Just use dollar prices for skins and characters instead of gems.
It’s a shame development stopped on this game when the team was pumping out a hero every month.
IMO players would buy skins if they were a couple bucks each instead of the dollar price being hidden behind a digital currency. As a consumer I do not like buying digital currency as the avenue to purchase ingame items. I want to see dollar prices. I would be more inclined to buy a skin for example if I knew that skin was only $2…
I don’t think the problem was having gems instead of dollars, but that you could easily get the skins you wanted.
Take League of Legends for example, they also have their “gems” to buy skins etc. And people actually spend a lot of money buying skins because they are rare to acquire just f2p.
In game currencies are a trick from the gaming industry. Its a way for them to offer you more of their currency at a much higher price but a much better deal. If you bought 500 gems, it’ll cost you $5, however there is a bonus amount added with each selection so you’re getting more gems per dollar if you spend $20 or $35 instead of $5 at a time. In reality its stupid to buy any selection besides the $100 because you get the most gems per dollar that way.
If each skin was put at a price tag, then you’re not getting the most bang for your buck this way. Sure each skin is $2, which seems cheap, but you can’t bundle and save this way. Not saying anyone who’s going to drop money on a game is ready to spend $100 for a bundle, but it incentivizes those who are willing to make the bigger purchase because you’re getting scammed buying $100 worth of gems by purchasing the $5 packages 20 times. This system is better for the player because they are getting a deal that your suggestion won’t allow unless through a sale or something.
Blizzard is just stupid for making shards a thing. They undermine the value of gems because you could buy skins with either gems or shards, but you can buy shards with gold, which is easy to rack up and obtainable for free just by playing the game. Not to mention free loot boxes. If they wanted to make more money in this game they should have never put shards or loot boxes in the game. Gold would be obtained in game and allowed you to purchse heroes (same as now), but skins and cosmetic items and boosts could be bought with gems, requiring the player to spend money.
Blizzard has detailed financial data that breaks down HOTS sales by each item available. You are failing to take into consideration the sale of boosts, which people buy to earn gold faster, so they can purchase skins through that means. Blizzard knows exactly what they are doing by allowing skins to be purchased with shards.
It wouldn’t make a difference. Almost no one pays for skins.
It makes no difference. You pay the amount, then you pick your skin and the gems are deducted. The Gem currency has zero impact. Pretty much every F2P game does this.
You can easily work out what the price is based on how many gems the item costs.
And like Xivilaikhys said, it would actually cost more without the in-between currency.
So there’s really no advantage to changing it.
I doubt the sale of boosts makes up the difference they’re losing by making skins available through shards and shards available though gold.
Good point. Most of these kids don’t understand how businesses manipulate the consumer.
Revenue attributed to “battle passes” or “seasonal passes” that allow players to earn rewards through gameplay far outweighs revenue from direct sales of cosmetic items in the gaming industry presently. The boost in HOTS is a bit watered down, but is fundamentally the same thing: a system that allows players to earn extra rewards through playing the game. Blizzard is moving all of its games in this direction.
Blizzard is a multi-billion dollar gaming company that has a lot of expertise and knowledge in the gaming industry, so I’m curious to know what credentials you have in the field to be calling the company stupid.
doesn’t take field-specific credentials to notice that the company has been bleeding active users, employees, and has had more games ‘bomb’ in recent years than pretty much the entire lifespan of the company.
While sales statistics spin positive numbers, in many cases, it looks to be ‘gatcha’ monetization that provide the means for whales to spend more money despite drops in the player experience. Being able to ‘milk’ specific players for more money can look good, but it arguably be padding numbers since ‘costs’ (for net numbers) could also be down.
That doesn’t mean that the data you’re talking about isn’t ‘valuable’, but the games would be better off by having more players to be ‘whales’ that carry the game sales. The company has arguably do doing ‘scorched earth’ tactics which aren’t sustainable and have essentially needed someone else to bail them out because of it.
If the microsoft deal wasn’t prodding up actiblizz, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’d end up auctioning off IPs instead (as other companies have done in the past)
I need a dollar, dollar, a dollar is all I need
no, just me?
oh okay
I’m not a fan of in game currencies, but I don’t think Gems are a significant factor for Hots not being profitable enough to sustain active development.
Even if your suggestion was put in place to have a dollar value on skins and heroes, Hots is now an old game and most of the player base has either a stockpile of shards and gold, that they never need to drop another cent and new players a few.
Boosts, I agree, are probably the most valuable item for new players, or players who play infrequently. Despite this, the 360-day boosts are no longer put on sale. I feel on firm ground in positing Hots generated more profits prior to the introduction of 2.0., but that ship has well and truly sailed, and it would be futile to go back to a system where cosmetics are behind a paywall.
