Isn't this the first expansion which has no influence from Brode? Don't they design them in advance? Didn't he preside over the period which introduced Kobolds, one of the most badly designed sets? From what I gather from other player's comments, Gadgetzan was a disaster too on launch, although I only started playing during KOFT. I wish people would stop talking about Brode, if he had any control over the final sets, it seems he was the reason the game got out of hand.
Design of cards is well in advance. Balance of cards continues pretty much up to release date.
So you can blame Ben Brode for the theme of the newer expansions. And you can blame him for the 'new' mechanics (i.e mechs and magnetic) but probably again mostly the thematics.
But the post Brode team are responsible for the balance of the sets, so take the blame for the new sets having zero impact on the meta.
For a company like Blizzard, or any normal company, or any regular person, the numbers are actually very good. What you see is a game that started off very well, spiked due to a very strong IP and, after said IP faded, still in the positive compared to non-spike years. At worst it's enough to realize you need to get pushing forward instead of just taking things in stride, but you would be very happy with your 5 year old game putting out figures like this, especially since you are very *VERY* much top of the roost in your genre.
If Blizzard was by itself, or if it was effectively left alone by its parent company then the story would end here, we would roll our eye at the "OMG WoW..I mean hearthstone is dying!' crowd, and move on.
The problem is Activision.
We all laugh when we hear things like "game sold 300 million copies. It failed!" But there's a good reason why such a statement would actually be true, and it's not "They want ALL DE MONEYS!"..not exactly. The issue are investors.
To make it brief (too late) when someone invests money into a company, they do so because they want to see a gain in their investment. If I'm giving $1000 to a company to own a stock, I don't exactly want to get $1000 back. I can do better putting the money in a saving's account. You buy $1000 of stock so that you can sell it for $1050 later, or $1100. And I want it to grow every year since I'm accepting the risk that the company can die and take all of my money with it at any time. Ever hear about people wanting "a 7% return from their investments?" This is the basis of that.
The stock of a company represents the company's value. Thus the only way that a company's stock grows is if the company grows. It doesn't matter whether the company earned $20 a year or $2000 million. What matters if growth; did you earn more this year compared to last year. A company that sold $40 this year and $60 the next gained value, thus will have a higher stock price, which means my investment grows. A company that earns $2000 million this year and next year grows 0%, so I gain NOTHING. If said company then earned $1000 million, THEY may still have plenty of cash and can still go on fancy vacations, but their value just dropped, meaning I just lost money. No one is giving ANY of that $1000 million to me afterall.
get that? Now go back and look at those numbers.
They went from $1400 million in earnings to $700 million. In a year when *ALL* of their games have lost revenue and players. BLIZZARD is still making cash. But the company is now worth less than before. If the company was giving me a piece of that revenue then that would be fine but it's not really (that IS a thing: dividends. But it's .34 cents for every 46 dollars you spent on the stock, less than 1% per year). Instead they cost me to hold it. If I bought $1000 worth of stock last year, it's now worth $700. THEY enjoy 700 million, I lost 300 dollars.
The whole thing is 1000% more complicated than that, but that's the bare enough to show why it can be a Very Bad thing to earn $700 million in one year. Welcome to the life of a corporation.
So is hearthstone in trouble? Depends on how much Activision-Blizzard is worried about the shareholders (who ARE the owners of the company. No i'm not being snarky though it is more complicated than just that). Depends on how much pressure Acti-Bliz puts on Blizzard to fix the problem. Depends on how much Blizzard decides to look at Team 5 in the viewpoint of a company and how much in the viewpoint of a shareholder.
I agree with you. I liked your post. Yes the issue is Activision also for me. They wanted Blizzard as cash-cow. But they are losing market cap instead.
Isn't this the first expansion which has no influence from Brode? Don't they design them in advance? Didn't he preside over the period which introduced Kobolds, one of the most badly designed sets? From what I gather from other player's comments, Gadgetzan was a disaster too on launch, although I only started playing during KOFT. I wish people would stop talking about Brode, if he had any control over the final sets, it seems he was the reason the game got out of hand.
Design of cards is well in advance. Balance of cards continues pretty much up to release date.
So you can blame Ben Brode for the theme of the newer expansions. And you can blame him for the 'new' mechanics (i.e mechs and magnetic) but probably again mostly the thematics.
But the post Brode team are responsible for the balance of the sets, so take the blame for the new sets having zero impact on the meta.
