Number of Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft players worldwide 2018

Hearthstone is a free-to-play online collectible card game which reached a milestone 100 million players worldwide in November 2018, thereby doubling the number of players since April 2016. The game originally bore the subtitle “Heroes of Warcraft” as it is based in the same universe as Blizzard’s extremely popular Warcraft series. Warcraft still going strong after 25 yearsWarcraft is seen as one of the jewels in the crown of Blizzard Entertainment. The series is made of up five main games, with Hearthstone being the latest title. While the early games in the series focused more on strategy and battles, the fourth in the series, World of Warcraft, is a massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) in which players can create characters and interact with others. World of Warcraft quickly became the best-selling game in the series, with releases of expansion packs regularly selling millions of copies on the first day. Hearthstone, on the other hand, is a turn-based online collectible card game between two players. Despite being less of an action-packed game than its predecessors, Hearthstone has still proven to be very popular among viewers and it ranked as one of the most watched games on Twitch in 2018, alongside World of Warcraft. Blizzard Entertainment keeps on bringing out hitsHearthstone was created by Blizzard Entertainment, which is also responsible for games such as Starcraft, Diablo and, more recently, Overwatch. The success of the latter undoubtedly contributed to the company generating record revenues in recent years, with the 2018 figure peaking at 7.5 billion U.S. dollars.  Released in 2016, Overwatch is a multiplayer shooter game in which two teams of six work together with different “heroes” to defeat their opponents. The game garnered a lot of media attention when it was first released and it became the most talked about game online in 2016. As of 2018, the game had reached 40 million players and continued to win accolades, such as the prize for the Best eSports Game at The Game Awards 2018.

炉石传说是一款免费在线收集卡牌游戏，截至2018年11月，其全球玩家数量已突破一亿，自2016年4月以来玩家数量实现翻倍。该游戏最初以“魔兽英雄”为副标题，因其基于暴雪娱乐备受欢迎的魔兽系列相同的宇宙背景。魔兽系列在走过25年后依然活力四射，被视为暴雪娱乐的瑰宝之一。该系列包括五款主要游戏，其中炉石传说是最新的作品。虽然系列早期游戏更侧重于策略和战斗，但第四款游戏《魔兽世界》则是一款大规模多人在线角色扮演游戏（MMORPG），玩家可以创建角色并与他人互动。《魔兽世界》迅速成为系列中最畅销的游戏，其扩展包的发布常常在首日销售数百万份。另一方面，炉石传说是一款两人之间的回合制在线收集卡牌游戏。尽管与前辈相比动作性稍逊一筹，但炉石传说依然在观众中证明了其极高的受欢迎程度，并在2018年成为Twitch上最受关注的游戏之一，与《魔兽世界》并肩。暴雪娱乐不断推出爆款之作。炉石传说由暴雪娱乐创作，该公司还负责开发了如《星际争霸》、《暗黑破坏神》以及近年来备受瞩目的《守望先锋》等游戏。后者无疑为该公司近年来创纪录的营收做出了贡献，2018年的收入峰值达到75亿美元。2016年发布的《守望先锋》是一款多人射击游戏，其中两队各六名“英雄”合作击败对手。该游戏在首次发布时便吸引了大量媒体关注，并在2016年成为网上最热门的游戏。截至2018年，该游戏已拥有4000万玩家，并继续获得众多奖项，如2018年《游戏大奖》最佳电子竞技游戏奖。