I have been marked as spam once previously for a post similar to this, I hope this one stays up.
Recently an article was released by seeking alpha which documents how that even through hearthstone is losing popularity they continue to increase profits every year. I will attach a link to the article at the bottom of the form. If you control f "hearthstone" ( or about a third of the way down for mobile users ) you can find a chart showing decreased usage of hearthstone over time.
I encourage everyone to scrutinize my claims and analyze this data for themselves. Please draw your own conclusions. However, from my perspective it appears although blizzard is sucking us that play consistently, dry, which makes me sad :( If this is the case, I encourage you to spread awareness to this issue wherever you can. If my interpretation is wrong, please let me know why below.
I read every word of it, I DO have a background and master level degree in finance, and I compliment you. Basically everything you gleaned from the article is 100% correct, with one important caveat.
This article never gets down to a game by game basis, so the talk of MAU is a little clumsy. The article tries to generalize monetization across all of Blizzard's titles, and that is the sort of thing that a financial publication will do without any real understanding of whether or not those numbers really mean anything.
For example, monetizing World of Warcraft is quite a bit easier than monetizing a game like Diablo or Starcraft. Because, WoW has always had a subscription cost built into its model, whereas Diablo and Starcraft are single purchases with no ongoing monetary commitment necessary. Yes, of course, they can try (with varying levels of success) to introduce cosmetics and such to sell to Diablo/SC fans, but they can do the same with WoW. WoW still has that stream of income built in.
Hearthstone likewise, is one of their easier monetization models. While there isn't a literal subscription, there is a constructive subscription for anyone who wants to play the Standard game mode, in that as new cards come out, one way or the other a player needs to stay up to date, at least enough to make one or two decks that contain modern cards.
Now, as to the subject of losing players, nothing in the data there specifically shows that Hearthstone has a declining player base, and here we get into the problems with generalizing MAUs across multiple games. Obviously, Activision has the data on a per-game basis, but we don't have it presented there. Even if you delve into Activision's financial disclosures, the best you can come up with is an educated estimate of the number of paying players. There is no data on the number of players in total, except for third party aggregation sites like HSReplay, which have their own limitations in data gathering.
Anyway, on a company-wide basis you are correct. Less people are playing Blizzard games, BUT more money is being spent per player. Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing whether that statement applies to Hearthstone in particular. From reading Activision's financials, I can tell you that Hearthstone hit a peak of revenue when Knights of the Frozen Throne came out, and that is likely for the same reason that WoW hit a subscriber peak during the Wrath of the Lich King expansion; namely, that people are particularly nostalgic for the Warcraft 3 Lich King storyline.
Given how ridiculously high the revenue spiked during KotFT, it is unlikely Hearthstone will ever get back to that level of profitability. That's just a consequence of them using the most popular aspect of the Warcraft IP at that time. However, Hearthstone is not on a multi-year downward trend. The numbers fell heavily after KotFT, and then leveled off and began a slow climb again in the subsequent year. Whether this is due to growing player base, more money per player, or both, is impossible to say from the data presented.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
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.
Thank you for your breakdown, it absolutely helps. I never want to spread misinformation or claims that are unsubstantiated. I just saw this post and thought it was worth bringing some attention to!
you can look at the forums / streams / youtube videos of hearthstone videos and just speaking to people in general to tell that the game is going downhill population based and it is what it is, it is no longer the new boy on the block and it loses some of its appeal which comes from figuring something out and learning a new system.
what is really killing hearthstone in my opinion is their monetizing model, it directly counters the whole idea of playing a card game, which is to experiment with the cards, how are you gonna do that when each deck cost you 140 euro (9000 dust = 140 euro)
they need a different way of paying for the game and it needs to allow players to have all the cards instead of locking down certain classes down behind a pay wall and rotate the different archetypes which a class can play (which is what i suspect that they do)
you can look at the forums / streams / youtube videos of hearthstone videos and just speaking to people in general to tell that the game is going downhill population based and it is what it is, it is no longer the new boy on the block and it loses some of its appeal which comes from figuring something out and learning a new system.
what is really killing hearthstone in my opinion is their monetizing model, it directly counters the whole idea of playing a card game, which is to experiment with the cards, how are you gonna do that when each deck cost you 140 euro (9000 dust = 140 euro)
they need a different way of paying for the game and it needs to allow players to have all the cards instead of locking down certain classes down behind a pay wall and rotate the different archetypes which a class can play (which is what i suspect that they do)
Wow, so after Shadowrisen and the OP himself agree that the data does not support the claim that the number of HS players is declining, you still can't help but vomit out more nonsense. Or is this just another one of your feeble efforts to (as you yourself admit to) convince more people not to play HS?
Had posted it to the other thread, but yeah, Activision is more than Hearthstone. Namely CoD, WoW and Candy Crush are the main money makers. More detailed MAU breakdowns might be in the earning calls but I think they stopped that a while ago.
what is really killing hearthstone in my opinion is their monetizing model, it directly counters the whole idea of playing a card game, which is to experiment with the cards, how are you gonna do that when each deck cost you 140 euro (9000 dust = 140 euro)
https://www.mtggoldfish.com/metagame/standard#paper Hearthstone isn’t cheap, but if you can’t or don’t want to afford it, don’t play. You are not forced to play this game and can freely choose any of the alternatives.