The only exception to this would be if new Cosmetics were added to Hots. However, this approach was already tried with 2.0. New skins such as, Whitemane and Alex were Gem only, but they removed all paywalls a year later. I would assume because it wasn’t profitable, or at least, profitable enough to meet the desires of a Billion-dollar company.
TLDR: For Hots to generate money at this stage, there would need to be some active development to create new cosmetics/heroes for veteran players and the whole monetisation system itself would need an overhaul. As much as I enjoy Hots, I can’t see even MS bothering to do this for a game that is considered a “failure” and it’s worth noting that Hots is also well past being middle-aged, it’s essentially a legacy product at this point.
It takes field-specific and company-specific credentials to understand how those changes impact the company. If someone is going to call a multi-billion company stupid regarding their financial decisions, I’d like to know the credentials they have to make that claim.
All of this gobbledegook leads me to believe that you have no experience in board meetings for large, successful companies. Businesses make decisions based on internal meetings where they have a lot more data available than the public does. Your gut feelings as a single consumer of what would make the games “better off” has close to zero value compared to the data they’re basing their decisions on.
yea, i haven’t sat in a board meeting, but in case you haven’t noticed, actiblizz is actually getting bailed out by a buyout in circumstances where other companies would have had the investors pressuring the company to sell.
While ‘public’ outcry may not reflect the actual scope of the value of the company/products to those they actually care about (cuz it’s easy to complain) it’s still having internal issues of employee retention, on-going lawsuits, and fubared their chinese market.
A bailout and acquisition have specific meanings in the financial world and performed for completely different reasons. Activision-Blizzard is not being “bailed out,” they are being bought out. A bailout would suggest the company is failing and close to bankruptcy, which isn’t even close to the case. In fact, ATVI has been outperforming the industry standard within the 1yr, 5yr, and 10yr metrics. Their debt-to-equity is in a very healthy spot (and trending lower). Their quick ratio has been hovering between the 2-4 range for nearly a decade, which is both very strong and consistent considering the rapid monetization changes that the gaming industry has been going through. What data do you have that indicates ATVI is being “bailed out?”
Every large company has on-going lawsuits constantly. The only difference is that a few of their lawsuits have made news headlines recently. The headlines caused some very temporary drops to their equity, but they stabilized within a week or two of each of the headlines.
Employee retention issues are also not exclusive to ATVI. It is a widespread issue in the US that is hitting many other gaming companies and pretty much every other industry. Despite employee retention issues, ATVI is still outperforming the industry, so they are handling the situation better than most.
I don’t have much information regarding their decision regarding NetEase. I think those decisions have some political and governmental influence though.
nah , there is no point in supporting a game which can be shut down any time soon
All the planning won’t help their end result. They went woke, they gonna go broke rofl. Nature is self correcting.
The choice of term was not adequate for what I was trying to convey. When the PR debacles, lawsuits, and rallying cries against koteck came to a head, the acquisition announcement has effectively stymied the momentum of those concerns. So the ‘bailout’ was the situation not needing the response some were expecting regarding blizzard reforms, the consequences of Bobby’s ‘golden parachute’ payout if he were actually removed as CEO, and so on.
While public statements can try to decry those as factors for the sale (since microsoft has offered to buy them before and got turned down,) it seems like it gives more credence to the speculation as issues continue to abound on the blizzard side of the company as seen with the latest Overwatch announcement (scrapped pve system after years of work,) when leaders leave the company, and then the projects that they had been working on have to retract major features and development promises.
A lot of that won’t matter if D4 has a sufficient release (esp if it goes better than day 1 diablo 3) and people will ‘forget’ about the development, investment concerns unless the acquisition actually fails to go through.
I guess you aren’t up on your Blizzard lore, if anything they went the opposite of “woke”, which opened them up to lawsuits, that made them broke.
I’d tell you to lay off the empty and lazy catchphrases, buzzwords and memes, but that would basically be asking you to leave the forums.
Most of my real money hero purchases were with $. This game used to have dollar purchases years and years ago in HotS 1.0.
Boosts and season/battle passes are not the same thing at all. Battle/season passes restrict what items you receive as you play the game unless you purchase the pass. Boosts just grant gold/xp but you can get almost every item from hots without boosts.
If all you need is gold to get any item what incentivizes you to even purchase boosts/gems? Other than obtaining gold a little faster, nothing. So how would that make them more money than by forcing people to spend money if they wanted a particular skin? It won’t.
All you need is a functioning brain and some basic knowledge of how money works to understand why the decisions they made regarding shards as a pathway to obtain any item you want instead of incentivizing gem/boost purchases is stupid.