Case Study Presented by Kaiwen Zhou

Two Questions What does Blizzard do? Why is Blizzard important?

Blizzard’s most successful game franchises How successful? - we can surmise that this company has lots of success Worldwide popularity World of Warcraft - 7.8 m subscribers at the beginning of 2014 ,over $10 billion in total revenue Starcraft - launched in 1998, over 11 million worldwide as of 2009 Starcraft II - nearly 4.5 million as of 2012, released in 2010 - very popular in korea Diablo 3 - 6.5 million sales, first week; 15m in feb 2014

How did they start in the industry?

What are Blizzard’s strengths?

Subscription and Expansion Based Monetization

Building on successful franchises

Building on successful franchises

Customer interactions

Changing market - “Freemium” How about weaknesses? Changing market - “Freemium”

What can we learn from Blizzard? Subscriptions and expansions vs one-time purchases Building on one thing and making it perfect Good customer relations Need to adapt to changing industry