I play WoW, OW, played a bit of heartstone and diablo, and have seen some streamers play hero’s of the storm, and the common issue between all games is balance. Which for whatever reason as time has marched forward, had gotten to be worse, and worse as they try to buff and nerf things. That creates annoying meta’s and annoying steamrolls that players abuse in all their games. That is about to drive me to the breaking point and quit MMO’s for a while as I am sick and tired of the up and down that they go through.
IDK what’s going on, but they need to get it together, as it’s apparent their IP’s are sinking with OW2 being so delayed, WoW being in tatters right now. Hero’s of the storm is essentially dead given their not developing for it much anymore. Then diablo went down the same route as the classic relaunches of it was neat and shiny for the span of a month. Then when everyone zoomed through it they stopped logging in as there was nothing to do other than to make alts and grind. With Hearthstone just swinging wildly with each season and whatever meta deck players stack.
I don’t want to see blizzard fail, yet they sure as heck are trying their best to right now. In which people are leaving their games in droves, and I know part of it is due to the recent events. Yet the other part is their games aren’t much fun right now, and it comes down to mainly being the case of their games are so unique that they retain people through that fashion.
I hope they turn things around in 2022, cause IDK if their going to last much longer with the path their currently walking down.
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Their profits are at all time highs though despite a lower player count.
I guess they aren’t doing as bad as you think.
To be fair I expect their profits to inflate st this moment in time due to the shop sales that are going on right now. Yet they won’t survive for long if their games continue to wind down like they are.
Besides Overwatch, which is just a reskinned shooter and an aborted MMO, they haven’t had an original IP in a very long time.
There’s a number of reasons. Game development is more expensive and time consuming and they don’t have much of a financial incentive to be pumping out yearly game releases since they basically just cash in on new game releases and have WoW fill the coffers in-between with expansions + subscriptions. Hearthstone is also a significant source of income due to it being their only mobile + pc game.
They have mobile games in development plus OW2 + D4 and a new IP they’ve been hiring people on for a while.
Starcraft is still going strong in Korea.
from what i heard, the majority of the profits that ActivisionBlizzardKing is actually from the King side, which are your candy crush games and such.
So of course the idiots tried to convert the income model to something similar, which brings Blizzard games down the toilet.
Moo…
I mean I wouldn’t be surprised if that were the case honestly. I feel like most of blizzard’s MMO RPG’s are struggling super hard right now. Given the majority just seem like their in long term maintenance now, with them trying to shift to the mobile platform. Which of course pushes out a lot of their current fans as mobile games just simply are pure cash grab games. In how their designed to for you to spend tons of money, or else you get to spend years grinding it before you’d max an account out.
It certainly does seem that way. It used to be that whatever Blizzard releases instantly takes the top spot in its genre and reigns onto it for at least a decade.
Now though?
- Even with Reaper of Souls’ fixes, Diablo III lives in the shadow of Path of Exile. The most successful Diablo title in modern days is a remaster of a 23 years old game.
- Warcraft III was completely ruined by Reforge and the whole real-time strategy genre is dead.
- Starcraft II while good was never as successful as its predecessor and is in maintenance mode. Again, the RTS genre is dead.
- World of Warcraft appears to have lost its crown to both New World and (arguably) Final Fantasy XIV in 2021.
- Heroes of the Storm could never crack Riot and Valve’s dominion over the MOBA genre and appears to be in maintenance mode after Blizzard outrageously canceled all tournaments without warning.
Now, I couldn’t possibly care about Overwatch even if my life depended on it, but my understanding is that most players moved on from the game and that Valorant took its crown for the competitive hero shooter genres. And also that Overwatch 2 is basically a solo mission DLC. So that seems to be one more down.
So, the only Blizzard game that appears to still rule over its genre is Hearthstone. A game I quit very early and never looked back because I thought it wanted too much money, but apparently there’s nothing overwhelmingly better on the market to dethrone that one.
Hearthstone to me always suffered the issue if you basically needed to swipe your credit card a few times to get a deck. That would work for and with you, given you gamble for cards, and if you don’t buy packs then it takes a really long time to get a good deck going. Similar to other card games it is to be expected in a way, yet at the same time because it’s a online game toy would think packs would be inexpensive, when the reality is they close about the same as physical cards. That also have codes to them in some cases that let you add them to the online games.