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.
And so they decided to make a new adventure this time ... but you have to pay for it besides the preoder (or the packs from gold)... so as a f2p player i have 5000 gold now ... but 2800 are going to this "adventure" ... and this time ist is not the old adventure feeling, you get only packs ... but i will play it because i like the single player content. There is only money and more money in the eyes of Blizzard/Activision ... in the old times we got some packs for the new expansion before lauch, we got free legendarys and free heroes ... now we got 3 packs from old expansions ... great job ... this is not the old Hearthstone anymore (and the cards from the new expansion ... many are reprints ... no really new ideas).
You all know less than nothing. Just talking shit, like you do, day in, day out. Every game is dying. Games aren't meant to last forever. Hearthsto has already outlasted 90% of games and it looks like it's gonna have a decent amount of people playing it for the foreseeable future. No amount of your butthurt can change that.
I have a lot of gripes, like the fact that they print trash like Dr. Boom's Scheme and Dr. Morrigan and refuse to buff them due to their predatory business model, thus leaving them needlessly unplayable and making the game less fun so they can fill up their pockets a bit more. Gripes like how they milk whales (like me) for $400+ a year. But Hearthstone is still way better than any other card game. I've tried getting into Magic and Eternal. Not being able to choose your attacking minion's target ruins them for me, as do the huge decks and having to draw lands. If you're into that fine but to me it's boring and headache inducing.
Blizzard is a horrible company run by heartless money leeches, but Hearthstone is still better than anything else out there.
I don't understand how can you say a game is dead when it makes $700m a year, SEVEN HUNDRED MILLION A YEAR!!!!
the costs it generates are nothing compared to that, team 5 is right now 70 members, let's go over the top and assume that on average a person in the team earns $100k a year(that's a huge over-exaggeration I know), that comes to $7m a year then there are server costs, benefits, bonuses, parties and such(not sure how life looks working at Blizz tbf)
so again hugely over-exaggerating let's assume the game produces £20m in costs a year, which I think is impossible, that leaves $680m profit, SIX HUNDRED AND EIGHTY MILLION!!!! most people can't really grasp how much money that is
I'm seriously tired of threads like this made by fanboys or relative new players. The game is dying and nothing is gonna change that. You are not deceiving anyone with your weak efforts, statements and numbers. Believe it or not, this is Team 5 last chance. Enoy this joke of a game right now as much as you can, Shadowrisen, because its days are numbered. ;)
You're high if you think this. Team 5 could fuck around for 3 years with Hearthstone and the game wouldn't die. The fanbase is to big and they simply generate to much capital.
There are Triple A console games that would kill to make anywhere near $700M much in their entire lifespan let alone in a year.
The game couldn’t be less dead. I’ve got friends who have been playing since beta and although they get annoyed with metas they still keep coming back for more. I started playing 18 months ago and have dropped about £300 in that time and I have never played WOW or any other Blizzard game. I’m also not stuck on the ‘glory days’ of previous metas so it doesn’t bother me one bit that they’re re-using similar content. I imagine there are millions of players like me which is why they’ll keep printing money!
The ‘HS is Dead’ crowd seem preoccupied with with personal frustrations as opposed to looking at the actual facts. #hsforever
Blizzard is a horrible company run by heartless money leeches, but Hearthstone is still better than anything else out there.
This. But the worst thing of all is the fanboy-playerbase, defending bandwagon-style with pseudeo-intellectual flare anything card design. This audience keeps the game a money leeching business. Unfortunaltely albeit as a nice and well conceived game is skill- raped by their own creators.
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We make our world significant through the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers.
Blizzard is a horrible company run by heartless money leeches, but Hearthstone is still better than anything else out there.
This. But the worst thing of all is the fanboy-playerbase, defending bandwagon-style with pseudeo-intellectual flare anything card design. This audience keeps the game a money leeching business. Unfortunaltely albeit as a nice and well conceived game is skill- raped by their own creators.
And so they decided to make a new adventure this time ... but you have to pay for it besides the preoder (or the packs from gold)... so as a f2p player i have 5000 gold now ... but 2800 are going to this "adventure" ... and this time ist is not the old adventure feeling, you get only packs ... but i will play it because i like the single player content. There is only money and more money in the eyes of Blizzard/Activision ... in the old times we got some packs for the new expansion before lauch, we got free legendarys and free heroes ... now we got 3 packs from old expansions ... great job ... this is not the old Hearthstone anymore (and the cards from the new expansion ... many are reprints ... no really new ideas).
