While at least you and me are in the same boat on this, millions of hats, alternate hero art and whatnot sell for billions per year in games like Fortnite. There IS a market there, of course.
They specifially speak of the “Hearthstone Shop”, i.e. the ingame shop, IMHO as opposed to the Battlenet shop. This aims at players using HS (more or less) exclusively from their handhold devices and not in front of a big ol’ PC (how 20. century!). Obfuscating worth thru alternate currencies and enticing impulse buying surely play a big role, too.
I personally don’t play Battlegrounds and could care less, but since it became such a popular game mode it’s clear they will finally find a “proper” way to monetarize it. The question is how Runestones influence constructed and if the regular reward track will get runified.
P.S. Regis posted a vid on his youtube channel and seems somewhat torn back and forth on the announcement:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMQcvRZltnk
Think of the whole HS players as a venn diagram - while there’s quite some overlap lots of people play exclusively BG OR constructed (or Arena, for that matter). Your argument could be flipped upside down - why bother / pay for two modes if you only ever play one of them?
If both of the will cost 20 bucks, though -
Hopefully this will make the game more rewarding both for hs and bg players, since now they can make better quests and put better rewards on the track.
There is a 99% chance that they are already planning to give 4 heroes to everyone for free (or like before, for gold).
They are just testing the waters, like with the first hs battlepass.
Besides for the reasons mentioned,like disconecting ingame purchases from spending real money,i think they also want to devalue the value of gold in general.
Bg only players have amassed an enormous amount of coins. I am well over 50k totall on my accounts combined and i dont even play that many hours a day.
Enough to buy the perks with gold like 5 times over or more on each account and the gold still goes up every day. It wasnt really sustainable for BG i guess as they would never make money other then selling skins.
Not liking the runestones but from what (very little) I understand it’s kind of necessary to get around gambling laws in some places.
BG has gotten way too popular and blizzard wasn’t making any money on it. Simple as that.
We’re being asked to pay 15 dollars? To unlock the additional hero choices and heroic track for 4 months.
Raise your hand if you never once went out to eat, (even fast food) in the last 4 months?
If you love this mode and want it to be around… the expectation to pay 5 dollars a month or less is pretty minimal.
I mean seriously. We are talking like a singular domestic draft at a sit-down restaurant here folks.
I don’t really want to come off as an elitist snob but complaining about being asked to spend a few real dollars if you’re a dedicated fan of this mode is pretty cringe.
oh, nothing wrong with paying some money for a product you like.
the issue is if the product lures you in with a “free” version only to have you find out later on that you have to pay money to get proper value out of it. If they´d be upfront about it and everyone has to pay to play that´s fine.
And it just doesn´t stop there, if the shop would just accept dollars/euros/whatever your countries currency is that´s also fine by me, but using alternate currency to deceit their customers on the real costs and circumvent laws that are there for a reason (or at least should be there) - that´s just immoral to a degree noone should support.
This statement has the condition that it appliest to today but leaves open the future. I fully expect them to move away from this over time because the purpose of the new currency is to divorce costs from actual money.
I can somewhate agree in a general principle with the idea of supporting games or modes you enjoy or otherwise just not paying to continue playing for free.
However, I think part of the problem is the idea that Blizzard wasn’t making money off the game mode.
If BGs were blizzards only game mode, sure I can understand monetizing it to continue supporting the developers to continue the game.
However, there are all the other game modes that all have monetization that more than easily support the developers as they dont have separate teams or companies.
There are such things as loss leaders that companies use to attract people to have them spend money elsewhere. There are plenty of ways to incentivize the popularity of BGs into getting people to play other game modes and spending money there potentially.
unfortunately they sold out to some crypto firm from what i gathered and wahtever sh** Blizzard is doing, at least right now it´s still better than joining in on the NFT scamming. Kind of a shame, the game didn´t look half bad.
Mehh if it was 5-10$ I might buy it to get 4 heroes and the early hero access and to support BG that I enjoy…. Buuut with all the cosmetics that I have zero interest in, it will undoubtedly be a lot more so hard pass for me… and yeah might be the final nail in the HS coffin for me, we will se
They are 100% doing this to create a disconnect between real money costs by forcing people to use the company store currency. Similar to how companies exploited labor in the past by getting them in debt to the company store.
I think the runestones are an attempt to go around gambling laws in certain countries.
I dont think it has anything to do with gambling laws. That is just a spin in an attempt to get the players on board.
Personally i dont care,i will buy the bg pass and thats fine with me. The only thing i am upset about is that they devalued the gold. But i guess that had to be done because blizzard didnt have the forsight to forsee that BG players would accumulate a large amount of gold.
The accountant who forsaw that one day there would be players strong enough to wield the sword of a thousend truths probably no longer works for blizzard.
You guys should probably be more concerned than you are for the game moving forward. If you give them an inch… I’m really trying not to be a naysayer. But, remember the original rewards track? I expect something as deceptive and unrewarding. They don’t even hide the greed anymore.
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.