No, I blame whoever designed Kobolds (in conjunction with KOFT) for the new sets having zero impact on the meta.
Isn't this the first expansion which has no influence from Brode? Don't they design them in advance? Didn't he preside over the period which introduced Kobolds, one of the most badly designed sets? From what I gather from other player's comments, Gadgetzan was a disaster too on launch, although I only started playing during KOFT. I wish people would stop talking about Brode, if he had any control over the final sets, it seems he was the reason the game got out of hand.
Design of cards is well in advance. Balance of cards continues pretty much up to release date.
So you can blame Ben Brode for the theme of the newer expansions. And you can blame him for the 'new' mechanics (i.e mechs and magnetic) but probably again mostly the thematics.
But the post Brode team are responsible for the balance of the sets, so take the blame for the new sets having zero impact on the meta.
No, I blame whoever designed Kobolds (in conjunction with KOFT) for the new sets having zero impact on the meta.
I don't.
Although KOFT and K&C added power creep. The development team have simultaneously said that the classic set is too powerful. If that is the case then maybe normalising the power creep to a new plateau would have been the correct action (so that 2 dead sets would not have to be endured).
Once OP sets have been you have to move forward from that point and in some way address the issue. No point releasing sets that might be ok if other sets did not exist. For example if mechs were not bad cards with the magnetic option...
man a lot of people seem to see those years 100% seperated, which you cannot do. The years do affect each other and what no one mentioned is that in 2018 they made more money than in 2016, which is often seen as the glorious days of hearthstone.
The year 2016 lead the waystone, so that 2017 could be that succesfull. And then in 2017 they fired off everything they had. They didn't include an adventure, they almost doubled the amount of legendaries in an expansion and at the same time brought the most iconic wow expansion theme back. The hype was already declining at the end of 2017 and i agree 2018 was a rough year, because of all the powerfull card from 2017. So you can see that the whole 2017 year, which was so succesfull had an influence on why 2018 sucked so hard.
Please do see this topic as a wholesome and don't just try to seperate it by each year.
It made them over a billion dollars. I don't think we're only considering it as a Spike, it's just represented that way. It is a spike, but one with meaning and significance to Blizzard and some of us here.
All I know is I was a whale and stopped playing after 1) The expansions got more and more 'kiddy' and goofy, and 2) The new cards and mechanics were less thematically tighter (They have more effects that seem arbitrary and game-boosting in a kind of coarse way, like, 'Lukewarm Sorceress: Discard one card, do 3 damage to a minion, draw a card, place a counter on a thing'.) I assume I'm not the only one who disliked how things changed.
Isn't this the first expansion which has no influence from Brode? Don't they design them in advance? Didn't he preside over the period which introduced Kobolds, one of the most badly designed sets? From what I gather from other player's comments, Gadgetzan was a disaster too on launch, although I only started playing during KOFT. I wish people would stop talking about Brode, if he had any control over the final sets, it seems he was the reason the game got out of hand.
Design of cards is well in advance. Balance of cards continues pretty much up to release date.
So you can blame Ben Brode for the theme of the newer expansions. And you can blame him for the 'new' mechanics (i.e mechs and magnetic) but probably again mostly the thematics.
But the post Brode team are responsible for the balance of the sets, so take the blame for the new sets having zero impact on the meta.
No, I blame whoever designed Kobolds (in conjunction with KOFT) for the new sets having zero impact on the meta.
I don't.
Although KOFT and K&C added power creep. The development team have simultaneously said that the classic set is too powerful. If that is the case then maybe normalising the power creep to a new plateau would have been the correct action (so that 2 dead sets would not have to be endured).
Once OP sets have been you have to move forward from that point and in some way address the issue. No point releasing sets that might be ok if other sets did not exist. For example if mechs were not bad cards with the magnetic option...
The classic set and basic set is not overpowered. This is an excuse. How do I know this? Well if you take a look at ALL the expansions for hearthstone that have ever come out pretty much all of them have changed the meta in some way or another EXCEPT the last two. I’m talking even BEFORE the power creep of 2017. Gvg, naxx, old gods? Yeah they saw lots of play. Which leads me to believe that indeed either year of the mammoth was too powerful to compete with; OR year of the raven was TOO WEAK and uninteresting. Take your pick. Because it is certainly not the classic sets fault ._. It never has been. You have been fooled to believe so.
Let's talk numbers! But I'm not going to provide any sources!
