Technically not an incorrect statement.
- Release broken game/cards
- Release fixes/broken cards to deal with #1
- Rake in the monies.
that’s the problem with Blizzard, they’re heavily rely on whales to carry them.
Do you remember the outrage that it took to get to this point?
Blizzard made the battle pass ludicrously bad.
Then walked it back when the community went bonkers.
Somone had to design the issue to start with.
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Bro Blizzard is not going to put you in the game.
Just because you can get cards free doesn’t meant your getting a good return on investment. {time spent} or 2 weeks worth of grinding.
Why would I pay 50 dollars for digital cards when I can get cult of the lamb for $26?
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cult of the lamb was having a roblem with the unity engine it runs on now charging devs for each install of their game i think or they joked about it on twitter
the Unity fees start next year which also impacts Hearthstone believe it or not.
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oh. good to know that about hearthstone
If you think Unity is getting a dime off Bobby or Microsoft…
You are right so who is going to have to help pay those fees. The consumer buddy. {more monetization} If Blizzard/Microsoft decides it’s worth it that is.
If Unity does decide to try to charge Blizzard and Microsoft for Unity installs, they’ll be trapped in a court case that lasts so long that Hearthstone 2 will be out made with a different engine before Unity gets to charge Blizzard a dime.
Ain’t no way Bobby is letting some small fry like Unity, stick their hands in his pockets.
Lol remaking hearthstone in a different engine. Blizzard gave up on China because it wasn’t worth the money. { The worlds biggest video game market} If it’s not worth it finically they will give up.
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It’s besides the point.
You’re assuming Unity can retroactively change a contract and then try to charge one of the largest businesses in the world because of it.
Not a chance.
Blizzard is Microsoft owned now and even prior to that, it was never happening.
If Unity gets a single dime from Blizzard, I’ll fly from the UK to the US naked and personally hand you $30,000 in cash.
Again not expecting money from you because I think they pull the plug before then.
There’s no way that scenario of charging for installs ever actually happens. It’s far too easy to fake an install for this to be a realistic plan.
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Hoooooold up now. Ease up there, please. In no way can you tell me they do not care about a profit. If there’s ANYTHING that not just the devs on Team 5, but those on ALL of the Blizzard catalog have focused most on, it’s friggin’ profit. So it’s not a lack of focus on
As you say, but how much effort they have to put into a game to garner what’s in our wallets. Look at WC3 Reforged. Look at OW “2”. Look at all of the skins, BPs etc. in the HS shop across all their modes. More and more the effort between developing a good, balanced game and monetization has skewed way more towards the latter.
For the record, I don’t mind BPs, skins and other cosmetics available in games. As long as P2W isn’t a part of the purchases, I couldn’t care less. However, as I said, focusing way more on draining more money from a consumer than putting out a good game and keeping it that way (live service) is killing what used to be great across all the iconic IPs of this shell of a company.
More like if you think Unity lasts another five years…
Even if they completely back track, they’ve broken the trust of the developers and the players. I certainly wouldn’t want to invest in a company willing to pull the trigger like that.
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Nah.
People take the "don’t Care that much " as:
Hey. Here is santa Claus.
Those are very different things.
What i personally see is a Company running their game and improving it at a very slow pace.
A Better statement would be:
They not care for hearthstone profits that much as long as it’s net profit is positive.
If hearthstone profit was their priority things would be so much faster than that to a point it’s not even worth discussion.
It is how far hearthstone is from it’s max monetization potential.
Here’s my argument. I don’t think games are their priority. Just profits. The only reason they make the games is because they bring in money. Blizzard used to make games to make games. Now it’s recycle popular IP and monetize the crap out of it.
Like I said, a game can have monetization and not ruin it, however, it does ruin a game if the focus of making the game playable, good, and fun is skewed towards the monetization, which is the case across all their big IPs.
I didn’t understand this. Could you explain, please?
/agree
Unfortunately, some of the monetization
trends during last few years are very greedy, scummy, and scammy:
1). A good example of this would be Mercenaries and how players who bought the pre-purchase bundles only to discover that they were actually duped into paying to alpha-test a poorly developed new mode, which included packs with cosmetics, no duplicate protections, and incredibly bad diminishing pack opening returns. Then the Mercenaries mode was abandoned by the devs in just a few years. How many of you Mercenaries players, who spent money on the mode, now feel that you were completely ripped off?
2). Think about some of the cosmetics that were so misleading (or proved to be such a poor value) that the company felt compelled to offer refunds for those items due to player outcries.
3). Runestones
What I see is a company that slowly makes improvements to the game, but these improvements are also slowly outpaced by bad design elements, which cause more harm than any good that the devs to do for Hearthstone.
From early on, the devs have pursued a design philosophy, which has always included way too much powercreep, bad balance, and bad mechanics—all of which contribute to a lot of non-interactive gameplay.
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Profit is always the top priority for such companies, since they’re not a charity.
The reason for the slow pace is the lack of competition. Even after all these years, there isn’t a game of the same caliber that can dethrone Hearthstone and replace it.
Under such conditions, releasing updates slowly is a strategy. They might already have a next-generation prototype, but they don’t need to reveal any of that unless an opponent threatens their profit margin too much. They only need to feed customers with crap, since other companies don’t even have crap to feed them.
They are not maximizing profit; they are maximizing the profit per unit of work under resource restrictions.