Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

massivelyop.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 557 posts

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

#201

Post by egfx »

void_mint wrote: post #40
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 can't say what's driving all the playerbase losses but: "The Blizzard Way" doesn't work anymore. Fortnite releases content monthly/quarterly. Massive updates with huge out-of-game tie-ins, changing worlds, in-game events, etc. Other games have changed to match/compete. CoD and Valorant both implement similar season-pass style systems. Blizzard, on the other hand, insists on delaying/cancelling games, releasing "o…

I basically agree with this kind of answer. I’m an old Blizzard alum circa 2000. Blizzard was a personal company filled with a medium sized collective of people doing ambitious work. It was about me getting patti melts with a mythical figure named Chris Metzen at lunch. And then inspired to spend the next 14 hours in the office on my level design application submission. No matter what we did it was either worth it and/or scrapped. This may be why blizzard had lost touch. It is very difficult to recapture the early magic. It’s been copied and even newness does not bring the original energy back because it lost touch.

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

#202

Post by elliekelly »

gmaster1440 wrote: post #5
nickstinemates wrote: post #3

Not 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?

It's not unique to Overwatch and applies to any team game that requires voice-chat but I'd play it (and enjoy it) a lot more if I wasn't constantly harassed by people who seem entirely incapable of wrapping their head around the existence of a woman who plays video games. Quick Play is usually fine because no one really uses in-game voice chat (on xbox at least, though you will occasionally get nastygrams in your inbox) but competitive play is an unmitigated disaster.

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

#203

Post by nemothekid »

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…

>The problem is not how Overwatch was maintained, the problem is that the core formula isn't fun.

This has been a criticism of Overwatch since day one. If the core problem was the actual core formula it wouldn't have grown so large to begin with. Millions of people wouldn't have billions of hours into the game in the first place if the core formula wasn't fun. I think you have a valid point, but I don't think it's why Overwatch hemorrhages players. None of the issues your brought up are any different than they were for the past 5 years (except role queue).

Also, you can't point to queue times, then mention League has a better system. It wasn't rare at one point (I don't play League anymore) to have 30 minute queues even in diamond. DPS queues in OW currently are 10 minutes max even in GrandMaster.

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

#204

Post by novok »

void_mint wrote: post #40
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 can't say what's driving all the playerbase losses but: "The Blizzard Way" doesn't work anymore. Fortnite releases content monthly/quarterly. Massive updates with huge out-of-game tie-ins, changing worlds, in-game events, etc. Other games have changed to match/compete. CoD and Valorant both implement similar season-pass style systems. Blizzard, on the other hand, insists on delaying/cancelling games, releasing "o…

I wouldn’t say that about fortnight, in the past 3 years fortnight revenue dropped from 5 billion to 3 billion, a similar %40 drop.

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

#205

Post by time0ut »

The most recent WoW expansion was beautiful looking but so boring and convoluted I lost interest after a matter of days. I am playing classic WoW, which really stands the test of time as a game.

That said, classic WoW exposes Blizzard for what they are even more than their recent expansion flops. Where you could write off the short comings of the expansion as them trying something innovative and failing, their support for classic is shocking compared to what it once was and make it apparent they are just a shambling zombie shell of a company.

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

#206

Post by elliekelly »

Svperstar wrote: post #105
donatj wrote: post #25

I'd almost entirely stopped playing Overwatch for a couple years, but I got back in recently and feel like the tone is overall better than it had been. I think a lot of the toxic players may have actually just moved on?

I was super hyped for Overwatch, I loved my time with the beta. I thought Overwatch was going to be the new Counter-Strike, Quake, or Halo. One of those games that just defines its time period. Then it launched and I got bored after 1 month. Too few maps too few variety.

And whatever algorithm they use for match-making should just be completely scrapped so they can start over. It seems like most games are really lopsided - you're either stomping on someone or getting stomped on. Maybe it's different in the high-ranked competitive play but the hard-fought matches that go back and forth until the very end are infrequent, in my experience, and those are the best part of playing!

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

#207

Post by meowface »

confidantlake wrote: post #183
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…

Also to a lesser extent, there is the rise of Clem (France). What makes that interesting is he is Terran, which is a race that rarely sees high level foreign (non-korean) players.

Yeah, I should've mentioned him as well. I was following it most closely in 2019, where Serral and Reynor were the main stars and Clem was mostly just a super young and kind of inconsistent up-and-comer. We'll see if Serral (23) can keep up with the teenagers.

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

#208

Post by jvzr »

icegreentea2 wrote: post #198
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...

You are right. Plus, the Diablo 2 remaster announced at the same time as Diablo 4 (IIRC)

Based on past track record, I don't hold much hope, though

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

#209

Post by nosianu »

confidantlake wrote: post #191
jandrese wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I watch both too and I disagree. After a while I have to stop watching SC1 games, I can continue watching SC2 for much much longer. SC1 just gets way too boring. It really is like watching chess, slow and methodical (assuming the perfect control only the top players can achieve in this game, I could not stand watching any less skilled players, other than with SC2). I appreciate the much faster games in SC2. I think SC2 game play is more significantly more varied too.

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

#210

Post by mrgordon »

alpaca128 wrote: post #173
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 rar…

I strongly disagree. The maps add tons of variety and the objectives force you to have team battles instead of just one vs one landing to last hit minions all game. Shared XP is another part of making it less about winning your one lane

The issue is they were late to MOBAs and made the game entirely free so there was no reason to really support the game. Eventually the finance people notice

Post reply on HN