I read every word of it, I DO have a background and master level degree in finance
Thank you for analysis, Dr. Professor Lawyer of Finance.
Once again, bringing the facts to us normal folks.
No problem, man. Anytime.
Unfortunately I can't claim the title "professor", but the rest is accurate.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
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.
Right. Hearthstone could conceivably just be following the overall trend OR it could be one of the few IPs that is actually bolstering a generally-failing catalog of products.
I say "failing" because even though the article tries to spin it in a positive light, the company would rather more players paying less money each than less players paying more money (holding total revenue static). In other words, if a company is going to make a million dollars, they would much rather it be from one million people paying $1 each than from one hundred people paying $10,000 each. Same amount of money in the short run, but it's much easier to convince a $1 user to double their contribution to $2 than it is to convince a $10,000 contributor to double theirs.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
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.
you can look at the forums / streams / youtube videos of hearthstone videos and just speaking to people in general to tell that the game is going downhill population based and it is what it is, it is no longer the new boy on the block and it loses some of its appeal which comes from figuring something out and learning a new system.
what is really killing hearthstone in my opinion is their monetizing model, it directly counters the whole idea of playing a card game, which is to experiment with the cards, how are you gonna do that when each deck cost you 140 euro (9000 dust = 140 euro)
they need a different way of paying for the game and it needs to allow players to have all the cards instead of locking down certain classes down behind a pay wall and rotate the different archetypes which a class can play (which is what i suspect that they do)
Wow, so after Shadowrisen and the OP himself agree that the data does not support the claim that the number of HS players is declining, you still can't help but vomit out more nonsense. Or is this just another one of your feeble efforts to (as you yourself admit to) convince more people not to play HS?
are you familiar with a term called fraud? basically it is to make something seem like it is something that it is not, sometimes it can be very serious, trying to showcase a better image to the world than what is really real is something basically as old as time and businesses' do this all the time, when the numbers goes up and up they will show them (blizzard wow numbers from vanilla to wotlk) but when times comes for the cataclysm of declining numbers then out of no where the numbers are no longer anywhere to be found (shocking)
blizzard is doing everything in their power to make hearthstone seem bigger than it is, every time there is a chance to do some sneaky sort of solution they will take it, especially if it goes unnoticed.
I am not sure if you are aware of how hard it actually is to prove something that is not a triangle? proving intent or misdreavus behavior is very hard if your target do not self snitch (reason why people who are accused of something always just stay quite)
activision is raising the price of games and it is gonna set a new industry standard from what in my currency used to be a 100 kr. game became 200 kr then 500 kr then 600 kr. now we starting to see 1000 kr. and the only one who can say stop is the customer when they choose to not let the strategy work anymore and that is why I am speaking, I don't want games to get more expensive there is no production reason for the games to become more expensive, it is not like they are operating at a loss, no they just raise the prices because they can due to it being a shareholder company where people put their money in stocks to drain the money from the people who are dealing with the company
and there you go now you know a little more about capitalism
Just to clear things up, the answer we arrived at is “uncertain” for anyone making claims
Agreed. My point was the evidence in the article is insufficient to make that claim. It could very well be true, but that specific article offers nothing to support that conclusion.
you can look at the forums / streams / youtube videos of hearthstone videos and just speaking to people in general to tell that the game is going downhill population based and it is what it is, it is no longer the new boy on the block and it loses some of its appeal which comes from figuring something out and learning a new system.
what is really killing hearthstone in my opinion is their monetizing model, it directly counters the whole idea of playing a card game, which is to experiment with the cards, how are you gonna do that when each deck cost you 140 euro (9000 dust = 140 euro)
they need a different way of paying for the game and it needs to allow players to have all the cards instead of locking down certain classes down behind a pay wall and rotate the different archetypes which a class can play (which is what i suspect that they do)
Wow, so after Shadowrisen and the OP himself agree that the data does not support the claim that the number of HS players is declining, you still can't help but vomit out more nonsense. Or is this just another one of your feeble efforts to (as you yourself admit to) convince more people not to play HS?
are you familiar with a term called fraud? basically it is to make something seem like it is something that it is not, sometimes it can be very serious, trying to showcase a better image to the world than what is really real is something basically as old as time and businesses' do this all the time, when the numbers goes up and up they will show them (blizzard wow numbers from vanilla to wotlk) but when times comes for the cataclysm of declining numbers then out of no where the numbers are no longer anywhere to be found (shocking)
blizzard is doing everything in their power to make hearthstone seem bigger than it is, every time there is a chance to do some sneaky sort of solution they will take it, especially if it goes unnoticed.
