It’s clearly oviouse that the company doesn’t make profit with Heroes of the Storm; so I come with an idea that will be positive for the company and for the players too.
Today “free to play” games are actually “pay to win” (you pay stuff in game to have boosts to help you to win)…but in HotS you can buy heroes and skins with coins that you get from daily quest, games,heroes leveling up and at a certain point (player lv 1000) you will have everything (all heroes, 90% of the skins,sprays,avatars,mounts,etc) ; and to produce more heroes, skins,etc isn’t efficient (company costs are higher and players recives the new skins/heroes in time for free)
The solution is this: Ranked Games with tickets
a player recive 3 tickets/day to play in Ranked/League (3 games)
you can buy tickets ( to play more games in Ranked) a small price like 2$
every season have prize reward $ (like first place 1000$ 2nd place 500$ and 3rd place 300$…the bigger the prize pool will be that the company will pay from extra tickets from the players, the more players will try to reach top tournament/ more entries-extra tickets)
instead to be “pay to win” it will be “pay to play more”
Charging for Ranked games… people would just quit ranked and stick to QM and ARAM. And nobody is paying to play an unsuported game.
The best way to make money with hots would be doing something similar to league of legends. Heroes are a little bit harder to get and skins much much harder. I’ve been playing league for about 3 or 4 years now (not consistently though) and I got about half the heroes and just like 10-15 skins. I even spent some money on a couple of them, which I would never do for hots because of how easy it is to get stuff. They also have a pass for more rewards during events and stuff.
According to third party reports of people who worked on HotS, it apparently did make significant money. Just not enough money as it was not a World of Warcraft or Hearthstones.
That would just remove the leftovers of the community like the streamers who only play ranked.
The only way of monetization for a free to play game both sides can life with is to constantly release new content which can be either bought or crafted/won. HOTS has the tools to do so but not the content. Because of it there is also zero marketing traction and the amount of new players is super low. If it wouldn’t be Blizzard the servers would be turned off already.
On some servers, ranked is completely dead. On the US servers, players Diamond and above have to make smurf accounts, as it can take hours for them to find matches on their mains. Even the EU servers aren’t immune to this decline.
If you can’t get enough people to play ranked when it’s free, they sure the heck won’t pay cash for the privilege.
Heroes of the storm was always profitable. They were bringing in a good amount of cash for a moba. However Blizzard abandoned it because it didn’t cut it for Esports. Where they were hoping to make billions off a free moba game.
The game didn’t fail because it didn’t make profit or wasn’t sucessful. It was abandoned by greedy corperate bleep. Who told the devs to stop producing content for the game.
What little they put out could be summed up as the Raven Lord being a misunderstood good guy taking the extreme path to prepare for some unimaginable evil. Meanwhile, the daughter hates him, a rebellion is being organized against him, and…that was about it.
There really was not much going for it in the beginning as they were taking the long route of making things vague with the daughter on the run and the Raven Lord as mentioned being a mysterious jerk gathering allies and power to fight something so terrible no one else could possibly understand.
Considering Blizzard’s inability to write (or stick to their own lore for that matter) I’d bet the existence of my account that it wasn’t anything all that grand considering how out in left field it was considering the whole existence of the Nexus. This is the same company that cannot line up the ages of their Overwatch characters with the lore they have and had already retconned multiple times. WoW has been retconned so many times it may as well be renamed World of Retcons.
To me it came across as “Well League of Legends has lore, why can’t we?” so they started laying the groundwork for the Nexus being more than just an anomaly where heroes from multiple universes slap the fail out of one another and instead have this expanded universe with its own denizens. Hence why Orphea and uh…er…whatsherface exists. The Wakanda reject. Can’t remember her name.
But that is my take on it, which could have been horribly wrong, and you completely right in that it could have been a surprisingly good story. Unfortunately we most likely will never know. However, I am still willing to bet my account’s existence.
I doubt both points otherwise they wouldn’t have killed it. The same for the eSports track even though a large part of it could be seen as marketing budget.
Maximising profit is a very common practice for most companies worth billions.
Let’s say Hots was bringing in one million dollars a year in profit after costs. For me, that sounds like a very attractive bottom line, for a massive corporation it’s chump change.
Profits generated from any given IP for a company like Blizzard usually need to be astronomical to please their shareholders and the executives who ultimately decide what cuts the mustard.
Hots didn’t make enough profit, so they cut their perceived losses and moved the Devs to other projects, like Diablo 4, where they saw more potential to generate massive mula.
At first I was like wth charge ppl to play ranked that’ll never work. But the cash prizes for winning your league may be a good incentive so it’s not a bad idea. Anything to encourage ppl to play more rank im all for it. I think there needs to be more incentives and prizes to encourage ppl to play ranked even though I don’t play it myself.
Government wont allow that i think depending on which states you live, for example i live in utah, i cannot gamble online due to Utah’s restriction because utah is a very religious state aka Mormon (im not mormon) but that sucks big time for me, so i cant gamble HOTS tournament cash or any games because of utah’s restriction.
