Active2000–· Bellevue, Washington, US
ArenaNet
The Guild Wars studio, owned by NCSOFT. Its buy-to-play, no-subscription model with Guild Wars (2005) and the living-world approach of Guild Wars 2 (2012) both pushed against the genre's defaults and stuck.
Studio lineage
- Founded in 2000 by Blizzard veterans Mike O'Brien, Patrick Wyatt, and Jeff Strain — key developers of Warcraft, StarCraft, Diablo, and the original Battle.net. (as of 2026-07-19 · source ↗)