I am not sure if you are aware of how hard it actually is to prove something that is not a triangle? proving intent or misdreavus behavior is very hard if your target do not self snitch (reason why people who are accused of something always just stay quite)
activision is raising the price of games and it is gonna set a new industry standard from what in my currency used to be a 100 kr. game became 200 kr then 500 kr then 600 kr. now we starting to see 1000 kr. and the only one who can say stop is the customer when they choose to not let the strategy work anymore and that is why I am speaking, I don't want games to get more expensive there is no production reason for the games to become more expensive, it is not like they are operating at a loss, no they just raise the prices because they can due to it being a shareholder company where people put their money in stocks to drain the money from the people who are dealing with the company
and there you go now you know a little more about capitalism
I'm well aware of the term fraud, which has at least two meanings. One, the legal definition, which I'm not qualified to explain in any but the most general terms. I'll leave that to an attorney. As for the other meaning, well, most of your posts qualify.
You make several claims about Blizzard hiding its numbers. Prove it. Please provide verified statistics from a reputable source regarding this supposed drop in PLAYERS. Not streaming viewers, not what you and your buddies think. Real numbers. (And before you demand I prove it's not happening, remember you're the one who said the number of players is declining. I've made no claim WRT the number of players at all.) You also say that they used to provide numbers when the numbers were going up and up, but not now. Please provide proof. What year did Blizzard stop releasing the number of players? You might be right, but since you're so routinely full of it, you need to prove it.
As for the price of HS in your country (I'm assuming Sweden), I have no idea why it's becoming more expensive. Is your government taxing these games? What I can tell you is that here in the US, the bundle prices have not changed in several years (to the best of my recollection). I've been buying the $50 bundle off and on, and the price and number of packs hasn't changed, except for this most recent expansion, where the smaller bundle was $40 (I think).
Beyond that, your "knowledge" of capitalism is a joke. Production costs haven't changed, you say? That's unlikely. You DO know, for example, that the salaries of the game designers, artists, play testers, marketing people, software engineers, network security personnel, etc. all affect the production cost for HS, right? Are you claiming none of these positions has seen a salary increase in years? I can promise you, production costs have increased. And the less said about your deep insight into shareholder behavior, the better. Your tedious, Marxist understanding of corporate behavior is laughable. Companies (at least successful ones) do not try to "drain the money from people who deal with the company." The successful ones create loyal customers who keep coming back because they feel that they are getting their money's worth. Smart companies try to grow their customer base, not milk it, especially in a hyper-competitive industry like gaming.
But hey, why bother thinking when you can just trot out the same tedious anti-capitalist tripe you learned in college?
you can look at the forums / streams / youtube videos of hearthstone videos and just speaking to people in general to tell that the game is going downhill population based and it is what it is, it is no longer the new boy on the block and it loses some of its appeal which comes from figuring something out and learning a new system.
what is really killing hearthstone in my opinion is their monetizing model, it directly counters the whole idea of playing a card game, which is to experiment with the cards, how are you gonna do that when each deck cost you 140 euro (9000 dust = 140 euro)
they need a different way of paying for the game and it needs to allow players to have all the cards instead of locking down certain classes down behind a pay wall and rotate the different archetypes which a class can play (which is what i suspect that they do)
Wow, so after Shadowrisen and the OP himself agree that the data does not support the claim that the number of HS players is declining, you still can't help but vomit out more nonsense. Or is this just another one of your feeble efforts to (as you yourself admit to) convince more people not to play HS?
are you familiar with a term called fraud? basically it is to make something seem like it is something that it is not, sometimes it can be very serious, trying to showcase a better image to the world than what is really real is something basically as old as time and businesses' do this all the time, when the numbers goes up and up they will show them (blizzard wow numbers from vanilla to wotlk) but when times comes for the cataclysm of declining numbers then out of no where the numbers are no longer anywhere to be found (shocking)
blizzard is doing everything in their power to make hearthstone seem bigger than it is, every time there is a chance to do some sneaky sort of solution they will take it, especially if it goes unnoticed.
I am not sure if you are aware of how hard it actually is to prove something that is not a triangle? proving intent or misdreavus behavior is very hard if your target do not self snitch (reason why people who are accused of something always just stay quite)
activision is raising the price of games and it is gonna set a new industry standard from what in my currency used to be a 100 kr. game became 200 kr then 500 kr then 600 kr. now we starting to see 1000 kr. and the only one who can say stop is the customer when they choose to not let the strategy work anymore and that is why I am speaking, I don't want games to get more expensive there is no production reason for the games to become more expensive, it is not like they are operating at a loss, no they just raise the prices because they can due to it being a shareholder company where people put their money in stocks to drain the money from the people who are dealing with the company
and there you go now you know a little more about capitalism
I'm well aware of the term fraud, which has at least two meanings. One, the legal definition, which I'm not qualified to explain in any but the most general terms. I'll leave that to an attorney. As for the other meaning, well, most of your posts qualify.
You make several claims about Blizzard hiding its numbers. Prove it. Please provide verified statistics from a reputable source regarding this supposed drop in PLAYERS. Not streaming viewers, not what you and your buddies think. Real numbers. (And before you demand I prove it's not happening, remember you're the one who said the number of players is declining. I've made no claim WRT the number of players at all.) You also say that they used to provide numbers when the numbers were going up and up, but not now. Please provide proof. What year did Blizzard stop releasing the number of players? You might be right, but since you're so routinely full of it, you need to prove it.
