Now I will start off by saying obviously I have no inside statistics on hots popularity over the years, but ill do my best to explain how blizz killed their own game for no reason.
I started playing in 2016 pre-2.0 and loved heroes of the storm from the start. After 2.0 the game seemed to be doing so well, we were getting so many new heroes and stuff in a single year, I remember heroes would release so much more often, the playerbase was so much more populated and the E-sports seemed successful too.
What I donât understand is, HGC (the esports for hots) didnât flop at all, and the players were passionate about it, so why did blizz cancel hots esports, fire/pull a bunch of devs from the hots team then pretty much shelf this game? It might not have been overwatch but I felt like the game was thriving enough that they didnât have to end esports and reduce resources and cause the decline of the player base in their own game? I still love this game but the company who made it took its vibrancy and caused its passionate players to lose faith in it.
It is a shame, now we barely get new heroes, its a miracle that the devs who remained on this game are so dedicated and seem motivated to keep this game alive.
Iâm pretty sure if they didnât cancel esports and pull developers from the game, it wouldnât be considered dead as it is now, even I quit playing for a whole year because I didnât have faith in the game anymore.
As a longtime fan of Blizzard, I feel very left out by a lot of their modern design. Itâs all very boorish and hamfisted. They refuse to clearly and consistently communicate on their own forums. We may just barely eke through 2020 with two new releases if weâre lucky, of which both will be characters people have been wanting in the game instead of excessively poorly written OCs (Qhira and Orphea are some of the most generic, token BS excuses for characters that have ever been churned out by a company, and League has Shaco), and if weâre further lucky those releases wonât rock the balance boat for weeks while the skeleton crew figures out how to make it work despite trying to also make the rest of the game work. We donât get new brawls. Nothing is as impressive as it once was. Everythingâs slowly trickling down, and it all began at a point where their choices began to make us question things. Like how we surely have phones, or how we âdidnât wantâ Classic despite its dedicated playerbase and constant traffic, or how they launched this game saying theyâd do OCs when they powerfully exhausted their list of candidates and didnât even manage to add another Blizz Classic before turning it into âMy DeviantART Originalsâ category. Then they decided the mottled review from that was as good a time as any to dumpster their standards, so they added a boom/bust hero, made it another OC, slapped on one of the single laziest character spotlights across any MOBA and any of their characters (if not THE laziest spotlight in MOBA history), and then acted totally unapologetic about it. I havenât even cracked open how the reporting system interacts positively with players (it doesnât really), how matchmaking has been made more effective (it hasnât), nor how hero direction seems to be teetering dangerously toward âhas CC, mobility, and damage windows, off the belt it goes.â
Like, itâs just so, so, so many things and then itâs compounded by them not having the five minutes a day to talk to the community-- you know, the literal sole reason the game has any hot air left in it at all. And sadly enough even with all the aching Iâll still play⌠but at this rate, itâs more of a point of contention that I play long enough to see Blackthorne added. A running gag, a joke; even when they add him, I do have faith theyâll make him good, but what game is going to be left to play?
If Blizzard wanted me to have faith in them and this game, they sure go about it in a funny @#$%ing way, let me tell you.
I will say a lack of communication has always been one of the main downfalls of every game Iâve played that âdied.â Impressions are everything and when the developers start leaving the impression that theyâve abandoned their own product, the playerbase naturally goes elsewhere. However, this is one of those dead horses that has been beaten on for decades so it should certainly be no mystery to developers unless theyâre just so out of touch to begin with.
In other words, if Iâm a game developer and Iâm mostly certain that Iâve been doing the right things as far as game development goes but for some odd reason, thereâs fewer and fewer people playing my game, then perhaps I should take a step back and look to see if Iâve actually been keeping the playerbase regularly informed of my efforts or even my own existence in general because thereâs really no other way for us to know if anything is being done at all outside of those interactions.
Jay Allen Brack also did this game and its team real dirty by coming out and effectively saying they were putting the game into maintence mode. That guy is a real jackass.
The current Development team had to basically walk back his statement saying: âNo, weâre still working - itâs just a reduced team.â
Unfortunately, JABâs announcement made headlines. The walk back did not. Most people Iâve talked to in other games think HOTS is in 100% Maintence Mode, or donât even know itâs still around. âI thought they ended that game.â
Creative is a strong word. Neither exudes any depth of character; both are about as basic as characterization can possibly get, tropey and gamey. Both are generic beyond all compare.
Their kits, granted, are amazing. Both play very well and are balanced pretty nicely against their own skill caps. But couldnât they have made their personalities less⌠token?
Theyâve put too much prize pool for HGC and why it suddenly got shut down? I have no idea. Also yeah. Pulling developers from the team was totally a dumb idea. Maybe because HoTS âdidnât make the money Blizzard wantedâ (Many would blame Activision for this). Also we still donât know if they still accept new members for the dev team to replace former members (Mainly because the Heroes of the Storm team is removed from Blizzardâs career page). I hope someday Blizzard realizes that there are still fans who love this game and let the dev team have more members to speed up the gameâs development. I miss having a new hero every 4 weeks
(Which I doubt will happen cause itâs the matter of money I think)
Sure, they have token personalities, but so do a lot of Blizz characters. You canât literally have every character be a unique special personality since thatâs not even accurate. Besides, their personalities make sense to the âstoryâ weâve seen for them (Qhira the âtokenâ cynical character⌠because her homeland was blown up and Orphea the naive trusting one cause sheâs been super sheltered in Ravenlordland).
But no, I wasnât talking about their personalities, those could obviously use some work. But it takes a new universe to allow any real innovation as far as in-game kits go. For example, Imperius has to charge people with a spear. Thatâs just a given. Thereâs no limitation like that with Nexus Originals.
