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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 years

Warcraft 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 hits

Hearthstone 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.