{"id":11092,"date":"2026-08-10T12:06:01","date_gmt":"2026-08-10T12:06:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/2026\/08\/10\/blizzard-had-its-third-best-year-ever-as-xbox-struggled-wgb\/"},"modified":"2026-08-10T12:06:01","modified_gmt":"2026-08-10T12:06:01","slug":"blizzard-had-its-third-best-year-ever-as-xbox-struggled-wgb","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/2026\/08\/10\/blizzard-had-its-third-best-year-ever-as-xbox-struggled-wgb\/","title":{"rendered":"Blizzard Had Its Third-Best Year Ever as Xbox Struggled \u2013 WGB"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A new report from Jez Corden has shed some light on the internals at Xbox gaming, namely revealing that Blizzard had a strong year, making it the top performing studio within Xbox.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Corden got all this info from a leaked internal email which claims Blizzard had its third-highest ever fiscal year in 2026, achieving consecutive quarterly growth for the first time since Overwatch launched back in 2016. Which boggles the mind, because I can\u2019t believe it\u2019s been a decade since Overwatch launched. Good grief.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Anyway, the email states Overwatch and Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred were major driving forces behind Blizzard\u2019s strong year. Specifically, Overwatch had its best quarter since 2022. This probably has a lot to do with the game\u2019s reputation being slowly rebuilt, including a soft relaunch in February where it stopped being Overwatch 2 and just became Overwatch again. Five new heroes were launched at once, with Blizzard promising 10 new heroes across 2026, alongside a UI overhaul and more. The results were good, with Steam player counts rising and even breaking its own concurrent player count record.<\/p>\n<p>\n<span class=\"embed-youtube\" style=\"text-align:center; display: block;\"><\/span>\n<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Blizzard had a pretty busy year, too. World of Warcraft: Midnight launched in March, while Diablo 4 received its Lord of Hatred expansion in April.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">All of this needs to be taken in context, though: Corden says Xbox finished financial year 2026 down another 11%, and is still a brand that\u2019s floundering hard. It\u2019s currently undergoing a massive reset that involves multiple Xbox studios being sold or going independent, 1600 layoffs with another 1600 to occur across the coming year, and a shift in exclusivity strategy. That\u2019s just a taste of what\u2019s happening at Xbox under the leadership of new boss Asha Sharma, and it\u2019s pretty much impossible to tell if the changes will work.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Regardless, according to the internal email, Blizzard\u2019s success will allow further investment into its games, staff and other projects. Whether that\u2019s smart or not remains to be seen: one good year doesn\u2019t say much. Whether Blizzard can repeat it and continue to bring in some much needed cash for Xbox remains to be seen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A new report from Jez Corden has shed some light on the internals at Xbox gaming, namely revealing that Blizzard had a strong year, making it the top performing studio within Xbox. Corden got all this info from a leaked internal email which claims Blizzard had its third-highest ever fiscal year in 2026, achieving consecutive<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11093,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[1313,9914,9913,335,315,698],"class_list":{"0":"post-11092","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-pc-gaming","8":"tag-blizzard","9":"tag-struggled","10":"tag-thirdbest","11":"tag-wgb","12":"tag-xbox","13":"tag-year"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11092","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11092"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11092\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11093"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11092"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11092"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11092"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}