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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

#141

Post by slowmovintarget »

jandrese wrote: post #33
asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #8

I 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…

Blizzard kinda killed the RTS genre with Starcraft 1. It's basically the perfect RTS so everything that came after it seems inferior. Even Starcraft 2. There are still niches for specialized audiences, like historical battles with a more strategic bent, but for mass market RTS nothing has been able to beat a 23 year old game.

I much preferred Supreme Commander, but then again, I'm not the eSports clicks-per-second type of gamer.

Re: Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years

#142

Post by vaylian »

SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #59
haunter wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.

Neither is an RTS. They're MOBAs.

True. But these Mobas are descendants og these RTSs. WarCraft 3 gave birth to Dota 1. StarCraft 1 had the Aeon of Strife map.

Re: Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years

#143

Post by meowface »

lhorie wrote: post #49
asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #8

I 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…

> Starcraft 2 is basically dead. WC3 remastered flopped Paradoxically, I've noticed an uptick of new creative Starcraft 2 content on Youtube (similar to those "can you beat the game by doing [insert crazy premise here]" types of videos you see in the Mario community). I think the two company direction things that were noticeable for me were that they decided to try to embrace two major cop-outs: milking cash shop (sk…

The competitive Starcraft 2 scene has definitely seen a new surge of excitement within the past two or so years. (This is just my subjective impression; no idea of the actual numbers. And I'm not sure what the non-professional scene is currently like.)

I think a large part of it is that after around 10 years of dominating Starcraft 2 and 20 years of dominating Starcraft 1, there are now some European players who are repeatedly beating Korean players (and everyone else) in the big tournaments.

(Including in-person tournaments, so you can't chalk it up to latency differences. Though of course there haven't been any of those in the past year, so we'll see if that'll be sustained.)

The two main usurpers, Serral (Finland) and Reynor (Italy) also have a really entertaining rivalry. I'd go so far as to say that those two may have single-handedly kept professional Starcraft 2 interesting and alive.

Re: Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years

#144

Post by Pet_Ant »

1-6 wrote: post #10
VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #2

do they have any good games still

SC1

A hot take but I was really disappointed by it when it first came out. While waiting for it to be released I discovered Total Annihilation which really seemed like the next generation of RTS. When Starcraft came out it felt like WarCraft 2.5 or 2 with ramps. Sure the plot was much better, and the races were more differentiated, it did not feel like an evolution of the genre: just more polish. After that RTSes haven't grown IMHO outside of Sins of a Solar Empire, Total War, and Supreme Commander.

Re: Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years

#145

Post by jvzr »

Blizzard died the day it was bought by Activision. It has been descending into mediocrity ever since. Many executives left, and many studios/teams inside Blizzard have been shuffled around and between projects, unlike Blizzard's doctrine of old (tight teams focused on a project until it's great or must be stopped -- Blizzard's infamous "Soon(tm)").

World of Warcraft is still being milked till it dries up (and I'm saying that as someone clocking 560+ days in game). Diablo has been abandonned (see the announcement of a mobile Diablo game last year¹, and its reception by the player base). So has StarCraft. Overwatch is stagnant (no new hero for a year) and Overwatch 2 is probably in development hell (pure speculation on my part I'll admit). Heroes of the Storm is also pretty stagnant (the game went from a hero every month to only two last year, nothing in 2021 so far).

In the meantime, there has been a very heavy push for e-sports with Overwatch and Heroes of the Storm (though I have not followed any of those). These efforts seem, to me, extremely centred on American audience, unlike League of Legends which has multiple leagues around the world. I'm sure a ton of money has been poured into this venture, but I'm unsure it has improved the games...

Anyway, the last time I launched Battle.net was for Destiny 2... and it has migrated to Steam in the middle of 2019!

¹Wow OK, that was in 2018 o_O Time flies, especially with a global pandemic, it seems...

Re: Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years

#146

Post by TulliusCicero »

SiempreViernes wrote: post #95
pradn wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To me it just looks like they aren't trying very hard.

SC2 did something very smart with its last expansion with the coop mode, and it became very popular despite being only sort of fleshed out. I could easily see that kind of game mode making for a hit RTS if it was the central focus, and had the standard MMO-lite stuff like loot and missions and raids and story and customizable units/armies and support for other group sizes.

Re: Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years

#147

Post by brobdingnagians »

pradn wrote: post #54
asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #8

I 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 recently started playing AoE2 again with my brothers after basically a 15 year gap, and it's a lot of fun. I was surprised to see such an active community. I've heard AoE4 will be more like AoE2 than AoE3 was, so I'm totally considering picking it up at some point if my brothers do. The game has aged really well with its design. We are all casual gamers, and it's nice to have something to play with people who aren't into the FPS twitch skills.

Re: Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years

#148

Post by tsimionescu »

derekdahmer wrote: post #92
tsimionescu wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I haven't played Overwatch, so I can't speak to it. It's very possible that my opinion only really applies to WoW, and perhaps WC3:Reforged was a fluke.

Still, Overwatch was released in 2016, and announced in 2014, so there is also the possibility that there was some shift happening after that time.

I believe HS gets major updates that are considered well polished, just to add another data point.

Re: Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years

#149

Post by mywittyname »

freshair wrote: post #29

"Do you guys not have phones?" -Blizzard staff in 2018, in response to booing fans upset that Blizzard wouldn't make a PC version of a game those same fans obviously wanted to play. This company has been contemptuous of their players for years. They fell into that classic trap of "If we [do something that will alienate all our customers] we can get 10x as many customers from [untapped market]" As anybody should have…

I think this is more of the enthusiasts vs. causal user conundrum. Gaming has made the transition to a mature industry where mass market appeal is more profitable than a great product aimed at enthusiasts.

I can't really blame either side. It sucks for enthusiasts who want games that are complex, to be offered a watered down experience full of MTX. But it sucks for studios when they sink a 10xs the money into producing a complex PC game and earn maybe half the revenue.

Re: Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years

#150

Post by tmpz22 »

Ekaros wrote: post #100
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Overwatch queue times are still pretty good outside of Masters+ competitive play (remember most players are quick play or Diamond and below). I'm fairly certain overwatch 2 and beyond will be just fine barring some massive screw-up. The main problem with OW was how much money they blew on the Overwatch League and E-sports partnerships - hundreds of millions of dollars invested and the top talent keeps leaving because they are miserable.
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