Forgive me for assuming Google searches were within your skill set. The numbers are correct to the nearest 10 million.
Jesus Christ, what a dumpster fire thread. I apologize to the poor mod who caught this one.
I'm not exactly shocked that two pages of claims about the game losing players haven't been sourced, and since I can use Google myself, I am growing more and more certain there is no evidence for this claim, unless someone has been tracing HSReplay game report numbers, and if they have, it doesn't seem to be posted, so the folks making the claim are still full of shit.
Regardless, I understand a lot of you want to enjoy the serotonin from claiming a passtime many enjoy is dying. By all means, indulge. If you pursue such things on game forums, you're long past worrying about whether you are correct or not.
Someone made a half-cogent point about how the 1.4 billion of 2017 may turn out to be a peak, rather than a spike in an otherwise steady upward trend. That may be true, but it will require numbers from 2019 and 2020 being consistently under 700 million, and we have no reason to assume that in March 2019.
So, to recap, all evidence available suggests the game is doing well. I'm sorry if that hits you on an emotional level, and I make room for the fact that the future may change for the worse, but absolutely nothing quantitative suggests that outcome as we see it now.
Helpful Clarification on Forbidden Topics for Hearthstone Forums:
Enjoying Americans winning in the Olympics is forbidden because it is political. A 14 plus page discussion of state-sponsored lawsuits against a multi-national corporation based on harassment, discrimination, and wrongful death allegations is apparently not political enough to raise an issue.
Isn't this the first expansion which has no influence from Brode? Don't they design them in advance? Didn't he preside over the period which introduced Kobolds, one of the most badly designed sets? From what I gather from other player's comments, Gadgetzan was a disaster too on launch, although I only started playing during KOFT. I wish people would stop talking about Brode, if he had any control over the final sets, it seems he was the reason the game got out of hand.
Design of cards is well in advance. Balance of cards continues pretty much up to release date.
So you can blame Ben Brode for the theme of the newer expansions. And you can blame him for the 'new' mechanics (i.e mechs and magnetic) but probably again mostly the thematics.
But the post Brode team are responsible for the balance of the sets, so take the blame for the new sets having zero impact on the meta.
No, I blame whoever designed Kobolds (in conjunction with KOFT) for the new sets having zero impact on the meta.
I don't.
Although KOFT and K&C added power creep. The development team have simultaneously said that the classic set is too powerful. If that is the case then maybe normalising the power creep to a new plateau would have been the correct action (so that 2 dead sets would not have to be endured).
Once OP sets have been you have to move forward from that point and in some way address the issue. No point releasing sets that might be ok if other sets did not exist. For example if mechs were not bad cards with the magnetic option...
I don't agree. It looks to me like they're trying to bring the game back to a reasonable point, and you have to take some pain upfront for that to happen. For example, I don't want to play a game where if I am playing a tempo deck and don't clear a minion on turn 5 vs a virtual combo deck, my opponent drops a cube and a 1 Mana activator to generate two 3/12 taunts and my game is over. I don't want that type of scenario to continue, which is what you're advocating.
It's a dead game if it takes 5 minutes to even find an opponent.
Has Hearthstone peaked? Possibly. But if it's still bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars a year, that should be more than enough to sustain it.
The real concern is whether Activision understands that a game can be not growing and still doing well. They seem to care more for their investors than for their employees or players, and investors generally prefer growth or at least steady dividends.
It made them over a billion dollars. I don't think we're only considering it as a Spike, it's just represented that way. It is a spike, but one with meaning and significance to Blizzard and some of us here.
Yeah, but, i mean even tho 2017 *includes* a spike, the total income does not tell us the dimension of the spike within 2017.
So considering the whole 2017 as invisible is not acceptable in an analysis.
Anyway, my real point is 2018 was still within a favourable wave, and its quality was not so bad afterall.
You know what are the most hype cards in all of HS? Deathknights. Hero cards. Whatever. Jaraxxus was and is one of the most beloved legendaries, especially in the earlier years. And then they announce 9 hero cards? Of course this expansion gonna sell. This is so new, so innovative, and as a gimmick (like quests in Un goro or Legendary weapons/spells) is much, much more appealing. I mean, we never saw another Quest card or standalone Legendary weapon, but hero cards? We already got 3 more and I am sure we will have more over the years. Plus it is one of the most beloved Warcraft themes. Noone knows Rastakhan or Witchwood, but everyone know about Lich king.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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It is just a meme, a joke, don't take seriouly.