We are not yet sure about the feeling from the old adventures, so how can you say that? Instead of cards you get packs now, that's all we can say now.
I am f2p aswell. But this is still hearthstone, i don't know where you got that information from. We get 3 packs from old expansions as a farewell to these older expansions. Which we only started to get since last year…. We still get a legendary card before expansion (just as we got cthun in the old days), you also get free packs in a quest chain... The rewards are exactly the same as before.
Freebies for this expansion: The first chapter of the solo adventure. (Remaining 4 wings available for gold or $20) A legendary card before pre-release begins, playable before the expansion hits. A quest chain rewarding multiple free packs for Rise of Shadows and Year of the Raven expansions
Compare it to an older expansion, WOTOG: Opening your first Old Gods pack will give you C'Thun and two Beckoner of Evil for free. A special promotional period will be available in which everyone who logs in will get 3 free packs for the expansion. One Time Quest: Win 2 Games, get 5 Old Gods packs. One Time Quest: Win 7 Games, get 5 Old Gods packs.
We now get many freebies during the year, look at the most recent ones:
Fberuary: Today you can buy a Lunar New Year Bundle. 30 Packs (10 each of WW, BD, RR) for $20. Starting Feb 5 you will receive a free golden Fireworks Tech for logging in. Starting Feb 5 there will be new quests that reward dust and gold.
December: Get a Free Rastakhan's Rumble Card Pack! Want a free card pack? Silly question, of course you do! Go show your Team Spirit over on the official Hearthstone website by choosing one of the nine teams.
November: Blizzard is celebrating the milestone of 100 million Hearthstone players! From November 7 - 11, you can login to get some goodies. 6 Boomsday Project Card Packs (Logging in reward) Celebrate the Players Quest Chain (100 Gold x 5 Quests = 500 Gold)
Oktober: Free card packs return to the esports scene via another Choose Your Champion ! Check out the groups below to help figure out the best choice!
All the figures suggest Hearthstone is still a massively successful game with a huge playerbase by anyone's standards. 700m profit and an increasing number of players that's now over 100m. Admittedly the monthly active users has seen some drop-off, like the revenues, since 2017 but the idea that the game is in some sort of death spiral is clear BS.
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.
THat's the rub of all this.
For a company, everything is doing well, especially since they spent the past year toning down the power level, which is an early sacrifice in the name of future gains. You now have to figure out how to put forward the gas without going through another power spike, which is tricky but has been done. In fact, those numbers suggest an upward trend and is showing that some of the big fad gains of 2017 hung on during the toned down 2018. That's utterly awesome.
For investors, this is a nightmare. 30% of your cash disappeared last year and what you thought was an explosively growing company is, at best, a middling flatline with few prospects for future growth.
Activision-Blizzard, the parent is looking at this through investor eyes, not company eyes and pushed Activision, the game maker, into panic mode. Blizzard has, in the past, viewed things through company eyes and has been more than content to be content with downturns that are still high in profits.
The questions are, how much has the Acti-Bliz way of thinking is in Blizzard now. And how much of that leaked into Team 5.
Which gets even more wonky with the answer to this next quote...
It's very much clear that the old guard of Hearthstone is gone now and the company is signaling a very big change in how they do things.
But the question is.. why?
It could be a final realization that the small time cute Hearthstone that was for a few people who loved the WoW card game is dead and a new beast has come from it, which requires a new team to take it on a new course because of it.
It could be a sea change as the investor panic forces out the old guard that failed to bring growth and forces in a group dedicated to the investor mentality no matter the cost.
Which is it? We don't know. But you'll understand why some hold the Company view and say we're moving up while others hold the Investor view and say we're moving down.
I'm seriously tired of threads like this made by fanboys or relative new players. The game is dying and nothing is gonna change that. You are not deceiving anyone with your weak efforts, statements and numbers. Believe it or not, this is Team 5 last chance. Enoy this joke of a game right now as much as you can, Shadowrisen, because its days are numbered. ;)
Where have I heard this kind of thing before?
