That explains why OW on Switch was on a 50% sale about one month ago (pumping playerbase numbers just before the report)
Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years
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Re: Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years
#92Their games just don't feel like labors of love anymore. They feel like icky skinner boxes through and through. Every aspect of their games are a/b tested up the ass to convert as many MTX as possible and personally it's a total turn off. I downloaded Warzone and tried it out this weekend and uninstalled after 2 matches, it just felt off. Hard to describe. Like a AAA graphics Candy Crush. yuck!
Also, the once famous Blizzard polish is all but reversed - Warcraft 3 Reforged speaks for itself, but also looking into World of Warcraft commentary, it has become common to expect systems present in the game at launch to require major fixes or overhauls over the coming patches. The very fact that players and commentators alike have grown to expect this speaks volumes to me about the changing perception.
Overwatch still feels highly polished to me (few bugs, great lore, good performance, character design, responsive dev team communication) though new content have been seriously lagging due to OW2.
Re: Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
WoW also just got boring for me a long time ago. Sure, they keep adding new things, but it's still riding in very deep treads they dug long ago. It's still fundamentally the same game, and in my eyes showing its age. I'd love to play a new MMO that explores new ideas. WoW explores WoW.
I've tried a bunch of MMOs since WoW... and despite newer engines and some neat features, they often end up just being... mostly WoW once the sheen wears off. I occasionally revisit WoW because if you're going to play a WoW clone, you might as well just play WoW.
If you've played a lot of WoW, you also spot glaring flaws in other games very quickly.
Usually the 'feel' of combat/animation/movement just isn't up to Blizzard standards, and UIs are often very inflexible compared to WoW's moddable interface (without that, nobody would play healers for long!). Sometimes the travel timesinks are just unbearable (SWTOR), or the global cooldown feels glacial (FFXIV)
And WoW keeps getting more and more polished. Just a shame that it all feels as if it's being run like an F2P mobile project now, probably driven by analytics/monetisation people rather than passionate MMO players.
Re: Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years
#94You can thank MBAs for the demise of every American company.
MBAs are the reason China will eat the US.
Re: Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years
#95I can't say what's driving all the playerbase losses but: They stopped development on Diablo 3 a long time ago. It doesn't have the staying power of more modern online games where new content is added continuously. They stopped development on HotS, which never achieved the same level of pull as League of Legends. Overwatch faces stiff competition from Valorant and other competitive small team FPSes, and also has over…
I'm unsure if the RTS genre is in a waning phase. AoE2 is still a top-20 game every day on Steam. Granted, it's a 20-year-old game. Maybe that shows new entrants can't make it; or maybe it shows there aren't enough good new entrants. StarCraft 2 is not as popular as it was, but would still be in the top 20 games if it were on Steam. We'll see if AoE4 gives the genre a kick. Initial reactions are somewhat lukewarm bec…
I suppose they mean in the commercial sense, new RTS games certainly don't drive industry leading sales for instance.
Certainly in the context of talking about a publisher like Blizzard nothing but raw profit is of any concern. Arty ambitions is the something for the game studios that appear and die off, not for the publisher that seeks to endure.
Re: Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years
#96I can't say what's driving all the playerbase losses but: They stopped development on Diablo 3 a long time ago. It doesn't have the staying power of more modern online games where new content is added continuously. They stopped development on HotS, which never achieved the same level of pull as League of Legends. Overwatch faces stiff competition from Valorant and other competitive small team FPSes, and also has over…
> Overwatch faces stiff competition from Valorant and other competitive small team FPSes, and also has overlapping audiences with battle royale FPSes. The competition isn't driving away people from Overwatch. The game is incredibly stale, and IMO, is probably the death knell of full price online games. There has been little to none new content and changes to the game. The competitive community has always complained a…
It seems like they're setting up for that with OW1 being compatible with OW2 multiplayer. They'll probably just make OW1 free to play shortly following launch of OW2.
Re: Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years
#97I am pretty hyped about playing d2 again with "Diablo 2 Resurrected". But I guess it's a bad sign that the most exciting thing they have going is a remake of a 20 year old past glory.
I'm way less excited for D2R. I was a hardcore Diablo 2 player, but the D2 endgame was spamming Diablo runs over and over, Cow Level farming, and one or two other things I've forgotten; not exactly dynamic content. Path of Exile has taken D2 game design to the next level, and the level after that, and even that game is aging (PoE2 is in the works). Obviously World of Warcraft Classic is the counter-example that will come to mind, but even original WoW still had plenty of content and grinds to do once you hit 60 (Booty Bay pirate hat, anyone?). Nothing in D2 will keep people around for more than a week or two once they've rediscovered how to play it.
Re: Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years
#98I can't say what's driving all the playerbase losses but: They stopped development on Diablo 3 a long time ago. It doesn't have the staying power of more modern online games where new content is added continuously. They stopped development on HotS, which never achieved the same level of pull as League of Legends. Overwatch faces stiff competition from Valorant and other competitive small team FPSes, and also has over…
In terms of WoW, I'm sure a lot of it is focusing on the top raiding guilds and leaving the casual player with few rewarding activities. Further, one of their most cherished metrics is how much time people spend doing a certain activity. Instead of making those activities more fun and rewarding, they made them take longer to complete and with fewer rewards. To top it all off, they are nearly completely deaf to their…
This is why "you can't improve what you don't measure" bothers me. It's rare that you can condense all useful information into a number and it encourages people to remove critical thinking from the equation. People come to rely on the number instead of thinking deeply about what they're doing.
Re: Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years
#99Not surprising, Blizzard has lost its way and its brand doesn't mean what it once did. The fall from grace started with the advent of paid services, and in game cosmetic shop in WoW and all of the issues surrounding the launch of Diablo 3 (let alone the disaster that is OWL/Overwatch, complete abandonment in HotS, etc.)
What about Overwatch is a disaster?
Game is fun (but Overwatch 2 is needed?) Characters are cool. Zero map rotation. Competitive scene is terrible, OWL even more so.
Really just highlights Blizzard is terrible at esports. Lots of examples here for MDI, AWC prize pools vs. investment required to be successful.
Re: Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years
#100I can't say what's driving all the playerbase losses but: They stopped development on Diablo 3 a long time ago. It doesn't have the staying power of more modern online games where new content is added continuously. They stopped development on HotS, which never achieved the same level of pull as League of Legends. Overwatch faces stiff competition from Valorant and other competitive small team FPSes, and also has over…
Overwatch is just feeling stale because OW2 has been in development so long. I'm sure they'll get a huge boost when it launches. But yeah, all their current titles are pretty much just rolling along with nothing new, people are going to go elsewhere in the meantime. The FPS crowd is extremely cyclical, mostly owing to Call of Duty and Battlefield's annual release cycles. Gamers buy the latest FPS, play it for a few m…
Or maybe Overwatch does not have staying power. It is quite interesting how CS still has million daily players... And they don't do that much either in terms of new content.