As for the price of HS in your country (I'm assuming Sweden), I have no idea why it's becoming more expensive. Is your government taxing these games? What I can tell you is that here in the US, the bundle prices have not changed in several years (to the best of my recollection). I've been buying the $50 bundle off and on, and the price and number of packs hasn't changed, except for this most recent expansion, where the smaller bundle was $40 (I think).
Beyond that, your "knowledge" of capitalism is a joke. Production costs haven't changed, you say? That's unlikely. You DO know, for example, that the salaries of the game designers, artists, play testers, marketing people, software engineers, network security personnel, etc. all affect the production cost for HS, right? Are you claiming none of these positions has seen a salary increase in years? I can promise you, production costs have increased. And the less said about your deep insight into shareholder behavior, the better. Your tedious, Marxist understanding of corporate behavior is laughable. Companies (at least successful ones) do not try to "drain the money from people who deal with the company." The successful ones create loyal customers who keep coming back because they feel that they are getting their money's worth. Smart companies try to grow their customer base, not milk it, especially in a hyper-competitive industry like gaming.
But hey, why bother thinking when you can just trot out the same tedious anti-capitalist tripe you learned in college?
As Yepapa pretty much just proved with his last post, he drops the pretense and admits to trolling when he gets bored.
Read the posts by 3nnu1 about "an interesting video" or my thread about Zeddy Hearthstone. He does it in one of them explicitly and the other constructively.
Regardless, there is no hard evidence to suggest the player base is declining. Yepapa basically implied that it's a reasonable assumption that Activision publishes fraudulent financial reports, which is ridiculous. No, I can't prove it, but I know the amount of jail time that would involve for a publicly-traded company to do that. The last really huge case I can recall of defrauding the SEC was the Enron deal, and for those who were too young or too oblivious to remember that fiasco, several folks got a long visit to federal "pound-me-in-the-ass" prison over that one. So, without some sort of evidence, that claim is not something reasonable to just assume.
Having said all that, I try to be fair here, and the claim that production costs have materially increased for computer games is not one that strikes me as particularly reasonable either. First of all, I have read in a few financial publications that the tech sector salaries have actually been dropping in real dollars based on the abundance of people with the necessary skills and a slow growth rate in the number of available jobs. In other words, too many people can do the job and not enough jobs exist, so the cost of labor drops (again, in real dollars). I can't say that I've run my own research on the subject, so may have to take Forbes's word for it for now, but that is what I have seen.
Also, the actual "production" costs, as in the cost necessary to manufacture a product, have dropped to almost nil in the gaming industry. I remember 16 or so years ago when the first expansion to World of Warcraft came out, I think nearly 90% of sales were the boxed game from stores like Walmart of Gamestop with multiple CDs, instruction manuals, packaging, etc. Now, something like 95% of sales are internet downloads involving zero physical product. That is a HUGE drop in production cost across the board. One would have to point to a very serious commensurate increase in another area of production to offset that drop; otherwise I can't take the claim of rising production costs seriously.
So, as much as I might hate to say it, Yepapa has a small, trollish point.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
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.
what is really killing hearthstone in my opinion is their monetizing model, it directly counters the whole idea of playing a card game, which is to experiment with the cards, how are you gonna do that when each deck cost you 140 euro
I’ve been playing Hearthstone for 4 years. I preorder each expansion (the larger offer which is normally £70-80) and spend no more than that (as that is what I’m comfortable with). I don’t play wild, so I admittedly dust the cards that get rotated out, but I don’t dust any other card I receive unless it’s a duplicate.
I currently have a close to complete standard collection. I’m missing one legendary from Schoolmance, one from Saviours, three from Darkmoon and around six useless ones from classic. I also don’t have around 10 epics.
So basically, what I’m saying is... it doesn’t even come close to 140 euros for a deck.
On top of that, I have made F2P accounts several times towards the end of expansions (not whilst they were giving a free deck) and easily managed to make a deck competitive enough to reach legend.
you can look at the forums / streams / youtube videos of hearthstone videos and just speaking to people in general to tell that the game is going downhill population based and it is what it is, it is no longer the new boy on the block and it loses some of its appeal which comes from figuring something out and learning a new system.
what is really killing hearthstone in my opinion is their monetizing model, it directly counters the whole idea of playing a card game, which is to experiment with the cards, how are you gonna do that when each deck cost you 140 euro (9000 dust = 140 euro)
they need a different way of paying for the game and it needs to allow players to have all the cards instead of locking down certain classes down behind a pay wall and rotate the different archetypes which a class can play (which is what i suspect that they do)
Wow, so after Shadowrisen and the OP himself agree that the data does not support the claim that the number of HS players is declining, you still can't help but vomit out more nonsense. Or is this just another one of your feeble efforts to (as you yourself admit to) convince more people not to play HS?
are you familiar with a term called fraud? basically it is to make something seem like it is something that it is not, sometimes it can be very serious, trying to showcase a better image to the world than what is really real is something basically as old as time and businesses' do this all the time, when the numbers goes up and up they will show them (blizzard wow numbers from vanilla to wotlk) but when times comes for the cataclysm of declining numbers then out of no where the numbers are no longer anywhere to be found (shocking)
blizzard is doing everything in their power to make hearthstone seem bigger than it is, every time there is a chance to do some sneaky sort of solution they will take it, especially if it goes unnoticed.
