Hearthstone’s production director on crafting a $1.2 billion market leader

Hearthstone started out as project from a small team. It’s now one of Blizzard’s most important games.

The World of Warcraft company ventured into smaller projects with smaller teams years ago, and one of the results was Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, a digital collectible card game that released in 2014 after a long best-test period. It was an instant success. While card games weren’t new — Magic: The Gathering had a computer game version for years — Blizzard’s product became so strong that it established what market research firm SuperData called a “dominant new category” in a report last year. It found that card games had become a $1.2 billion market, and Hearthstone was its leader.