It will take a while with the transition period and the innertia in the player base that is always there but i guess Bg will probably just die out. Like lose over 50% of active players and dropping vieuwer numbers on twitch.
There is nothing on the reward track,the only thing is the 2 extra heroes. The skins are nice but many people do not really care about,bg is one of those games that doesnt thrive because of its optics but because of its gameplay. Maybe if the updates are really good it can become a game that stands on its own and a game that many people will happily pay for.
But the reality i think is that most more or less casual players wont pay for this,even more so if they also play constructed. Its not like these are cheap times.
And people having the feeling to be at a disadvantage (even though the actual disadvantage is statistically rather small if you go by winrates on replay net) those people they will be less likely to play.
I guess competitive BG will suffer,as there will be less players in the top. For the casual players probably not all that much will change. They will all be f2p and the few that do pay wont have all that big of an advantage (and even if they would,they would go up in rating eventually seeing other people who pay).
I was optimistic at first but i am getting a bit more pessmistic about the future of BG. There is a change it could become much better and maybe even more popular if the updates are amazing. But i feel it is also a game where one bad update can push many players away. And with there beeing a higher barrier to enter (if only perceived) they might not return so quickly.
Maybe blizzard should look for a different model to monetize games that are somewhat difficult to monetize. Like a sort of package for anything blizzard related. You pay xx a year and for that you get all the perks in a variety of games. Then the communitys can cross over a bit and might hit critical mass more easily.
Monetizing every small game individually risks ending up with a bunch of very niche games (bar the big titles) where the community can barely stand on its own. And those games are not all that atractive for the average player,then only the true bg lovers will remain.
i don´t think they are difficult to monetize at all. Just follow Riots model. Make a game people enjoy, make all payment completely optional while being very generous with the ingame resources needed to compete to unlock cards/champions/whatever - and you´ll evidently earn waaay enough money of your product.
the problem here is that they don´t trust their own product enough and/or are being greedy.
Not sure what riot game you are pointing to but if it is a fps game,those games are a class on their own they dont follow traditional rules. You can see it in the vieuwer numbers on twitch. Fps games have far more vieuwers then any other game type out there.
Skins dont make enough,they tried that. And i can see why skins are not enough in BG,and that is because optics in this game are not important. The community isnt big enough to get a lot of satisfaction from a skin that in the end is rather cheap to get and not all that rare. They dont have the same amount of apeal that special skins have in fps games,for a variety of reasons. The game itself is just to small for that probably.
The thing for me is not about the money, but about the principle.
BGs are not a complex game, it is a game mode, which was created based on already explored game, which was heavily monetized and is more expensive than AAA titles every 4 months. Especially since the predatory mercs coming “recently”.
BGs? It is like paying 50USD every year for Sudoku app. Can I do it? Sure. Would I? No.
Launch it as a proper game, where is ton of content, allow bans, create different lobbies, better graphics, get rid of useless and boring heroes, that you simply dont want to pick and we can talk.
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that just supports my argument even more, you’re saying players don’t have the time to play both modes, give both modes away free then ? they would have nothing to lose
This reminded me. Is BG still under Beta?
Long ago we had discussion that BG will be monetize in someway.
The way they introduced skins for BGs was horrible. Expensive packs that featured skins for multiple heroes that you hate/aren’t fun to play, for a game that gives you a choice of 4 random heroes from a pool of over 80. So more than likely, you wont even get a chance to use the new skins you purchased.
It would’ve made more sense to add skins for minions, minion cards, or minion attack/death animations. Possibly even tribe-wide skins, but this would all take effort that Blizzard isn’t willing to add to put into the game.
This is horrible news and I am incredibly disappointed in Blizzard with this announcement. They’ve taken their Diablo Immortal model and have applied it here and I you know it’s what they are going to do for all their games which is just sickening.
So now with only a two hero choice by default and you can only earn XP by placing top 4 they’ve made it pretty much impossible to climb the path without purchasing things.
I’ll try it out and see, hopefully it won’t be as bad as I think and read its going to be but this is pretty much the end of my playing Hearthstone.
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Nope, what I meant was parts of the HS community only play one of the formats - Constructed or BG - because they don’t like the other: I, for instance, can’t be … to play Battlegrounds.
Blizzard would have a lot to lose if the gave away one of them for free.
Cosmetics are a dime a dozen anymore. I’d Rather Have the GOLD to buy my hearthstone packs. Very upsetting and not looking forward to playing either mode right now.
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huh are you removing gold ?I assumed this new currency would only be for battlegrounds
At start it’s only for BGs but it will eventually cover all of HS.
If you saw the gem bundles today, the largest 2 correspond to preorder bundle pricing.
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IIRC it came out of Beta when we started buying the pass to have 4 hero choices. Initially it was 3 hero choices vs 2 and we got access to BGs in exchange for buying a certain number of card packs from the latest expansion.
wait so will you still be able to buy packs with gold or earn gems or is it going full pay to win ?
You can buy packs with gold yes.
Surprise they didn’t nerf packs to be 1 card per pack with gold and rmake it so unestone get you the normal 5 card packs.
You’re right to suppose there’s a big possibility that they’ll remove gold to replace it by runestones in the future I think…
I say we take this fight to HS and tell them to remove Runestones because if they go forward with the new currency, i won;t be able to purchase the things i want to get.
Its 20$ for 2000 runestones. If they go with a 1/1 conversion of gold-runestones then it would be 20$ for the bg pass. I dont know what rate they will use but 1-1 does seem kinda logical.