I am not sure if you are aware of how hard it actually is to prove something that is not a triangle? proving intent or misdreavus behavior is very hard if your target do not self snitch (reason why people who are accused of something always just stay quite)
activision is raising the price of games and it is gonna set a new industry standard from what in my currency used to be a 100 kr. game became 200 kr then 500 kr then 600 kr. now we starting to see 1000 kr. and the only one who can say stop is the customer when they choose to not let the strategy work anymore and that is why I am speaking, I don't want games to get more expensive there is no production reason for the games to become more expensive, it is not like they are operating at a loss, no they just raise the prices because they can due to it being a shareholder company where people put their money in stocks to drain the money from the people who are dealing with the company
and there you go now you know a little more about capitalism
I'm well aware of the term fraud, which has at least two meanings. One, the legal definition, which I'm not qualified to explain in any but the most general terms. I'll leave that to an attorney. As for the other meaning, well, most of your posts qualify.
You make several claims about Blizzard hiding its numbers. Prove it. Please provide verified statistics from a reputable source regarding this supposed drop in PLAYERS. Not streaming viewers, not what you and your buddies think. Real numbers. (And before you demand I prove it's not happening, remember you're the one who said the number of players is declining. I've made no claim WRT the number of players at all.) You also say that they used to provide numbers when the numbers were going up and up, but not now. Please provide proof. What year did Blizzard stop releasing the number of players? You might be right, but since you're so routinely full of it, you need to prove it.
As for the price of HS in your country (I'm assuming Sweden), I have no idea why it's becoming more expensive. Is your government taxing these games? What I can tell you is that here in the US, the bundle prices have not changed in several years (to the best of my recollection). I've been buying the $50 bundle off and on, and the price and number of packs hasn't changed, except for this most recent expansion, where the smaller bundle was $40 (I think).
Beyond that, your "knowledge" of capitalism is a joke. Production costs haven't changed, you say? That's unlikely. You DO know, for example, that the salaries of the game designers, artists, play testers, marketing people, software engineers, network security personnel, etc. all affect the production cost for HS, right? Are you claiming none of these positions has seen a salary increase in years? I can promise you, production costs have increased. And the less said about your deep insight into shareholder behavior, the better. Your tedious, Marxist understanding of corporate behavior is laughable. Companies (at least successful ones) do not try to "drain the money from people who deal with the company." The successful ones create loyal customers who keep coming back because they feel that they are getting their money's worth. Smart companies try to grow their customer base, not milk it, especially in a hyper-competitive industry like gaming.
But hey, why bother thinking when you can just trot out the same tedious anti-capitalist tripe you learned in college?
production cost have increased? prove it
Also... you shouldn’t need any sort of proof of this. Have some common sense. What expense in this world hasn’t increased in the last six years? At the very least, everyone working for Blizzard is on more money than they were when it was first released.
I don't know about the last six years, but I posted in detail why, over the last 15-20 years, several areas of the process of making video games has dropped to zero. So unless there's a gigantic increase to offset all that, common sense says video games are significantly cheaper to produce today than they were 15-20 years ago.
There may, in fact, be such a gigantic increase, but I don't see it. It certainly isn't in hardware. Computers are significantly cheaper than they were back in the day, I remember vividly paying almost $3k for a slightly-above average model in the late 90s.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
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.
you can look at the forums / streams / youtube videos of hearthstone videos and just speaking to people in general to tell that the game is going downhill population based and it is what it is, it is no longer the new boy on the block and it loses some of its appeal which comes from figuring something out and learning a new system.
what is really killing hearthstone in my opinion is their monetizing model, it directly counters the whole idea of playing a card game, which is to experiment with the cards, how are you gonna do that when each deck cost you 140 euro (9000 dust = 140 euro)
they need a different way of paying for the game and it needs to allow players to have all the cards instead of locking down certain classes down behind a pay wall and rotate the different archetypes which a class can play (which is what i suspect that they do)
Wow, so after Shadowrisen and the OP himself agree that the data does not support the claim that the number of HS players is declining, you still can't help but vomit out more nonsense. Or is this just another one of your feeble efforts to (as you yourself admit to) convince more people not to play HS?
are you familiar with a term called fraud? basically it is to make something seem like it is something that it is not, sometimes it can be very serious, trying to showcase a better image to the world than what is really real is something basically as old as time and businesses' do this all the time, when the numbers goes up and up they will show them (blizzard wow numbers from vanilla to wotlk) but when times comes for the cataclysm of declining numbers then out of no where the numbers are no longer anywhere to be found (shocking)
blizzard is doing everything in their power to make hearthstone seem bigger than it is, every time there is a chance to do some sneaky sort of solution they will take it, especially if it goes unnoticed.