Design of cards is well in advance. Balance of cards continues pretty much up to release date.
So you can blame Ben Brode for the theme of the newer expansions. And you can blame him for the 'new' mechanics (i.e mechs and magnetic) but probably again mostly the thematics.
But the post Brode team are responsible for the balance of the sets, so take the blame for the new sets having zero impact on the meta.
For a company like Blizzard, or any normal company, or any regular person, the numbers are actually very good. What you see is a game that started off very well, spiked due to a very strong IP and, after said IP faded, still in the positive compared to non-spike years. At worst it's enough to realize you need to get pushing forward instead of just taking things in stride, but you would be very happy with your 5 year old game putting out figures like this, especially since you are very *VERY* much top of the roost in your genre.
If Blizzard was by itself, or if it was effectively left alone by its parent company then the story would end here, we would roll our eye at the "OMG WoW..I mean hearthstone is dying!' crowd, and move on.
The problem is Activision.
We all laugh when we hear things like "game sold 300 million copies. It failed!" But there's a good reason why such a statement would actually be true, and it's not "They want ALL DE MONEYS!"..not exactly. The issue are investors.
To make it brief (too late) when someone invests money into a company, they do so because they want to see a gain in their investment. If I'm giving $1000 to a company to own a stock, I don't exactly want to get $1000 back. I can do better putting the money in a saving's account. You buy $1000 of stock so that you can sell it for $1050 later, or $1100. And I want it to grow every year since I'm accepting the risk that the company can die and take all of my money with it at any time. Ever hear about people wanting "a 7% return from their investments?" This is the basis of that.
The stock of a company represents the company's value. Thus the only way that a company's stock grows is if the company grows. It doesn't matter whether the company earned $20 a year or $2000 million. What matters if growth; did you earn more this year compared to last year. A company that sold $40 this year and $60 the next gained value, thus will have a higher stock price, which means my investment grows. A company that earns $2000 million this year and next year grows 0%, so I gain NOTHING. If said company then earned $1000 million, THEY may still have plenty of cash and can still go on fancy vacations, but their value just dropped, meaning I just lost money. No one is giving ANY of that $1000 million to me afterall.
get that? Now go back and look at those numbers.
They went from $1400 million in earnings to $700 million. In a year when *ALL* of their games have lost revenue and players. BLIZZARD is still making cash. But the company is now worth less than before. If the company was giving me a piece of that revenue then that would be fine but it's not really (that IS a thing: dividends. But it's .34 cents for every 46 dollars you spent on the stock, less than 1% per year). Instead they cost me to hold it. If I bought $1000 worth of stock last year, it's now worth $700. THEY enjoy 700 million, I lost 300 dollars.
The whole thing is 1000% more complicated than that, but that's the bare enough to show why it can be a Very Bad thing to earn $700 million in one year. Welcome to the life of a corporation.
So is hearthstone in trouble? Depends on how much Activision-Blizzard is worried about the shareholders (who ARE the owners of the company. No i'm not being snarky though it is more complicated than just that). Depends on how much pressure Acti-Bliz puts on Blizzard to fix the problem. Depends on how much Blizzard decides to look at Team 5 in the viewpoint of a company and how much in the viewpoint of a shareholder.
The answer? *shrug* We'll see.
One does not simply walk into Mordor,
unless they want to be the best they can be.
I agree with you. I liked your post. Yes the issue is Activision also for me. They wanted Blizzard as cash-cow. But they are losing market cap instead.
No, I blame whoever designed Kobolds (in conjunction with KOFT) for the new sets having zero impact on the meta.
I don't.
Although KOFT and K&C added power creep. The development team have simultaneously said that the classic set is too powerful. If that is the case then maybe normalising the power creep to a new plateau would have been the correct action (so that 2 dead sets would not have to be endured).
Once OP sets have been you have to move forward from that point and in some way address the issue. No point releasing sets that might be ok if other sets did not exist. For example if mechs were not bad cards with the magnetic option...
woosh
man a lot of people seem to see those years 100% seperated, which you cannot do. The years do affect each other and what no one mentioned is that in 2018 they made more money than in 2016, which is often seen as the glorious days of hearthstone.
The year 2016 lead the waystone, so that 2017 could be that succesfull. And then in 2017 they fired off everything they had. They didn't include an adventure, they almost doubled the amount of legendaries in an expansion and at the same time brought the most iconic wow expansion theme back. The hype was already declining at the end of 2017 and i agree 2018 was a rough year, because of all the powerfull card from 2017.
