Arena used to be only on WOTC’s personal client, but the game lost so many players that it had to be put on STEAM for visibility. IDK why you think that Arena’s playerbase is still high when steam charts show that it is around 5K players.
Why are referring to 2023 MTG World Championship? The 2024 MTG Championship has a prize pool of $250,000, which is less than Hearthstone. For that matter, how did the prize pool get slashed by a quarter in less than a year? Surely it can’t be that MTG is a terrible ESPORTS. And even then, you are comparing the combined physical TCG with Arena invites, which means that Arena doesn’t even have an ESPORTS that can stand on its own leg…but we knew that already given that an Arena ESPORTS died 2 times within a span of 5 years not to mention the content creator program dying.
I never said that LoR had a bigger ESPORTs. I said that LoR managed to get a good share of the current card game marketshare. LoR has more players than Arena, and in general LoR has higher streaming time on twitch and better player reviews than Arena. LoR doesn’t have an ESPORTS because the developers can’t find a way to monetize the game because the rewards are far too generous. Arena has the opposite where players stopped playing Arena because the economy increasingly became more stifling and predatory.
MTG Arena is indeed doing poorly. Wizards of the Coast and Digital Gaming for the last 4 quarterly reports, WOTC has their weird pendulum of having net revenue losses, followed by gains, followed by losses, etc. Arena was a massive cashcow for WOTC for 3-4 years, but they killed the game so now the MTG brand has to stand on it’s own laurels.
If HS is dying, then clearly Arena must already be dead. When HS does so poorly that it has to go to STEAM, then we will have to have that discussion, but this isn’t the case. IDK why Blizzard refuses to develop HS into the cornerstone of ESPORTS in the card game sector, but even at its worst its still doing better than MTG as an ESPORTS. Let that sink in; a game like HS that is nowhere near reaching its potential is doing better than Arena which has been around for nearly half of HS’ time and already had a colossal fan base from the TCG.