I am not sure if you are aware of how hard it actually is to prove something that is not a triangle? proving intent or misdreavus behavior is very hard if your target do not self snitch (reason why people who are accused of something always just stay quite)
activision is raising the price of games and it is gonna set a new industry standard from what in my currency used to be a 100 kr. game became 200 kr then 500 kr then 600 kr. now we starting to see 1000 kr. and the only one who can say stop is the customer when they choose to not let the strategy work anymore and that is why I am speaking, I don't want games to get more expensive there is no production reason for the games to become more expensive, it is not like they are operating at a loss, no they just raise the prices because they can due to it being a shareholder company where people put their money in stocks to drain the money from the people who are dealing with the company
and there you go now you know a little more about capitalism
I'm well aware of the term fraud, which has at least two meanings. One, the legal definition, which I'm not qualified to explain in any but the most general terms. I'll leave that to an attorney. As for the other meaning, well, most of your posts qualify.
You make several claims about Blizzard hiding its numbers. Prove it. Please provide verified statistics from a reputable source regarding this supposed drop in PLAYERS. Not streaming viewers, not what you and your buddies think. Real numbers. (And before you demand I prove it's not happening, remember you're the one who said the number of players is declining. I've made no claim WRT the number of players at all.) You also say that they used to provide numbers when the numbers were going up and up, but not now. Please provide proof. What year did Blizzard stop releasing the number of players? You might be right, but since you're so routinely full of it, you need to prove it.
As for the price of HS in your country (I'm assuming Sweden), I have no idea why it's becoming more expensive. Is your government taxing these games? What I can tell you is that here in the US, the bundle prices have not changed in several years (to the best of my recollection). I've been buying the $50 bundle off and on, and the price and number of packs hasn't changed, except for this most recent expansion, where the smaller bundle was $40 (I think).
Beyond that, your "knowledge" of capitalism is a joke. Production costs haven't changed, you say? That's unlikely. You DO know, for example, that the salaries of the game designers, artists, play testers, marketing people, software engineers, network security personnel, etc. all affect the production cost for HS, right? Are you claiming none of these positions has seen a salary increase in years? I can promise you, production costs have increased. And the less said about your deep insight into shareholder behavior, the better. Your tedious, Marxist understanding of corporate behavior is laughable. Companies (at least successful ones) do not try to "drain the money from people who deal with the company." The successful ones create loyal customers who keep coming back because they feel that they are getting their money's worth. Smart companies try to grow their customer base, not milk it, especially in a hyper-competitive industry like gaming.
But hey, why bother thinking when you can just trot out the same tedious anti-capitalist tripe you learned in college?
production cost have increased? prove it
Also... you shouldn’t need any sort of proof of this. Have some common sense. What expense in this world hasn’t increased in the last six years? At the very least, everyone working for Blizzard is on more money than they were when it was first released.
I am just trying to help you see the flaws in your own "logic" also you totally missed the point of what I said because you are so busy attacking it
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I have been marked as spam once previously for a post similar to this, I hope this one stays up.
Recently an article was released by seeking alpha which documents how that even through hearthstone is losing popularity they continue to increase profits every year. I will attach a link to the article at the bottom of the form. If you control f "hearthstone" ( or about a third of the way down for mobile users ) you can find a chart showing decreased usage of hearthstone over time.
I encourage everyone to scrutinize my claims and analyze this data for themselves. Please draw your own conclusions. However, from my perspective it appears although blizzard is sucking us that play consistently, dry, which makes me sad :( If this is the case, I encourage you to spread awareness to this issue wherever you can. If my interpretation is wrong, please let me know why below.
If you have any questions, please ask.
I love hearthpwn, thank you for everyone helping.
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4393331-activision-blizzard-is-undervalued-unloved
I read every word of it, I DO have a background and master level degree in finance, and I compliment you. Basically everything you gleaned from the article is 100% correct, with one important caveat.
This article never gets down to a game by game basis, so the talk of MAU is a little clumsy. The article tries to generalize monetization across all of Blizzard's titles, and that is the sort of thing that a financial publication will do without any real understanding of whether or not those numbers really mean anything.
For example, monetizing World of Warcraft is quite a bit easier than monetizing a game like Diablo or Starcraft. Because, WoW has always had a subscription cost built into its model, whereas Diablo and Starcraft are single purchases with no ongoing monetary commitment necessary. Yes, of course, they can try (with varying levels of success) to introduce cosmetics and such to sell to Diablo/SC fans, but they can do the same with WoW. WoW still has that stream of income built in.
Hearthstone likewise, is one of their easier monetization models. While there isn't a literal subscription, there is a constructive subscription for anyone who wants to play the Standard game mode, in that as new cards come out, one way or the other a player needs to stay up to date, at least enough to make one or two decks that contain modern cards.
