In March 2016, around 100,000 fans - and millions more online - watched professional gamers compete in the Intel Extreme Masters e-sports tournament in Poland.
Among the crowd in the Spokdek arena was Mike Morhaime, co-founder and President of Blizzard Entertainment.
"We have three games here," Morhaime, 48, told Wired by phone. "StarCraft II, Hearthstone, and Heroes of the Storm. This is the first event in our WCS [2016 World Championship Series] circuit, so I'm excited to see how that will play out."
Under Morhaime, Blizzard's titles have changed gaming. The company's 2004 hit massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) World Of Warcraft boasts more than 100million registered accounts, and its influence can be seen in today's biggest titles from Destiny to The Division.
But while Warcraft is still being updated, the audience is dwindling: active subscribers fell to 5.5m last year as the market gravitated towards free-to-play titles. Meanwhile, e-sports has exploded, driven by live streaming on Twitch and YouTube.
Morhaime is no stranger to pro gaming. Blizzard's 1998 strategy game Starcraft was a hit in South Korea: television channels started broadcasting matches and professional players became celebrities. In 2010, Starcraft II was the first game the studio built specifically for spectator competitions. Now all Blizzard titles are designed for e-sports from the ground up.
Take Hearthstone, Blizzard's card game based on the mythology of World of Warcraft. The game has passed 40m registered players. To keep the "meta" - the interplay of different cards in each player's deck - fresh, new cards are added through expansion packs. But, to maintain competitiveness and prevent the possible combinations from becoming impossibly complex, Blizzard announced a limited set of tournament-approved "standard" cards.
"Blizzard has moved into this mode of continuous development," said Morhaime. "We’re contributing a lot of content to our games to keep them evolving."
Heroes of the Storm, which Blizzard calls a "hero brawler", is Blizzard's response to the rapid ascent of Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas (MOBAs). League of Legends, the most popular MOBA, earned creators Riot Games $1.6 billion in 2015. The same year, The International, the annual contest for elite Dota 2 players, offered a prize pot of more than $18m.
"E-sports used to be this niche thing," said Morhaime. "We knew it was really cool, but outside of a very narrow audience you really didn't get a lot of exposure. In the last couple of years that's really shifted, and now you have big players in the world of traditional sports really taking notice."
Equally key to Blizzard's success has been building on the vast lore of its Warcraft and Starcraft series. In June, Universal is releasing a Warcraft film directed by Duncan Jones. In November, in a move out of the Marvel playbook, Blizzard and its sister company Activision formed a film production arm, Activision Blizzard Studios.
"The vision is to be able to take our IP and create film and television content and still maintain control over the rate, pace, and partners that we’re working with to accomplish that," continued Morhaime.
But its big bet is Overwatch. The title, released on 24 May, is the studio's first major game for more than a decade to break from the setting and characters of World of Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo. A cartoonish first-person shooter, Overwatch pits teams of six against each other.
The characters have varied but carefully balanced abilities - from healing to time travel. Like Hearthstone, Overwatch has been designed to maximise enjoyment not just for players, but for viewers - demonstrated by its "spectator mode", a set of tools and camera angles designed to make watching the game as exciting as playing it.
The game is expected to be the biggest draw at Blizzcon, the company’s annual e-sports tournament, in November.
As for Morhaime, he's playing Overwatch in preparation. Overwatch is available for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Warcraft is out on 3 June.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
