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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

#191

Post by confidantlake »

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 watch probably 10 hours a week between SC1 and SC2. I have to agree, BW is a much better spectator sport imo. Battles take longer, there are things happening on more on the map ect. But SC2 is still a lot of fun to watch.

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

#192

Post by brobdingnagians »

vkou wrote: post #163
nemothekid wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The problem is not how Overwatch was maintained, the problem is that the core formula isn't fun. Forcing two tanks, two healers, two DPS characters leads to eight minute DPS queues. But if you don't force this kind of team composition, the game becomes incredibly unfun for the team that has five DPS characters and no tank. You'd figure that this would drive DPS players to switch to the other roles, to reduce the time…

Yeah, they originally had it all open and found out that it was a mess. Having very distinct and static characters is a neat idea but the problem is that there is usually one set of them that everyone wants to play. I've started just playing tanks to get short queues, but it gets boring quick since there are so few of them and not much difference in play style.

The other issue is that if you play casually and get a terrible healer, then you will almost certainly lose. Being a fantastic player only gets you so far.

Other people mentioned Valorant, and it appears it has a very different style with exchangeable weapons that apply to all classes, but just different abilities and more strategic games. It seems like a really good player can make a bigger difference and play solo. I'm going to look into that now.

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

#193

Post by catmanjan »

AlexandrB wrote: post #187
bob1029 wrote: post #160

What I don't understand is the financial equation around AAA studios like Blizzard. Our software company is not even 10 people big and we are able to deliver extremely high quality software multiple times per day to many customers, while supporting a wide range of business contexts. The annual budget for our whole team is something like $750k. Our part of the AWS bill is less than $400/m, but we seem to make due and…

> Spin out tens or hundreds of smaller teams with their own independent creative direction to try out new ideas. My impression is that big game studios would rather put all their eggs in one basket where they're (fairly) certain they can make a decent return rather than spreading it around a bunch of smaller projects and hoping one of them turns out to be Minecraft. This is the same dynamic driving large movie studio…

Yep another thing is that gaming is a zero sum game - blizzard would be competing with itself for player base

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

#194

Post by plorkyeran »

tsimionescu wrote: post #88
dstaley wrote: post #37

I've been an off-and-on World of Warcraft player since the Burning Crusade days, and I honestly think that Blizzard is struggling to evolve the MMORPG genre into something suitable for the modern day. There was a great article in Kotaku[1] that illustrated this quite nicely. Essentially, what made World of Warcraft successful when it launched can't really exist today, especially with our hyper-connected world. Blizza…

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.

The SC2 expansions were basically three good single-player games that came bundled with a different multiplayer game built on the same engine and art assets. HotS in particular the single-player game arguably wasn't even the same genre as the multiplayer.

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

#195

Post by meowface »

lhorie wrote: post #171
meowface wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Yeah, definitely. A lot/most of the top pros and commentators have been playing since the start of SC2 and often since early SC1, so all these new, young players are a huge breath of fresh air. They're growing up on a metagame that's been forming for a decade and putting their own creative spin on things, in addition to probably having a bit of a speed and reflex advantage. Reynor's keyboard cam is often pretty insane to watch.

(SC1 was actually the first computer game I ever played, back in 2000 or so, which I think is why it still holds a special place in my heart. Funny to think "computer game" is kind of an antiquated term now.)

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

#196

Post by brobdingnagians »

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 didn't know about Valorant before. Thank you! I'm going to go look into that. Every time I play Overwatch the matchups seem so off and if you get a bad healer or tank you are toast, I end up thinking "Why do I still play this game". Valorant seems to have a better way of dealing with differences in the classes and mix-and-match with the weapons, which seems like a good player can play solo casual and make a bigger difference without having their team just completely fold.

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

#197

Post by baumandm »

baby wrote: post #73
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…

Diablo 3 was pretty bad imo, clearly targeting consoles. Path of Exile is a much more faithful sequel to Diablo 2 and has a very active player base. It’s almost like if Valve gave it the same treatment they gave dota2.

I don't know if this is true or not, but it seems doubtful since it didn't come to consoles for over a year after release.

According to Wikipedia:

> It was released for Microsoft Windows and OS X in May 2012, the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in September 2013

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

#198

Post by icegreentea2 »

jvzr wrote: post #145

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 say…

FWIW, they did announce Diablo 4 for PC/Xbox/PS the year after the Diablo Immortal fiasco...

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

#199

Post by confidantlake »

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.

Nothing wrong with being a solid niche imo. Classical music will never sell as big as pop, but there will always be musicians and concerts keeping it alive on a smaller scale. No reason the same can't happen with RTS.

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

#200

Post by supernovae »

baby wrote: post #73
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…

Diablo 3 was pretty bad imo, clearly targeting consoles. Path of Exile is a much more faithful sequel to Diablo 2 and has a very active player base. It’s almost like if Valve gave it the same treatment they gave dota2.

POE is dangerously close to "2nd job" territory and is struggling to be fun as it heads into curiously complex gameplay and meta game.

So i struggle to see how different it is from other blizzard games

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