Now, as to the subject of losing players, nothing in the data there specifically shows that Hearthstone has a declining player base, and here we get into the problems with generalizing MAUs across multiple games. Obviously, Activision has the data on a per-game basis, but we don't have it presented there. Even if you delve into Activision's financial disclosures, the best you can come up with is an educated estimate of the number of paying players. There is no data on the number of players in total, except for third party aggregation sites like HSReplay, which have their own limitations in data gathering.
Anyway, on a company-wide basis you are correct. Less people are playing Blizzard games, BUT more money is being spent per player. Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing whether that statement applies to Hearthstone in particular. From reading Activision's financials, I can tell you that Hearthstone hit a peak of revenue when Knights of the Frozen Throne came out, and that is likely for the same reason that WoW hit a subscriber peak during the Wrath of the Lich King expansion; namely, that people are particularly nostalgic for the Warcraft 3 Lich King storyline.
Given how ridiculously high the revenue spiked during KotFT, it is unlikely Hearthstone will ever get back to that level of profitability. That's just a consequence of them using the most popular aspect of the Warcraft IP at that time. However, Hearthstone is not on a multi-year downward trend. The numbers fell heavily after KotFT, and then leveled off and began a slow climb again in the subsequent year. Whether this is due to growing player base, more money per player, or both, is impossible to say from the data presented.
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.
Thank you for your breakdown, it absolutely helps. I never want to spread misinformation or claims that are unsubstantiated. I just saw this post and thought it was worth bringing some attention to!
iv been saying this yo
you can look at the forums / streams / youtube videos of hearthstone videos and just speaking to people in general to tell that the game is going downhill population based and it is what it is, it is no longer the new boy on the block and it loses some of its appeal which comes from figuring something out and learning a new system.
what is really killing hearthstone in my opinion is their monetizing model, it directly counters the whole idea of playing a card game, which is to experiment with the cards, how are you gonna do that when each deck cost you 140 euro (9000 dust = 140 euro)
they need a different way of paying for the game and it needs to allow players to have all the cards instead of locking down certain classes down behind a pay wall and rotate the different archetypes which a class can play (which is what i suspect that they do)
Thank you for analysis, Dr. Professor Lawyer of Finance.
Once again, bringing the facts to us normal folks.
Wow, so after Shadowrisen and the OP himself agree that the data does not support the claim that the number of HS players is declining, you still can't help but vomit out more nonsense. Or is this just another one of your feeble efforts to (as you yourself admit to) convince more people not to play HS?
Had posted it to the other thread, but yeah, Activision is more than Hearthstone. Namely CoD, WoW and Candy Crush are the main money makers. More detailed MAU breakdowns might be in the earning calls but I think they stopped that a while ago.
https://www.mtggoldfish.com/metagame/standard#paper
Hearthstone isn’t cheap, but if you can’t or don’t want to afford it, don’t play. You are not forced to play this game and can freely choose any of the alternatives.
No problem, man. Anytime.
Unfortunately I can't claim the title "professor", but the rest is accurate.
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.
Just to clear things up, the answer we arrived at is “uncertain” for anyone making claims
Right. Hearthstone could conceivably just be following the overall trend OR it could be one of the few IPs that is actually bolstering a generally-failing catalog of products.
I say "failing" because even though the article tries to spin it in a positive light, the company would rather more players paying less money each than less players paying more money (holding total revenue static). In other words, if a company is going to make a million dollars, they would much rather it be from one million people paying $1 each than from one hundred people paying $10,000 each. Same amount of money in the short run, but it's much easier to convince a $1 user to double their contribution to $2 than it is to convince a $10,000 contributor to double theirs.
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.
are you familiar with a term called fraud? basically it is to make something seem like it is something that it is not, sometimes it can be very serious, trying to showcase a better image to the world than what is really real is something basically as old as time and businesses' do this all the time, when the numbers goes up and up they will show them (blizzard wow numbers from vanilla to wotlk) but when times comes for the cataclysm of declining numbers then out of no where the numbers are no longer anywhere to be found (shocking)
blizzard is doing everything in their power to make hearthstone seem bigger than it is, every time there is a chance to do some sneaky sort of solution they will take it, especially if it goes unnoticed.
I am not sure if you are aware of how hard it actually is to prove something that is not a triangle? proving intent or misdreavus behavior is very hard if your target do not self snitch (reason why people who are accused of something always just stay quite)
activision is raising the price of games and it is gonna set a new industry standard from what in my currency used to be a 100 kr. game became 200 kr then 500 kr then 600 kr. now we starting to see 1000 kr. and the only one who can say stop is the customer when they choose to not let the strategy work anymore and that is why I am speaking, I don't want games to get more expensive there is no production reason for the games to become more expensive, it is not like they are operating at a loss, no they just raise the prices because they can due to it being a shareholder company where people put their money in stocks to drain the money from the people who are dealing with the company
and there you go now you know a little more about capitalism
Agreed. My point was the evidence in the article is insufficient to make that claim. It could very well be true, but that specific article offers nothing to support that conclusion.
I'm well aware of the term fraud, which has at least two meanings. One, the legal definition, which I'm not qualified to explain in any but the most general terms. I'll leave that to an attorney. As for the other meaning, well, most of your posts qualify.
