HotS on Game Pass

General Discussion
1

30 heroes for free for GamePass owners. Should be interesting to see how this plays out.

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2

Are the 100 gem mega bundles still a thing?
While there will be some overlap with the 30 heroes, you can quite quickly get a decent collection going.

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3

Very interesting. No Starcraft 2 for Gamepass. Hmm… It’s almost like Microsoft wants to dust Hots off and bring it back into the mix.

Or could it be that they are positioning HOTs in a way where we are forced to buy Gamepass for Hots 3.0 when it is announced for 2026 (pure speculation)? Sure seems like something MSFT would do though.

4

As far as I know they are, but you have to get to account level 25? 50? To pick up one of those.

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5

Level 25, and new players have to be aware of the bundle lest they spend their free gems elsewhere. Anyway, hopefully this is a positive development for Hots, and I look forward to meeting some new players.

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6

30 heroes for free is one way of overwhelming a new player.

They’ll want to experiment with everything and suck at it hard, get bullied and if they don’t leave in a few days the disappointment will be even greater once they notice something “strange” about matchmaking.

No one will be queueing to pay for gamepass only to play hots and if they have a subscription already, they are probably playing something else already.

Do the same but with WoW subscription. Those are your loyal lifelong customers, nerds who are familiar and invested in all of the blizzard franchises more than anyone on the internet.

To me it is completely insane that these are the LoL benefits of gamepass.

With Game Pass, members will unlock:

  • All 160+ champions
  • Day-one access to every new champion as it’s released
  • 20% XP boost

And yet Microsoft can’t even cobble up an equally attractive package for a franchise and a competitor under their own company umbrella.

7

It’s looking more and more likely that there is a resurrection in the works for HotS with all the patches, this, and the vague trailer for Blizzcon 2026.

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8

My hope is that enough people come in to try it that “New Player Queue” will live up to its name for at least a few weeks.

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9

I got a little too hyped over this. I thought it was just 30 new heroes incoming . I was about to faint lol

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10

It’s cool but I wouldn’t read too much into this. Remember, StarCraft 1 and 2 have still been in limbo since being added to GamePass and in between they also added the Blizzard Arcade Collection. I doubt Blizzard has big plans for Blackthorne, The Lost Vikings, and Rock ‘n’ Roll Racing. And, like with the previous GamePass additions, this is just some free content with nothing new in the mix.

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11

I saw that. Fall 2026 is still far enough away that they could slow drip more heroes into the game pass as they gear up for a HOTs 3.0 announcement. More staggered publicity rather than releasing all at once.

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It looks like they have a very interesting mix of heroes that will be on GamePass. Wide range of roles and difficulties. I like that they didn’t just reuse the existing bundles, and didn’t wimp out and included some challenging picks! It may be they wanted to show just how much HotS deviates from other MOBAs.

  • Abathur
  • Anub’arak
  • Artanis
  • Blaze
  • Butcher
  • Deckard
  • Diablo
  • Falstad
  • Garrosh
  • Gazlowe
  • Hanzo
  • Kael’thas
  • Kerrigan
  • Li-Ming
  • Maiev
  • Malthael
  • Medivh
  • Morales
  • Nova
  • Rehgar
  • Rexxar
  • Sonya
  • Tassadar
  • The Lost Vikings
  • Tyrael
  • Uther
  • Valeera
  • Varian
  • Whitemane
  • Zarya

And of course, they had the good taste to include my favorite Hierarch.

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13

The other day i’ve seen an Asmongold’s video talking about some change in EU about hostile game mechanics and monetization in video games + fake in game money that only exist to fool players not really knowing what they are spending in real money in the games. To be fair i didn’t watch the whole video but i’ve retained that LoL is directly affected by those changes and so i guess Hots too.

That would explain why that change is occuring right now on Hots and if big changes must happen on Hots it’s probably for the forsee of those changes in EU that gonna probably affect not only EU countries but probably the world (if a good part of the countries are banning that kind of behaviour, then the market must adapt).

In EU, only few countries like Belgium were banning things like lootboxes or gacha games (iirc), it wasn’t enough to make any pression on the whole world, but if 27 countries are starting to ban some behaviours, then it has more impact and so the face of the video game industry will change (for the better).

Gamepass might be an answer to those recent changes in EU. I’m not sure what gonna happens, but if we see a lot of changes for Hots, it gonna be related to that decision and so i’m not sure if it gonna mean a lot for the game, i’m not sure if we will have new heroes or a real 3.0, they might only do the minimum updates to transform the game and that’s all.

14

Interesting but sadly only 30 heroes, while in League you get all heroes + exp boost.

It would be much better for Hots if they gave all heroes and exp boost. Imagine someone finding out they can already play with the characters they like day one without having to grind anything, much much better.

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15

I know they have done “All heroes on free rotation” periods before, and I wonder if they will do that for the initial week or two. New players could try everything, knowing which ones they would have permanently after that, and determining which mega-bundle to purchase. It might give them an incentive to keep playing? No idea what the long-term plans are, but that could make sense.

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16

I hope you get the irony of your complaints. They give too many heroes in hots…but they don’t give enough heroes compared to LoL. :rofl:

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17

If you play one hero per day for a whole month, assuming a new player will even want to stay around that long, they will barely get through the free roster. If we scale this up by a million, there wouldn’t be much diversity in your matches and the game could quickly start to feel stale.

Unfortunately Blizzard isn’t Apple computer or Marvel comics so the name alone is not enough to make anyone choose over a “better” game on the same service, especially when LoL had decided to come forward with a much better incentive to catch your attention.

I could be wrong if the plan all along was to put the free hero pool on a rotation or keep expanding it month by month, but if this is the full extent of their capability in marketing a game, that’s just disappointing and sad.

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18

LoL has outed themselves on luxury sales. Putting out the entire free roster is far more appealing if they get to sell more Ahri skins instead of nickel and diming minnows.

They’ve also had a few years on the game pass to ramp up their offerings and, ya know, have on-going active development.

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