Oh yeah, WC3, and here it is 17 years later, still in top 30 Twitch streams.
WoW was dead in 2009, and 2011, and 2012, and 2013... but here it is in 2019 making money.
If you want examples of dead games go look at Anthem, SW Battlefront, SW MMO games, Fallout 4, No Man's Sky, and the last Assassins Creed. Sorry but Hearth is going to take a long time to reach the levels of these games.
Why does this always happen whenever theres a small dip in any games popularity? Theres a huge difference between DEAD GAME, and a game thats having a low spot. We all know this last rotation wasnt fun. We all agree. Baku, Gen KOTFT, and Kobolds saw that most of the decks played this year were pretty much unchanged from start to finish. Give the community improvements coming with Shadows a chance to do literally anything before we pronounce it dead, especially when theres still a solid playerbase, thats a solid amount ahead of any of the other ECG's on the market. Monotization may be down, but that doesnt mean that the game is dead.
This game isn't going anywhere. The players who love this game (myself included) are also very likely to spend money on each expansion. Speaking for myself, that's $100s per year.
Those hardcore players have no alternatives. I guess there's Magic, but otherwise nothing else competes with Hearthstone in a serious way.
Thus, the game would have to become utterly awful before anyone would leave. And we all like to stay competitive, and have fun, so we invest in new cards every few months.
The players that leave are probably those who were less inclined to spend money in the first place, or who were never "that into" Hearthstone. Of course, Blizzard wants to keep them and get new players excited. But to keep the game going? They have more than enough committed players.
The jump from 2017 to 2018 is very large, but 700 million is still a HUGE amount of revenue and it's much bigger than 2016.
Unless we see a massive drop in 2019, which would surprise me, there is nothing to be concerned about. And while none of us know for sure what it costs to keep the development team in place, I am willing to reasonably conclude the profits are enormous.
How many other games come anywhere close to generating revenues like this?
I'm seriously tired of threads like this made by fanboys or relative new players. The game is dying and nothing is gonna change that. You are not deceiving anyone with your weak efforts, statements and numbers. Believe it or not, this is Team 5 last chance. Enoy this joke of a game right now as much as you can, Shadowrisen, because its days are numbered. ;)
You're high if you think this. Team 5 could fuck around for 3 years with Hearthstone and the game wouldn't die. The fanbase is to big and they simply generate to much capital.
I'm seriously tired of threads like this made by fanboys or relative new players. The game is dying and nothing is gonna change that. You are not deceiving anyone with your weak efforts, statements and numbers. Believe it or not, this is Team 5 last chance. Enoy this joke of a game right now as much as you can, Shadowrisen, because its days are numbered. ;)
You're high if you think this. Team 5 could fuck around for 3 years with Hearthstone and the game wouldn't die. The fanbase is to big and they simply generate to much capital.
There are Triple A console games that would kill to make anywhere near $700M much in their entire lifespan let alone in a year.
The game couldn’t be less dead. I’ve got friends who have been playing since beta and although they get annoyed with metas they still keep coming back for more. I started playing 18 months ago and have dropped about £300 in that time and I have never played WOW or any other Blizzard game. I’m also not stuck on the ‘glory days’ of previous metas so it doesn’t bother me one bit that they’re re-using similar content. I imagine there are millions of players like me which is why they’ll keep printing money!
The ‘HS is Dead’ crowd seem preoccupied with with personal frustrations as opposed to looking at the actual facts. #hsforever
I'm seriously tired of threads like this made by fanboys or relative new players. The game is dying and nothing is gonna change that. You are not deceiving anyone with your weak efforts, statements and numbers. Believe it or not, this is Team 5 last chance. Enoy this joke of a game right now as much as you can, Shadowrisen, because its days are numbered. ;)
Where have I heard this kind of thing before?
Oh yeah, WC3, and here it is 17 years later, still in top 30 Twitch streams.
WoW was dead in 2009, and 2011, and 2012, and 2013... but here it is in 2019 making money.
If you want examples of dead games go look at Anthem, SW Battlefront, SW MMO games, Fallout 4, No Man's Sky, and the last Assassins Creed. Sorry but Hearth is going to take a long time to reach the levels of these games.
Or keep to your narrative.
