Because other genres produce more income isn’t a reason to not make RTS games.
What 20 years ago Doom was more popular than Warcraft. Today tens of millions play games like Counterstrike over RTS games.
Nothing has changed except the willpower of the devs whose co-founder once infamously said “all of our best devs are now working on mobile games.”
These guys just gave up the smaller markets to chase more money. As is the case with most corporate dumpster fires. Money is the most important element of their exchange. Happiness of the customer doesn’t matter if it doesn’t impact the revenue.
Its an RTS game that requires you to have a min 200 apm to even start thinking of the upper leagues let alone winning . So most players don’t play but its really enjoyably to watch though . This is a problem every RTS game .
Over an above how do you monetize an RTS ?, cosmetics makes no sense cause top players play at the lowest settings where important details are highlighted over clutter and particle effects ,these players play at high intensity levels every fps, every button press counts. The players who would actually buy would not play the game long enough to see it or even justify it.
But it might not be a hyperbole. This isn’t directed at you but people really need to read Brewa’s posts because I know what they’re saying to themselves. “I can do maff. $25 x 12m (top sub count) doesn’t equal the billions of dollars that the StarCraft IP has made.”
But they don’t realize that number, 12m, is just the amount of people that was subbed at one time. In 2014 WoW hit 100m accounts created. That was 9 years ago. Who knows what they’re at now and Sparkle Pony was just removed from the shop in Jan 2022.
Well, you’re kind of missing the forest from the trees or the chicken from the egg or something like that.
For your microtransaction to be generating that much revenue, you are probably going to want a large, established, loyal playerbase first and those don’t just materialize out of thin air.
Even of your numbers are correct, those MBA grads are going to look at ROI. It takes a team you have yo pay to develop an RTS. That horse probably took a week.
Keep in mind it was around 12 million concurrent subscribers. There were.far more people that played WoW and could have bought the steed. What was it? Over 100 million people bought and played WoW. No telling how many of those bought the steed before leaving the game.
What Starcraft WOL made and what SC2 made are different things. World wide WOL sold about 6million copies before it became free to play. 1.5million in the first 48 hours. Most of those were not at $60 but whatever, $360 million. The horse is a harder number to track. You are right that at least some of them didn’t get it from the store but the horse existed for a while and blizzard flaunts over 100million accounts created. Your 40% leaves 40million horses for $25. Only about 15% would need to have bought it to hit $360m.
There is also what it means to “make more money”. It certainly didn’t cost more than the $100million they spent on Wings to reskin a horse. Its not at all unreasonable to think blizzard sold 10million fancy horses in the 12ish years it was for sale.
I believe that one was nick named “star pony” for a bit.
If I recall it was the first purchase able flying mount that would auto adjust to whatever speed your character was trained in.
To make sense for newer players there was a time it was the mount that determined the speed not the character. Then they introduced the training concept where you learn either normal or epic flying.
That’s the concept that sticks to this day for tbc flying.
Point being back in the day it was a big deal to have one mount adjust to whatever your character was trained in, because some mounts were only normal speed some were only epic.
Yeah and some 80 million of those 100 million were bought by gold sellers.
You are not going to convince anyone that they sold over 14-15 million steeds needed to come close to topping Starcraft 2 sales, let alone the rest of what they made off it. You literally have zero evidence to back up the statement.
The guy seems pretty knowledgeable/in-tune based on what I have seen, and yeah even if he was wrong (and based on how he phrased it I don’t think he is) he’s absolutely right.
They can spend a week (or two or three) designing some store content that they ship and make huge profit margins on. Even if the actual income they get from any one specific transaction is relatively small it adds up over the year and makes up a big part of the business.
Another point of evidence on how companies are approaching game monetization is what happpened with warcraft reforged. Pre order sales through the roof, and then cut content because the game wasn’t seen as long term good source of income (it was a one off love letter) so they got their profit and then cut content to further increase their margins.
Yeah. That’s a great point. Developers now focus a lot more on long-term monetization than what they can generate solely from initial box sales. Great examples are Skyrim’s multiple re-releases, the Sims 4’s $1K+ in DLCs, GTA V’s focus on online play, and D4’s plans for annual DLCs.
Creating good stand-alone games no longer generates the revenues that most companies want/need.
I was real excited when StarCraft 2 came out and I went out and bought the collectors edition and decided to beat the tar out of it. However, I quickly found out that the game fell flat. It had a ton of great content and on the surface looked like a blast but it just kinda got boring real quick. I don’t blame blizzard for this. I don’t solely because it’s an rts game. It feels like this genre of games just doesn’t have the popularity it used to. As a kid it was about warcraft 1&2, StarCraft, age of empires, command & conquer, etc… but when did the last rts game come out that actually excelled. I think this style of game just isn’t as stimulating as it used to be. Maybe it’s just me iono but I don’t think blizzard could release any rts game again and I actually buy it. I imagine most people are the same way which is prolly why blizzard gave up on StarCraft.
I won’t try to convince anyone of anything. I don’t know nor care how many they sold. I’m only pointing out that Blizzard has stated more than 100 million accounts were bought, which means it’s possible more people bought the mount. No one has evidence to support or deny that possibility.