I have been providing feedback designed to warn the design team of the inevitable pitfalls of its design philosophy, while using analogies like, on the game’s current path, it’s just a matter of time before Hearthstone “jumps the shark.”
Or “companies who treat their games as gimmicks or fads that must be quickly milked for all the money that can be made before players move on to the next big fad, actually end up transforming the game (which has the potential for some amazing longevity) into a fad and thereby end up driving their own player-base away.”
Hearthstone has missed some gigantic opportunities to make the game better, but it has also misses some gigantic opportunities to make 10 to 100 times the profit that it has achieved.
I remember being between rounds at a Magic tournament and being asked by some TSR reps to play-test a new CCG of theirs called Spellfire and to give my opinions. After playing some, I told the reps that the game had some potential but in its current form it was too crudely designed to play: the games mechanics needed a major overhaul, and some glaring balance issues needed to be addressed.
In response, the reps scoffed at me, and told me that the game was done and that it would be on the shelves of Barnes and Noble within the next month as it is. To which, I responded with: “That’s sad, this game will die a quick death, and have no chance for a future.”
Unbeknownst to me at the time, TSR’s deal with Barnes and Noble included a buy back clause for any booster boxes that failed to sell in a set period time. Spellfire failed and it pretty much bankrupted TSR, and TSR was scooped up by another gaming company.
When I played a lot of Magic in Michigan, there were nearly 30 different businesses within 30 minutes to 90 minutes of driving time that hosted Magic tournaments. This number slowly dried up to less than five business, which triggered me to write WotC a doom-full sounding letter with listed six things that I felt needed to be done ASAP to save the tournament scene in most U. S. states.
Mark Rosewater personally wrote me back to say that “Magic was alive and well” and that there was no need to implement any of my suggestions. But it was not lost on me that several of my suggestions were implemented within a few months and that all of them were in place by the end of the year.
Again, this an example of designers truly not completely understanding what they have in their game or it’s true potential.
WoW went through similar developmental issues: It focused on a single demographic (end-game raiders) while ignoring nearly every other demographic group who played their game (to point of crushing what was fun for those other demographics) until they had such a huge hemorrhagic loss of subscriptions that they panicked and shifted most of their new designs to cater to casuals, which made Wow a 100 times worse than it had already become, and laying the foundation for a demand for WoW Classic servers—a move that I have no idea about how well it worked, since I stopped playing WoW before Classic happened.