Ok guys, whatever... As I said in other thread about this same topic, time will tell who is right and who is wrong. ;)
Brode was great - not that he has that much to do with the game living vs dying. He was a great mouthpiece and had lots of charisma and enthusiasm. He also seemed genuine and pro-transparency on the part of development.
HS's failings IMO are due to unwillingness to embrace greater complexity in mechanics. MTG lets you play on other people's turns (instants)- secrets are the closest that HS gets, and outside of mage secrets these are severely lacking in interactivity. I am not saying that HS needs and instant-type mechanic, but the game needs more solid answers and good tech cards. The simplicity of play feels like they are afraid to take the kid gloves off.
Players need to be more encouraged and rewarded for correctly anticipating and reacting to the opponent's deck. There are just so few MEANINGFUL ways to adapt your deck to the situation at hand and matchups degenerate into very predictable and linear contests.
There is far too little emphasis on play modes outside of ladder and arena. HS needs a new killer playmode to draw more attention. The co-op battles are an example of this. Co-op campaigns might be a good place to explore. Built in tournaments would be another avenue to explore.
Innovation is just not happening in these periodic expansions, and single-player sucks. Nax was a cool single player campaign, explorers was pretty good too.
Well personally i couldn't give a rat's arse about hs itself but i don't want it to die because it will propably take hearthpwn with it. And damm i love this community, even the fanboys. Unless of course hearthpwn starts including other ccgs as well and it's renamed to Ccgpwn or even better Magicpwn.
Well personally i couldn't give a rat's arse about hs itself but i don't want it to die because it will propably take hearthpwn with it. And damm i love this community, even the fanboys. Unless of course hearthpwn starts including other ccgs as well and it's renamed to Ccgpwn or even better Magicpwn.
HAIL LORD BOLAS!!
I neither want Hearthstone to die, mostly because of Hearthpwn (and Hearthstation ;)), but if people don't complain and spend less money when things are going wrong, there is no other way to make the developers realise their mistakes. :( I know you know that, but had to say it. :P
First of all Sherman, I think you've finally struck on the perfect profile signature.
Someone who had a long post that I don't feel like cut quoting said this is a great situation for everyone except the investors. Presumably, you mean people who invested during or immediately after 2017. If that assumption is right, then of course, that is true.
Of course, this is the danger of the stock market in general. If you were going to invest in a single business, you'd probably pick something in a field about which you knew at least a little. No one who has both a little financial training and some knowledge about Blizzard products would have picked 2017 as a good time to invest (as opposed to 2010, when I got in for $10/share ((humble brag))). But, because of the stock market and in particular, the advisor-free trading apps, people who have no idea about the workings of Blizzard beyond reading a revenue graph could potentially have jumped on the bandwagon after the 2017 numbers came out.
With all due respect for the impoverished stock trader, if that's how you handle your money, you'll end up where you were going to end up with or without Hearthstone's help.
In the meantime, the "time will tell" thing is always true, to the point where it goes without saying. However, what is equally true is that in the present, a time period in which we have much more information relative to the future, you are just flat wrong.
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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'm part of the reason the numbers dipped last year. I had been a whale up to and including Witchwood, and I didn't spend a single dime after that. I was sick of DKs, sick of recruit, and yes, already sick of Odd/Even.
Now that all of those things are gone, I'm back and spending money again. Maybe I'm the only one, and maybe I'm not. But Hearthstone isn't dead if they keep learning from their mistakes. And I do consider the early rotation of Genn and Baku as a lesson learned. It's just too bad it took such a huge loss of revenue for them to realize players were not going to put up with two full years of every broken thing they release.
Magic Arena poses a new threat, and I hope Team 5 understands that responsiveness to balance issues is more important than ever.
(That said, I did dip my toe in the Magic pool again for the first time in decades, and man oh man, the whole mana-from-land thing feels outdated and stifling. It didn't take me long to remember why I hate that game.)
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"Why, you never expected justice from a company, did you? They have neither a soul to lose nor a body to kick." -- Lady Saba Holland
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And so they decided to make a new adventure this time ... but you have to pay for it besides the preoder (or the packs from gold)...
so as a f2p player i have 5000 gold now ... but 2800 are going to this "adventure" ... and this time ist is not the old adventure feeling, you get only packs ... but i will play it because i like the single player content.
