If we can help to make the interactions between folks online safer and more friendly, that would make it all more fun and more gratifying for everyone.

As a spectator eSport, I think 'StarCraft' is really exciting, engaging, and interesting to watch. As a player, it just really has something for everybody.

As our players have become more experienced playing 'World of Warcraft' over many years, they have become much better and much faster at consuming content.

I think if you're a small studio, you're living or dying by the success of the next project, it takes a lot of superhuman effort - or at least it did for us.

The cool thing about 'Hearthstone' is, in terms of accessibility to competitive play, it's very accessible. Anybody can participate in these types of things.

I want to thank all of the talented and hardworking people at Blizzard for their dedication, creativity and passion. It has been a privilege to lead this team.

I was always fascinated by technology and wanted to understand it so when I went to UCLA I studied electrical engineering figuring they knew how things worked.

We looked at the sales of 'Warcraft III,' which at the time was the bestselling PC game of all time, and we said, 'That's got to be our ceiling.' We were wrong.

Activision has their own games. Blizzard has our own games. We're not going to go in and fire their people and they aren't going to come in and fire any of ours.

I think every year we get better at running BlizzCon. The scale of the event is so large and I think people appreciate the logistics involved in putting on such an event.

People are getting older. Nine years ago, some people weren't old enough to play 'WoW.' Now they are. We want to be there to be the MMO of choice for them as they grow up.

When we started Blizzard, we just wanted to make great games. What we realized is that the games we create are really just a framework for communities and human interaction.

I mean, Blizzcon is a great event for us. It's a way that we can basically say 'thank you' to our most passionate players, and it's a great place for us to announce new things.

We love BlizzCon. It's great. It's our favorite thing to do. But first and foremost, we're a game company, and we have to make sure we deliver good quality games for our players.

A lot of the successful Blizzard games that you know actually grew out of failed projects. That was the case with 'World of Warcraft.' We canceled a project and decided to work on that one.

We created BlizzCon as a celebration of our global community, but not everyone can travel to the show, so the virtual ticket gives us a great way to bring BlizzCon to gamers around the world.

When you think about 'World of Warcraft' as a social network, and you think about the future version of Battle.net as Blizzard's social network, then you wanna stay connected to your social network.

'Starcraft' was never designed to support multi-byte languages. In order to support more complicated languages like Korean or Chinese, you need two bytes of storage and 'Starcraft' only had one byte.

Well, the team that created 'Starcraft 2' is probably the most experienced real-time strategy team in the industry - there are members of that team who have worked on all our RTS games going back to 'Warcraft.'

I think people are interested in watching what they know and what they care about, so as you have more people where gaming is a huge part of their life, they want to see what the top players in the world are able to do.

'Lost Vikings' and 'Rock 'n' Roll Racing' were pretty critical games to us. We got some acclaim as a result, some video gaming awards. Those are the games that impressed Davidson and Associates and led to the merger talks.

The great thing about 'World Of Warcraft' is that you can sit down in your lunch hour and do a couple of quests and still feel like you've had a meaningful experience, rather than it feeling like you've got a second career.

Our original mission and values consisted of four simple words that formed our foundation: 'We make great games.' We crafted that statement before we had even released our first game, but we were committed to living up to it.

We'd always felt that it would be cool to put the player into the world of 'Warcraft' as a single character, exploring the land and meeting other players, but it really wasn't until 1999 that we thought it was feasible to do it.

One thing we wanted to take from traditional sports with 'Overwatch League' - we have city-based teams. There aren't really any other models where you have a global city-based league. But you do have teams that are based in a location.

One of the things I think has been important for Blizzard is maintaining the direct relationship with our players. Having a platform that we owned and controlled was important for that strategy, and also to not be dependent on other publishers.

A lot of games that preceded 'Warcraft' made the assumption that this type of game wouldn't appeal outside the hard-core audience, so that's what they targeted. We thought this type of game could appeal to more people if we made it easier to use.

I've met several times with the Activision guys and we've talked at length about Blizzard's philosophy on game development and game publishing and all the things that are important to us at Blizzard. We found that we shared a lot of the same values.

There's the saying that perfect is the enemy of great, because if you strive for perfection you'll maybe never ship. There's a point that's good enough. But I do think that there's so much competition out there that if you don't hit the quality bar, the product will just fail.

When you look at how players experienced 'Diablo' I and II, there was a great desire to meet up and trade items for real money outside of the game. There's no real way to provide a secure and safe environment for doing that outside of the game. It really has to be integrated within the game.

Activision and Blizzard both believe that we're in an expanding market where we can reach more people across multiple platforms, geographies and age groups. Both of our companies are positioned very well to take advantage of those trends to keep lowering the barriers to get more people into gaming.

At the time we started working on 'World of WarCraft,' I think there was a limiting belief in the games industry and maybe outside the games industry, that MMOs would only appeal to the most hard-core of hard-core players, and therefore you didn't really need to do anything to make the game accessible to the wider audience.

There is another person on the other end of the chatscreen. They're our friends, our brothers and sisters, our sons and daughters. Let's take a stand to reject hate and harassment. And let's redouble our efforts to be kind and respectful to one another. And let's remind the world what the gaming community is really all about.

We'd really like for BlizzCon to be something that the people who really really want to go, if this is something you're really passionate about, you want to be here at BlizzCon, we'd like it to be possible for you to get here. When we are selling out in a couple seconds, it's really not possible for a lot of people that really want to come.

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