Hearthstone isn’t squeezing their players for cash nearly as aggressively as MTG Arena and that has to grind Kotick’s gears.
Also, why isn’t there a new Overwatch game every year?
Hearthstone isn’t squeezing their players for cash nearly as aggressively as MTG Arena and that has to grind Kotick’s gears.
I’m not too sure how long that’ll hold. Hearthstone is getting dangerously close. Each release now has battle passes, mid season $20 mini expansions, portraits, etc.
I just started MTGA because of the D&D expansion and they have a battlepass that is impossible to complete in the given time, forcing you to buy gems to finish it.
They literally do not award enough XP in a season to finish it.
Wow, that is really scummy.
They made the unfortunate decision to make an Overwatch 2. What they should have done was go F2P and stick with the season pass monetization model.
Eh, what? It’s definitely a short release window and I certainly wouldn’t put it past Wizards to try something like that, but there was enough xp to finish the pass for this set if you don’t miss any weekly wins. I know because I checked before I bought it, knowing I was going to miss 9 days or so for vacation. I’ll only get to 74 or so, due to those missed wins, but I bought it anyway. Still worth it.
All signs point to it being a paid battle pass system like Fortnite unlike the uncomplicated and egalitarian “play and get lootboxes for cosmetics” system they have now which doesn’t go back for multiple kicks at the can for profit.
You can get away with that sort of thing in a F2P game, much more pushback with B2P.
They’re certainly going to try to charge for OW2 justifying it with some barebones story missions while allowing a “free” upgrade to existing OW1 base in the multiplayer-only component so it should be the same between OW1 and OW2. OW2 is basically just OW1.5 in reality and will be B2P plus battlepass monetization. So sort of making OW1 F2P potentially.
Blizzard was all about polishing something until it shines, spending time and money that other companies wouldn’t spend, and the end product would reflect that. If you remove that, I’m not sure there’s much there, they made cool stuff, but I’m not sure there’s anything Blizzard ever made where the selling point wasn’t making something other people had already done, but better, more polished. Maybe Diablo?
Diablo, but that wasn’t even “made” by Blizzard, but Condor Games. (which was bought out and became Blizzard North prior to launch)
What happened in 2017 Q2 to make subs jump like that?
They made WoW fun again for a brief moment in time…
It started in Q1, and Tomb of Sargeras launched. Also, this likely includes Hearthstone players as well.
A truly garbage metric meant to impress at board meetings and earnings calls. It also highlights another problem with Blizzard - they haven’t put out a completely new game in over 5 years. You’d expect some attrition simply due to players moving on so it isn’t surprising to see the graph steadily decline.
Wow, there wasn’t even a 90 day spike for the last two WoW expansions. That is surprising.
However you slice it, 26 users ain’t much.
Not great when even your fake metrics don’t paint a good picture.