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Activision Blizzard's said the newest title in its popular Call of Duty franchise generated more than $500 million in worldwide retail sales in the first 24 hours of its release... Sales of "Call of Duty: Black Ops II" topped last year's launch of "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3," which made $400 million in sales in North America and the U.K. in the first 24 hours.

Video Diablo creator David Brevik stirred up quite a storm the other day with comments the former Blizzard North designer made about Diablo III. While his criticism of the game was fairly mild, the response from current Diablo team members was harsh.

Diablo III‘s opening-day sales just further prove that PC gaming is nowhere near dead. Blizzard’s Diablo III just became the fastest selling game in PC history. 3.5 million copies in just 24 hours. Another 1.2 million World of Warcraft gamers also joined through a special promotion, increasing the total number of gamers on day one to 4.6 million.

It's true - the world is big into Diablo 3 . So much so that the game was purchased more than 3.5 million times in its first 24 hours available, making it the "fastest-selling PC game" of all time, according to Blizzard. On top of that 3.5 million, another 1.2 million copies were scooped via the WoW Annual Pass (which included a free copy of D3 ).

Blizzard is known for two things: making great games and making us wait for them. For Diablo 3, the wait is almost over. May 15 is the official release date for Blizzard's hotly anticipated hack-and-slash game and follow-up to 2000's Diablo 2. It hasn't been an easy development cycle: the team recently announced that ...

Over the last several years, we've grown our organization tremendously and made large investments in our infrastructure in order to better serve our global community. However, as Blizzard and the industry have evolved we've also had to make some difficult decisions in order to address the changing needs of our company.

The most important moment at the BlizzCon convention was not in games of StarCraft II or the closing concert by the Foo Fighters; it came from the fans themselves.

"I come from the orcs, we eat with spoons and forks, we love to eat our pork!" That's the sound of a male orc in online roleplaying behemoth World of Warcraft. In China, it may also be the sound of an orc male working on the chain gang, by which I mean an actual Chinese prisoner playing an orc male in Blizzard's mega-MMO to rack up very serious (and very real) coin for Chinese prison guards.

The Guitar Hero franchise is finished. Or at least, it’s retiring, without much hope of a reunion tour. Activision Blizzard just released their latest investor report, and nestled in the fine print — underneath excessive fist-pumping for the monstrously successful World of Warcraft and Call of Duty franchises — you find the epitaph for one of the most influential series in videogame history: “Due to continued declines in the music genre, the company will disband Activision Publishing’s Guitar Hero business unit and discontinue development on its Guitar Hero game for 2011.”

As if the gun-toting action in Call of Duty: Black Ops wasn t expected to feel real enough in high definition, Activision Blizzard Inc. announced Tuesday that the latest entry in its successful first-person-shooter video game franchise would be released in 3-D.