There is only money and more money in the eyes of Blizzard/Activision ... in the old times we got some packs for the new expansion before lauch, we got free legendarys and free heroes ... now we got 3 packs from old expansions ... great job ... this is not the old Hearthstone anymore (and the cards from the new expansion ... many are reprints ... no really new ideas).
Team 5 isnt the same anymore, thats why HS has changed so much.
Source
Former members
You all know less than nothing. Just talking shit, like you do, day in, day out. Every game is dying. Games aren't meant to last forever. Hearthsto has already outlasted 90% of games and it looks like it's gonna have a decent amount of people playing it for the foreseeable future. No amount of your butthurt can change that.
I have a lot of gripes, like the fact that they print trash like Dr. Boom's Scheme and Dr. Morrigan and refuse to buff them due to their predatory business model, thus leaving them needlessly unplayable and making the game less fun so they can fill up their pockets a bit more. Gripes like how they milk whales (like me) for $400+ a year. But Hearthstone is still way better than any other card game. I've tried getting into Magic and Eternal. Not being able to choose your attacking minion's target ruins them for me, as do the huge decks and having to draw lands. If you're into that fine but to me it's boring and headache inducing.
Blizzard is a horrible company run by heartless money leeches, but Hearthstone is still better than anything else out there.
I don't understand how can you say a game is dead when it makes $700m a year, SEVEN HUNDRED MILLION A YEAR!!!!
the costs it generates are nothing compared to that, team 5 is right now 70 members, let's go over the top and assume that on average a person in the team earns $100k a year(that's a huge over-exaggeration I know), that comes to $7m a year
then there are server costs, benefits, bonuses, parties and such(not sure how life looks working at Blizz tbf)
so again hugely over-exaggerating let's assume the game produces £20m in costs a year, which I think is impossible, that leaves $680m profit, SIX HUNDRED AND EIGHTY MILLION!!!! most people can't really grasp how much money that is
the game is far, very very far from dead
There are Triple A console games that would kill to make anywhere near $700M much in their entire lifespan let alone in a year.
The game couldn’t be less dead. I’ve got friends who have been playing since beta and although they get annoyed with metas they still keep coming back for more. I started playing 18 months ago and have dropped about £300 in that time and I have never played WOW or any other Blizzard game. I’m also not stuck on the ‘glory days’ of previous metas so it doesn’t bother me one bit that they’re re-using similar content. I imagine there are millions of players like me which is why they’ll keep printing money!
The ‘HS is Dead’ crowd seem preoccupied with with personal frustrations as opposed to looking at the actual facts. #hsforever
There is only my justice now
This. But the worst thing of all is the fanboy-playerbase, defending bandwagon-style with pseudeo-intellectual flare anything card design. This audience keeps the game a money leeching business. Unfortunaltely albeit as a nice and well conceived game is skill- raped by their own creators.
We make our world significant through the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers.
Pseudo intellectual. Now there's some irony.
We are not yet sure about the feeling from the old adventures, so how can you say that? Instead of cards you get packs now, that's all we can say now.
I am f2p aswell. But this is still hearthstone, i don't know where you got that information from. We get 3 packs from old expansions as a farewell to these older expansions. Which we only started to get since last year…. We still get a legendary card before expansion (just as we got cthun in the old days), you also get free packs in a quest chain... The rewards are exactly the same as before.
Freebies for this expansion:
The first chapter of the solo adventure. (Remaining 4 wings available for gold or $20)
A legendary card before pre-release begins, playable before the expansion hits.
A quest chain rewarding multiple free packs for Rise of Shadows and Year of the Raven expansions
Compare it to an older expansion, WOTOG: Opening your first Old Gods pack will give you C'Thun and two Beckoner of Evil for free.
A special promotional period will be available in which everyone who logs in will get 3 free packs for the expansion.
One Time Quest: Win 2 Games, get 5 Old Gods packs.
One Time Quest: Win 7 Games, get 5 Old Gods packs.
We now get many freebies during the year, look at the most recent ones:
Fberuary: Today you can buy a Lunar New Year Bundle. 30 Packs (10 each of WW, BD, RR) for $20.
Starting Feb 5 you will receive a free golden Fireworks Tech for logging in.
Starting Feb 5 there will be new quests that reward dust and gold.
