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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

#171

Post by lhorie »

meowface wrote: post #143
lhorie wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I think the notable thing about the Starcraft 2 pro scene is the age of some of the new up-and-coming players. Reynor is 18, and Clem is 17. They're clearly not coming to the game for the nostalgia.

I think the uptick in challenge youtube videos is also no coincidence. These are games where there's depth in terms of acquirable skills, and there's definitely interest in the community for displays of mastery in these types of games.

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

#172

Post by tsimionescu »

dstaley wrote: post #108
tsimionescu wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blizzard hasn't produced even one single-player-focused game since... Diablo I? Their strength has always been multiplayer, I very much doubt they could deliver a blockbuster single-player open world game.

Totally fair point! But I'd also like to point out that prior to World of Warcraft, Blizzard hadn't released an MMORPG. Prior to Overwatch, Blizzard hadn't released a first-person shooter. I totally understand your point that Blizzard might not have the talent to pull off a single-player RPG game, but I still think it's within the realm of reality.

Sure, but some of those jumps have been more gradual - WoW's hotkey gameplay isn't all that different from a fast-paced RTS, especially given WC3's dabbling into RPG mechanics with the hero units.

Overwatch and HearthStone are much bigger jumps to be fair.

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

#173

Post by alpaca128 »

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…

> They stopped development on HotS, which never achieved the same level of pull as League of Legends.

Which to me isn't surprising as HotS' way to stand out from the rest is also why it's not fun long-term. At first it seems cool that every map in the game has a unique objective that the teams compete around. But the game is balanced in a way that you either win that objective 2-3 times or you lose the game, with rare exceptions. So now suddenly you do have a couple different objectives, but those never change and set the pace and timing for every single round, always in the same way.

In comparison, LoL and DotA always have the exact same map and objectives on it, but the teams are free to do what they want. Stay in lane for 20 minutes? Sure, why not, if none of the teams force the next phase. Focus on teamfights and kills or try to get the next dragon? Whatever you want.

I played HotS for 2 weeks and then I just needed to see the next map's loading screen to know where I'd need to stand exactly 2 minutes into the round. It becomes a game of kill-and-fetch quests where you also have to rely on 4 other people to do the right thing. Not fun.

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

#174

Post by AlexandrB »

29athrowaway wrote: post #94

You can thank MBAs for the demise of every American company. MBAs are the reason China will eat the US.

MBAs and excessive IP protections. The Warcraft 3 mapping community spawned entire new game genres and franchises. Warcraft 3 Reforged style TOSs means that probably won't happen again.

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

#175

Post by seriousquestion »

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…

And that accelerated with the Activision merger. Historically they were better aligned with gamers.

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

#176

Post by scruple »

Reason077 wrote: post #139
scruple wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true, and I love Hearthstone and play regularly (I really prefer the rule sets in HS to MTG:Arena, for example) and have played since Beta... But, Hearthstone is also monetized like crazy today, as well. Especially as compared to 3 years ago.

I think they have actually struck a pretty good balance when it comes to paid content. There isn't really anything (except maybe some of the hero skins?) you actually have to pay for and can't get for free. You can be top-level competitive without spending a cent, so long as you play enough and spend your gold & dust wisely...

Yes, I agree. The paid content is good (and the changes they've made to F2P are good, too), and I also think that it's required to maintain the level of development that they are pumping into the game, but... IMO, it is not as easy to play Hearthstone _casually_ today as it was 3 years ago and that's the time frame that the article is discussing wrt MAU.

edit/ The addition of classic mode may make it more approachable for casual players. Time will tell.

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

#177

Post by brundolf »

I've been boycotting them since the Hong Kong/Hearthstone incident a few years ago. Before that I was a regular Overwatch player and a semi-regular Hearthstone player. I quit cold-turkey. Hard to say how much of this effect would be from others doing the same, but it's a nice thought.

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

#178

Post by gigel82 »

I'm still playing Starcraft 2 with my buddies every weekend (even more so now during the pandemic). If they made a Starcraft 3 with updated graphics, units / structures and perhaps the new fabled 4th race I'll absolutely pay for it (even on a subscription base which I normally hate).

Instead, they've scaled down the investments in Starcraft to such a degree that the servers were almost completely offline over the past winter holidays and despite hundreds / thousands of complaints there was no official reaction from Blizzard. :(

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

#179

Post by bcrosby95 »

hhh wrote: post #130
AmVess wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't align with the top tier player opinion about WoW. I feel that this is who they have driven away from the game. I personally spent a large amount of time in that top-20 guild environment and have only progressively seen them care less about the edge case of boundary-pushers and more about the day to day player. The latest systems encourage time sinking less than they did in Legion, where there were infinite di…

> now there is just a full-stop end to your week.

Note that I don't think this stuff is casual friendly. As a casual, my problem with the way Blizzard does these systems is you want to do something every day/week/etc.

Quite frankly, it turns the game into a chore. It tells me that not only how much time I spend, but also when I spend that time significantly impacts my rate of advancement.

Disclaimer: I haven't played Shadowlands at all.

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

#180

Post by Jetrel »

david422 wrote: post #28
Covzire wrote: post #14

I still can't believe they butchered WC3:reforged so badly. It could have been a massive boon for them were it not for the hideously greedy ToS along with all the technical issues and straight up downgrades from the original in terms of multiplayer. There have to be some epic stories of mismanagement or hubris, if only someone would tell them.

WC3 was my favorite game ever, so much so that I bought multiple copies. I calculated that I probably played so much that my price per hour was a couple of cents. But I didn't buy reforged after how bad it was - and still is. It should have been easy money for them, and instead it was just a half finished money grab.

Ironically, having been a huge WC3 fan; I felt like reforged was great. I bought it, loved it, and am still routinely playing it (in fact, I've picked it up as a semi-regular routine, whereas I'd kinda mostly stopped playing the original). I love the new graphics, the bugs were pretty minor and quickly fixed, and the stuff the community complained about was either irrelevant (complaining about the game being heavier when it runs really fast on my not-very-good gaming rig), or was not a regression against the prior version of the game (not delivering the promised cutscene overhauls didn't make the existing game worse). The community complaints about the mod license changes were like - yeah, I sympathize, but it's not relevant to my enjoyment of the game. I get that blizzard doesn't want to have its lunch stolen a second time by LoL/Dota, but it's not a change that had any negative impact on me as a player.

If I'm angry about anything with blizzard, it's that they've stiffed a bunch of these existing communities by not giving long-term support+content updates. Like, reforged had pretty much the same level of bugs or unfinished stuff practically every game has on release, but after a couple months of the devs fixing a bunch of these, blizzard's management got cold feet and laid the whole team off. We might have gotten the promised cutscene upgrades. But now - now we'll never get them.

SC2 has this wicked game mode, "co-op commanders", that supposedly is one of their most popular things (and directly sells DLC), and what do they do? They stop making more content for it - all they'd have to do is make more DLC, and it'd print money. I've been playing a bunch of it lately, and I'm just plain mad, knowing that what I'm playing is truly all I'll ever get.

I genuinely don't get Blizzard, these days. I could understand them diverting their investment towards a far more lucrative pot (much like how Valve has doubled down on their real moneymakers like Dota/CS:GO, at the expense of i.e. Portal), but ... what is Blizzard even investing in? I thought Overwatch and Hearthstone were the new hotness, but if even those are getting stiffed, and blizzard's making money hand-over-fist, then...

... ? Like, what's even left?

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