You make several claims about Blizzard hiding its numbers. Prove it. Please provide verified statistics from a reputable source regarding this supposed drop in PLAYERS. Not streaming viewers, not what you and your buddies think. Real numbers. (And before you demand I prove it's not happening, remember you're the one who said the number of players is declining. I've made no claim WRT the number of players at all.) You also say that they used to provide numbers when the numbers were going up and up, but not now. Please provide proof. What year did Blizzard stop releasing the number of players? You might be right, but since you're so routinely full of it, you need to prove it.
As for the price of HS in your country (I'm assuming Sweden), I have no idea why it's becoming more expensive. Is your government taxing these games? What I can tell you is that here in the US, the bundle prices have not changed in several years (to the best of my recollection). I've been buying the $50 bundle off and on, and the price and number of packs hasn't changed, except for this most recent expansion, where the smaller bundle was $40 (I think).
Beyond that, your "knowledge" of capitalism is a joke. Production costs haven't changed, you say? That's unlikely. You DO know, for example, that the salaries of the game designers, artists, play testers, marketing people, software engineers, network security personnel, etc. all affect the production cost for HS, right? Are you claiming none of these positions has seen a salary increase in years? I can promise you, production costs have increased. And the less said about your deep insight into shareholder behavior, the better. Your tedious, Marxist understanding of corporate behavior is laughable. Companies (at least successful ones) do not try to "drain the money from people who deal with the company." The successful ones create loyal customers who keep coming back because they feel that they are getting their money's worth. Smart companies try to grow their customer base, not milk it, especially in a hyper-competitive industry like gaming.
But hey, why bother thinking when you can just trot out the same tedious anti-capitalist tripe you learned in college?
production cost have increased? prove it
As Yepapa pretty much just proved with his last post, he drops the pretense and admits to trolling when he gets bored.
Read the posts by 3nnu1 about "an interesting video" or my thread about Zeddy Hearthstone. He does it in one of them explicitly and the other constructively.
Regardless, there is no hard evidence to suggest the player base is declining. Yepapa basically implied that it's a reasonable assumption that Activision publishes fraudulent financial reports, which is ridiculous. No, I can't prove it, but I know the amount of jail time that would involve for a publicly-traded company to do that. The last really huge case I can recall of defrauding the SEC was the Enron deal, and for those who were too young or too oblivious to remember that fiasco, several folks got a long visit to federal "pound-me-in-the-ass" prison over that one. So, without some sort of evidence, that claim is not something reasonable to just assume.
Having said all that, I try to be fair here, and the claim that production costs have materially increased for computer games is not one that strikes me as particularly reasonable either. First of all, I have read in a few financial publications that the tech sector salaries have actually been dropping in real dollars based on the abundance of people with the necessary skills and a slow growth rate in the number of available jobs. In other words, too many people can do the job and not enough jobs exist, so the cost of labor drops (again, in real dollars). I can't say that I've run my own research on the subject, so may have to take Forbes's word for it for now, but that is what I have seen.
Also, the actual "production" costs, as in the cost necessary to manufacture a product, have dropped to almost nil in the gaming industry. I remember 16 or so years ago when the first expansion to World of Warcraft came out, I think nearly 90% of sales were the boxed game from stores like Walmart of Gamestop with multiple CDs, instruction manuals, packaging, etc. Now, something like 95% of sales are internet downloads involving zero physical product. That is a HUGE drop in production cost across the board. One would have to point to a very serious commensurate increase in another area of production to offset that drop; otherwise I can't take the claim of rising production costs seriously.
So, as much as I might hate to say it, Yepapa has a small, trollish point.
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’ve been playing Hearthstone for 4 years. I preorder each expansion (the larger offer which is normally £70-80) and spend no more than that (as that is what I’m comfortable with). I don’t play wild, so I admittedly dust the cards that get rotated out, but I don’t dust any other card I receive unless it’s a duplicate.
I currently have a close to complete standard collection. I’m missing one legendary from Schoolmance, one from Saviours, three from Darkmoon and around six useless ones from classic. I also don’t have around 10 epics.
So basically, what I’m saying is... it doesn’t even come close to 140 euros for a deck.
On top of that, I have made F2P accounts several times towards the end of expansions (not whilst they were giving a free deck) and easily managed to make a deck competitive enough to reach legend.
Also... you shouldn’t need any sort of proof of this. Have some common sense. What expense in this world hasn’t increased in the last six years? At the very least, everyone working for Blizzard is on more money than they were when it was first released.
I don't know about the last six years, but I posted in detail why, over the last 15-20 years, several areas of the process of making video games has dropped to zero. So unless there's a gigantic increase to offset all that, common sense says video games are significantly cheaper to produce today than they were 15-20 years ago.
There may, in fact, be such a gigantic increase, but I don't see it. It certainly isn't in hardware. Computers are significantly cheaper than they were back in the day, I remember vividly paying almost $3k for a slightly-above average model in the late 90s.
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 am just trying to help you see the flaws in your own "logic" also you totally missed the point of what I said because you are so busy attacking it