Blizzard Entertainment President Johanna Faries, in a publication on the publisher’s official website, summed up the results of 2024 for the company and shared interesting player statistics.
Image source: BLIZZARD ENTERTINMENT
In her first (still partial) year as Blizzard president, Faris said the teams have done “simply amazing” work “both for gaming communities around the world and for each other.”
Faris called the most important events for Blizzard in 2024 the release of The War Within add-on for World of Warcraft and the Vessel of Hatred add-on for Diablo IV, the return of the company’s games to China and the celebration of the 30th anniversary of Warcraft.
2024 was Blizzard’s first full year as part of Xbox.
As part of the 2024 review, Blizzard decided to highlight some of the players’ outstanding achievements:
- In 2024, users spent more than 8.34 billion hours in Blizzard games, or 952,055 years—during which time you could walk around the globe a million times;
- Players sent a total of 378 million messages – it would take 60 years to read them all, even if you spend only 5 seconds on each;
- In World of Warcraft, 4.5 billion spiders and nerubians were killed – in the real world, their total weight would be more than 45 tons (comparable to the weight of a blue whale in the North Pacific Ocean);
- 400 million miniatures of the Cenarius family were played in Warcraft Rumble – for each miniature there are approximately a thousand trees in the Amazon rainforests;
- More than 4 billion murloc creatures were played on the “Battlefields” in Hearthstone – this is more than the total population of the USA, China, India and all European countries;
- The number of demons killed in Diablo IV exceeded 1.7 trillion – this is slightly (several hundred billion) less than the number of domesticated honey bees on Earth;
- Player characters in Diablo Immortal died 480 million times in 2024 – if that number of smartphones are placed on top of each other, you will get a tower 3.7 thousand km high;
- On the new Skirmish maps (Hanaoka and Throne of Anubis), Overwatch 2 users have played more than 203 years – that’s enough time to fly to Neptune and back eight times (at current speeds).
As Faris puts it, these events “represent only a small portion of the many magical moments we have experienced with all of you.” The infographic does not take China into account.
Full infographics (magnification by pressing)
Blizzard’s first year as part of Xbox was also remembered for mass layoffs – almost two thousand employees of Activision Blizzard, Xbox and Bethesda were left without jobs in January – but Faris does not mention this in his message.
Looking to the future, Faris sees 2025 as “another big year of new and exciting gaming experiences,” but in the meantime, on behalf of everyone at Blizzard, he thanks fans for their support of the company.