So you can see that the whole 2017 year, which was so succesfull had an influence on why 2018 sucked so hard.
Please do see this topic as a wholesome and don't just try to seperate it by each year.
It made them over a billion dollars. I don't think we're only considering it as a Spike, it's just represented that way. It is a spike, but one with meaning and significance to Blizzard and some of us here.
Right on point. I absolutely agree
The classic set and basic set is not overpowered. This is an excuse. How do I know this? Well if you take a look at ALL the expansions for hearthstone that have ever come out pretty much all of them have changed the meta in some way or another EXCEPT the last two. I’m talking even BEFORE the power creep of 2017. Gvg, naxx, old gods? Yeah they saw lots of play. Which leads me to believe that indeed either year of the mammoth was too powerful to compete with; OR year of the raven was TOO WEAK and uninteresting. Take your pick. Because it is certainly not the classic sets fault ._. It never has been. You have been fooled to believe so.
Capitalism is shit. Corporations are evil. RIP Hearthstone 2014-2019
Forgive me for assuming Google searches were within your skill set. The numbers are correct to the nearest 10 million.
Jesus Christ, what a dumpster fire thread. I apologize to the poor mod who caught this one.
I'm not exactly shocked that two pages of claims about the game losing players haven't been sourced, and since I can use Google myself, I am growing more and more certain there is no evidence for this claim, unless someone has been tracing HSReplay game report numbers, and if they have, it doesn't seem to be posted, so the folks making the claim are still full of shit.
Regardless, I understand a lot of you want to enjoy the serotonin from claiming a passtime many enjoy is dying. By all means, indulge. If you pursue such things on game forums, you're long past worrying about whether you are correct or not.
Someone made a half-cogent point about how the 1.4 billion of 2017 may turn out to be a peak, rather than a spike in an otherwise steady upward trend. That may be true, but it will require numbers from 2019 and 2020 being consistently under 700 million, and we have no reason to assume that in March 2019.
So, to recap, all evidence available suggests the game is doing well. I'm sorry if that hits you on an emotional level, and I make room for the fact that the future may change for the worse, but absolutely nothing quantitative suggests that outcome as we see it now.
Helpful Clarification on Forbidden Topics for Hearthstone Forums:
Enjoying Americans winning in the Olympics is forbidden because it is political. A 14 plus page discussion of state-sponsored lawsuits against a multi-national corporation based on harassment, discrimination, and wrongful death allegations is apparently not political enough to raise an issue.
I don't agree. It looks to me like they're trying to bring the game back to a reasonable point, and you have to take some pain upfront for that to happen. For example, I don't want to play a game where if I am playing a tempo deck and don't clear a minion on turn 5 vs a virtual combo deck, my opponent drops a cube and a 1 Mana activator to generate two 3/12 taunts and my game is over. I don't want that type of scenario to continue, which is what you're advocating.
I like to make fun of those "dead game" trolls.
After reading the drunkard's walk i can just say that we have just too few data
It's a dead game if it takes 5 minutes to even find an opponent.
Has Hearthstone peaked? Possibly. But if it's still bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars a year, that should be more than enough to sustain it.
The real concern is whether Activision understands that a game can be not growing and still doing well. They seem to care more for their investors than for their employees or players, and investors generally prefer growth or at least steady dividends.
Holy shit, 1.4b in 2017. PogChamp
Release the Kraken!
Yeah, but, i mean even tho 2017 *includes* a spike, the total income does not tell us the dimension of the spike within 2017.
So considering the whole 2017 as invisible is not acceptable in an analysis.
Anyway, my real point is 2018 was still within a favourable wave, and its quality was not so bad afterall.
I bet 2019 incomes will be lower than 2018.
You know what are the most hype cards in all of HS? Deathknights. Hero cards. Whatever. Jaraxxus was and is one of the most beloved legendaries, especially in the earlier years. And then they announce 9 hero cards? Of course this expansion gonna sell. This is so new, so innovative, and as a gimmick (like quests in Un goro or Legendary weapons/spells) is much, much more appealing. I mean, we never saw another Quest card or standalone Legendary weapon, but hero cards? We already got 3 more and I am sure we will have more over the years. Plus it is one of the most beloved Warcraft themes. Noone knows Rastakhan or Witchwood, but everyone know about Lich king.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