Trying to conclude stuff happened for âno reasonâ is a bad start from the onset.
âReasonsâ are the why things happened, so if something happened, it had reasons for it. Thinking stuff had âno reasonâ is creating a perspective of denying possibilities in favor of just trying to blame something without bothering to understand what happened around it.
Most of what youâve written just boils down to âthis seemed goodâ and has little else to it. Having something âseemâ one thing, and then claim "no reasonâ for any deviation from the surface view just indicate you donât want to know anything deviated from the bubble you saw.
So letâs look at 3 things you could have found by looking into this stuff, but hadnât
Players have been fighting against "HoTSâ from the onset.
The map-mode design for a 'blizzard dota" was mentioned back in 2010, and when the project shifted from mod, to not to stand-alone game, people were thinking it was going to be some AAA full release-pay once (maybe with expansions) game that was akin to stuff like a Diablo release. It was going to have all the Blizzard staples and blow all the competition out of the water and show all them dota-knockoffs how to âdo it rightâ, and anything less than that was going to be âtoo lateâ.
So parts of the testing phase were mired by disillusioned players were had thought that game would magically transform from the test phase content to some super magical dream because people fall into âno reasonâ mantras and donât know how dev stuff works in the background; they donât care, they just want shiney more content, and anything that resulted in a âreleasedâ game havenât less options than dota/LoL meant to them that the game was âdead on arrivalâ.
If you look at social medium bumps, half of the possible âinterestâ in the game was gone before it was even playable. (eg, look at views on early HoTs video announcements) While some of the sentiment has been lost with the forum âmergeâ some relics of the âded gameâ slogan still persist from the birth of the game; if this wasnât some AAA $60 purchase that had 200+ characters at âreleaseâ, then it was a âded gameâ.
âBlizzardâ didnât kill the game.
Blizzard is a part of Activision Blizz INC, which is a publicly traded entity on the stock market. INC is a corporation that has multiple layers of leadership that get further and further away from the game development side of things and instead leads to the heads that answer to investors and board members that force trinkel-down decisions that set demands for an appealing financial portfolio that assesses profits and costs rather than âfunâ and âentertainingâ.
The teams involved with HGC were under the impression that business would continue as it had been, but were anticipating budget constraints and even cut-backs for the year after. However, because the chain of command had demands from well above the âHoTS teamâ side of things, higher ups made the call to cut costs, convert some full-time positions into contract pay, and shut the whole thing down.
HGC and HeroesDorm were mostly financed by Blizz and didnât have an outsourced sponsor or âransomwareâ model as Riot or Valve used for their pro scenes. Even Riot, the âtopâ of the world in this genre takes a loss from their events, but the publicity is worth it for them. For a âownedâ incorporated like Blizzard, costs like those donât suit the bottom line and with enough âbad showingsâ, decisions are going to be made to cut costs, and boast recordâ profitsâ to suit the investor portfolio.
The workload was unsustainable.
A number of news articles were posted in that aftermath of the HGC cancelation that have âunnamedâ former devs talking about some of the backgrounding on HoTS and the e-sports scene. One of the consistent takes is that the development pipeline for Heroes of the Storm was not sustainable; players constantly wanted more content, and despite possibly having the largest on-campus team at the time (of all the other game teams) the team was âconstantly underwaterâ with the pressures of needing to keep putting out more changes. The game didnât have 3-month content cycles of other games (seasons) and devs were putting in overtime instead of getting downtime to ease the tensions of working on the game.
Bad player expectations, insufficient profit model (to offset visible costs) and a dev design that wouldnât ever be âgood enoughâ to suit demands (and not be compensated enough for it) were all aspects of *real âreasonsâ that donât not exist.
Heroes 2.0 was a sort of âbubbleâ to try to offset the model the game had from release to quell some of the idea of the game having a âfor purchaseâ release (as per Blizzardâs usual games, such as Diablo or Starcraft) and to try to realize the game as a âserviceâ somewhat akin to WoW. While 2.0 brought more incentive to play the game, it pretty much undercut any reason to pay for itâs content.
I certainly donât have numbers to post, or how the shift affected âwhalesâ that sustain such game models, but a wide consensus has held on some of the various communities (forums/reddits) that players who had spent back in 1.0 found themselves spending less on 2.0.
Games like WoW have subscription counts and Diablo games boast fastest/most games sold metrics as a direct way to show investors the power of a brand to make money. HotS doesnât have easily conveyed metrics, so if someone had 6 works, or less, on how much money HotS was making, theyâd fumble trying to convey that.
Conclusion
So, game with very visible costs, poorly visible profits, and a lack of centralized âidentityâ to set it apart from other products make it an easy scapegoat for the financial reports. And, as the basis of this topic has at its core, people would much rather jump on a scapegoat than get into details. The âseeminglyâ and âno reasonâ perspectives are the exact sort of reasons on what bubbles like HotS just up and burst.
Blizzarrd made the mistake of spending too much money on this game too quickly before it could determine if it could sustain itself the way it was pushed. In the end you could say the game had a debt to pay and it couldnât afford it. Just go on youtube. You can find more in depth answers there. Ppl break it down pretty well.
To oversimplify it:
The Moba started late compared to others. A lot of internal conflict was the reason it was pushed to 2015
Lack of proper marketing
Average dev team being put under heavy pressure for new things + weekly patches
HGC started too early and the reward was to grand
Hots 2.0 was a success and a failure at the same time. It brought a lot of ppl to the game, but Blizzard was no longer making money, or very little off of skins and etc.
Heroes of the dorm, sum more spending
At the end Blizzard was just spending too much money and the game wasnât getting enough return.
It is maintenance mode though. 2 heroes per year is nearly there. Iâm glad he was honest about the game going downhill unlike what some players here think