December: Get a Free Rastakhan's Rumble Card Pack!
Want a free card pack? Silly question, of course you do! Go show your Team Spirit over on the official Hearthstone website by choosing one of the nine teams.
November: Blizzard is celebrating the milestone of 100 million Hearthstone players! From November 7 - 11, you can login to get some goodies.
6 Boomsday Project Card Packs (Logging in reward)
Celebrate the Players Quest Chain (100 Gold x 5 Quests = 500 Gold)
Oktober: Free card packs return to the esports scene via another Choose Your Champion ! Check out the groups below to help figure out the best choice!
All the figures suggest Hearthstone is still a massively successful game with a huge playerbase by anyone's standards. 700m profit and an increasing number of players that's now over 100m. Admittedly the monthly active users has seen some drop-off, like the revenues, since 2017 but the idea that the game is in some sort of death spiral is clear BS.
THat's the rub of all this.
For a company, everything is doing well, especially since they spent the past year toning down the power level, which is an early sacrifice in the name of future gains. You now have to figure out how to put forward the gas without going through another power spike, which is tricky but has been done. In fact, those numbers suggest an upward trend and is showing that some of the big fad gains of 2017 hung on during the toned down 2018. That's utterly awesome.
For investors, this is a nightmare. 30% of your cash disappeared last year and what you thought was an explosively growing company is, at best, a middling flatline with few prospects for future growth.
Activision-Blizzard, the parent is looking at this through investor eyes, not company eyes and pushed Activision, the game maker, into panic mode. Blizzard has, in the past, viewed things through company eyes and has been more than content to be content with downturns that are still high in profits.
The questions are, how much has the Acti-Bliz way of thinking is in Blizzard now. And how much of that leaked into Team 5.
Which gets even more wonky with the answer to this next quote...
It's very much clear that the old guard of Hearthstone is gone now and the company is signaling a very big change in how they do things.
But the question is.. why?
It could be a final realization that the small time cute Hearthstone that was for a few people who loved the WoW card game is dead and a new beast has come from it, which requires a new team to take it on a new course because of it.
It could be a sea change as the investor panic forces out the old guard that failed to bring growth and forces in a group dedicated to the investor mentality no matter the cost.
Which is it? We don't know. But you'll understand why some hold the Company view and say we're moving up while others hold the Investor view and say we're moving down.
One does not simply walk into Mordor,
unless they want to be the best they can be.
I'm seriously tired of threads like this made by fanboys or relative new players. The game is dying and nothing is gonna change that. You are not deceiving anyone with your weak efforts, statements and numbers. Believe it or not, this is Team 5 last chance. Enoy this joke of a game right now as much as you can, Shadowrisen, because its days are numbered. ;)
Where have I heard this kind of thing before?
Oh yeah, WC3, and here it is 17 years later, still in top 30 Twitch streams.
WoW was dead in 2009, and 2011, and 2012, and 2013... but here it is in 2019 making money.
If you want examples of dead games go look at Anthem, SW Battlefront, SW MMO games, Fallout 4, No Man's Sky, and the last Assassins Creed. Sorry but Hearth is going to take a long time to reach the levels of these games.
Or keep to your narrative.
Why does this always happen whenever theres a small dip in any games popularity? Theres a huge difference between DEAD GAME, and a game thats having a low spot. We all know this last rotation wasnt fun. We all agree. Baku, Gen KOTFT, and Kobolds saw that most of the decks played this year were pretty much unchanged from start to finish. Give the community improvements coming with Shadows a chance to do literally anything before we pronounce it dead, especially when theres still a solid playerbase, thats a solid amount ahead of any of the other ECG's on the market. Monotization may be down, but that doesnt mean that the game is dead.
This game isn't going anywhere. The players who love this game (myself included) are also very likely to spend money on each expansion. Speaking for myself, that's $100s per year.
Those hardcore players have no alternatives. I guess there's Magic, but otherwise nothing else competes with Hearthstone in a serious way.
Thus, the game would have to become utterly awful before anyone would leave. And we all like to stay competitive, and have fun, so we invest in new cards every few months.
The players that leave are probably those who were less inclined to spend money in the first place, or who were never "that into" Hearthstone. Of course, Blizzard wants to keep them and get new players excited. But to keep the game going? They have more than enough committed players.
The jump from 2017 to 2018 is very large, but 700 million is still a HUGE amount of revenue and it's much bigger than 2016.
Unless we see a massive drop in 2019, which would surprise me, there is nothing to be concerned about. And while none of us know for sure what it costs to keep the development team in place, I am willing to reasonably conclude the profits are enormous.
How many other games come anywhere close to generating revenues like this?
Ok guys, whatever... As I said in other thread about this same topic, time will tell who is right and who is wrong. ;)
Dying fast.
Brode was great - not that he has that much to do with the game living vs dying. He was a great mouthpiece and had lots of charisma and enthusiasm. He also seemed genuine and pro-transparency on the part of development.
HS's failings IMO are due to unwillingness to embrace greater complexity in mechanics. MTG lets you play on other people's turns (instants)- secrets are the closest that HS gets, and outside of mage secrets these are severely lacking in interactivity. I am not saying that HS needs and instant-type mechanic, but the game needs more solid answers and good tech cards. The simplicity of play feels like they are afraid to take the kid gloves off.
Players need to be more encouraged and rewarded for correctly anticipating and reacting to the opponent's deck. There are just so few MEANINGFUL ways to adapt your deck to the situation at hand and matchups degenerate into very predictable and linear contests.
There is far too little emphasis on play modes outside of ladder and arena. HS needs a new killer playmode to draw more attention. The co-op battles are an example of this. Co-op campaigns might be a good place to explore. Built in tournaments would be another avenue to explore.
Innovation is just not happening in these periodic expansions, and single-player sucks. Nax was a cool single player campaign, explorers was pretty good too.
Well the last article i read said that they were losing a lot of moneys every year
Leper Gnome
Well personally i couldn't give a rat's arse about hs itself but i don't want it to die because it will propably take hearthpwn with it. And damm i love this community, even the fanboys. Unless of course hearthpwn starts including other ccgs as well and it's renamed to Ccgpwn or even better Magicpwn.
HAIL LORD BOLAS!!
I neither want Hearthstone to die, mostly because of Hearthpwn (and Hearthstation ;)), but if people don't complain and spend less money when things are going wrong, there is no other way to make the developers realise their mistakes. :( I know you know that, but had to say it. :P
First of all Sherman, I think you've finally struck on the perfect profile signature.
Someone who had a long post that I don't feel like cut quoting said this is a great situation for everyone except the investors. Presumably, you mean people who invested during or immediately after 2017. If that assumption is right, then of course, that is true.
Of course, this is the danger of the stock market in general. If you were going to invest in a single business, you'd probably pick something in a field about which you knew at least a little. No one who has both a little financial training and some knowledge about Blizzard products would have picked 2017 as a good time to invest (as opposed to 2010, when I got in for $10/share ((humble brag))). But, because of the stock market and in particular, the advisor-free trading apps, people who have no idea about the workings of Blizzard beyond reading a revenue graph could potentially have jumped on the bandwagon after the 2017 numbers came out.
With all due respect for the impoverished stock trader, if that's how you handle your money, you'll end up where you were going to end up with or without Hearthstone's help.
In the meantime, the "time will tell" thing is always true, to the point where it goes without saying. However, what is equally true is that in the present, a time period in which we have much more information relative to the future, you are just flat wrong.
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'm part of the reason the numbers dipped last year. I had been a whale up to and including Witchwood, and I didn't spend a single dime after that. I was sick of DKs, sick of recruit, and yes, already sick of Odd/Even.
Now that all of those things are gone, I'm back and spending money again. Maybe I'm the only one, and maybe I'm not. But Hearthstone isn't dead if they keep learning from their mistakes. And I do consider the early rotation of Genn and Baku as a lesson learned. It's just too bad it took such a huge loss of revenue for them to realize players were not going to put up with two full years of every broken thing they release.
Magic Arena poses a new threat, and I hope Team 5 understands that responsiveness to balance issues is more important than ever.
(That said, I did dip my toe in the Magic pool again for the first time in decades, and man oh man, the whole mana-from-land thing feels outdated and stifling. It didn't take me long to remember why I hate that game.)
"Why, you never expected justice from a company, did you? They have neither a soul to lose nor a body to kick." -- Lady Saba Holland