Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years • Hacker News Board

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

#231

Post by TheCapn » Wed, May 05, 2021, 9:35 PM UTC

dragontamer wrote: post #114

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.

For a "perfect" game, Dragoon / Goliath pathing is sure awful. Starcraft 2 units really do "what you want" most of the time: automatically balling up into groups or "dancing" together. From one perspective, elite Starcraft1 players who memorized "The Magic Box" and other engine-level pathfinding behaviors saw this as an abomination: other players can gain the same skills now without practice. On the other hand... let…

I've always held that their patch/balance style is what ultimately killed SC2's scene compared to SC1. Just look at how many balance patches were required from SC2 vs. what they applied in SC1.

While neither game is perfect IMO, letting the game mature without micromanaging it was a very important aspect of SCBW's success. Instead of mucking with units on a monthly basis they let things simmer and ultimately let balance be achieved through proper map design used in the competitive scene.

In my personal opinion one of the biggest faults with SC2 was their unit design philosophy. The idea that every unit was viable or had some special unlock created a balance nightmare. Its been years since I played either game competitively (played iCCup in BW / Collegiate StarLeague for SC2:WoL) but I remember always feeling like the game had too much "gotcha" in it that SCBW never had. Didn't scout proxy reapers? gg. Didn't scout fast void? gg. Didn't scout x? gg. It was too much rock-paper-scissors where missing one piece of intel was death while SCBW wasn't entirely the same. Taking the Terran/Protoss matchup for example you'd typically expect the early game to be vulture+tank vs. zealot+goon where if the terran player just a-moved into the protoss it was guaranteed loss, but microing the vulture and tanks gave you the chance and arguably the upperhand where the skill of the either player determined the outcome. SC2 didn't have that to the same extent.

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

#232

Post by akmarinov » Wed, May 05, 2021, 9:36 PM UTC

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…

It’s looking likely that the GSL is going away after Blizzard stops funding it the year after, though.

ASL looking strong in Korea.

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

#233

Post by merb » Wed, May 05, 2021, 9:36 PM UTC

supernovae wrote: post #200

baby wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

yeah d3 was lacking meta and PoE overdo's it for the average "hardcore" audience. d2 was mostly fine and the reason why it was so beloved. the problem is that replicating what d2 did with something new is challening or impossible without rebuilding it (thus being a clone)

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

#234

Post by ocdtrekkie » Wed, May 05, 2021, 9:39 PM UTC

seoulbran wrote: post #190

aaomidi wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it launches, one of the major faces of that project has left. There's not a lot of trust @ Blizzard releasing good updates to games anymore.

I wonder if the reason Jeff left was that he was asked to leave for taking so long with the game...? I would rather he not leave as he has been the face of OW for a long time and beloved by the fan base. But, this is a public company and deadlines and dollars matter...

I highly doubt it. Very visible employees that are community-loved are incredibly stupid to let go of. Jeff's community fame is worth dozens of other employees' worth to the company.

My guess is that Jeff wanted to move on, either due to issues internally, or for something different.

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

#235

Post by akmarinov » Wed, May 05, 2021, 9:39 PM UTC

phillryu wrote: post #156

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 feel like it's relevant to mention how huge Hearthstone is, and that's a mobile first game (at its best on iPad which is rare) that I feel is totally Blizzard tier quality with expected polish and substance to it, and both satisfied a lot of Blizzard fans + successfully tapped into that 10x market. There's fair criticism to how it monetizes but it still dominates its category for a reason, they continue to own it l…

Yeah i find that weird, viewership numbers on Twitch for HS have been steadily dropping for the past 2 years and have halfed in the time.

Yet it seems people still play it.

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

#236

Post by BadInformatics » Wed, May 05, 2021, 9:40 PM UTC

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.

As GP mentioned, AOE4 will be a good litmus test of the "commercial sense". Microsoft arguably squandered one of their most iconic franchises for the better part of 2 decades, and yet here we are (in large part thanks to strong sustained grassroots support from the community).

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

#237

Post by Meekro » Wed, May 05, 2021, 9:41 PM UTC

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…

I recently got into WoW classic, and my experience has been much more positive than what this Kotaku writer describes. I'm in my mid-30s and I never got into WoW when I was younger, but was always curious to try. There were so many expansions that I wasn't really sure how to get started-- do I need to buy all of them? Some of them? One of them? Anyway, WoW classic made it simple to dive in, so I did!

Since I didn't want to waste time searching for random people to party with, I convinced my wife and a friend to start playing with me. We're all about to get to level 20 and are eager to see if the 3 of us can complete Deadmines.

I haven't experienced the kind of "ghost-town" feel that the writer described. Even minor towns usually had people running around them. Also, the writer's use of "everyone" and "we" doesn't apply to me or anyone I know. The 3 of us are learning how to play together effectively, and having a great time doing it. At the rate we're progressing, we probably have many hundreds of hours of fun gaming ahead of us even if we never do anything more than 5-man dungeons.

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

#238

Post by davidivadavid » Wed, May 05, 2021, 9:41 PM UTC

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…

200 copies of a 10 people team will develop 0 AAA games.

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

#239

Post by plandis » Wed, May 05, 2021, 9:43 PM UTC

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.

The last content added to Overwatch that wasn’t new character skins or balance patches was in April of 2020 when they added the last new character to the game. The last new non-death match map added to Overwatch was in 2019.

Correct me if I’m wrong but I think CS:GO has had like two big updates since like Q4 2020 alone.

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

#240

Post by icegreentea2 » Wed, May 05, 2021, 9:45 PM UTC

lovelyviking wrote: post #102

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's odd how often people put studios and publishers together, when the relations are (often) a lot less close than people on the outside realise.

For me being outside of thess relations are indeed it is not so clear. Can you describe it more ?

In the original terms, game studios/developers made games, game publishers provided financing and support (such as distribution and marketing) to game studios.

You can have hybrid entities, and you can have game studios/developers chose to self-publish, or whatever. The relationship between a publisher and studio can also vary. You can have one offs, where an independent game studio pitches a single game to a publisher, and they sign a deal for just that one game. Or you can have longer term relationships. For example, after Bungie re-spun out from Microsoft, they signed a 10 year deal with Activision (but they weren't owned by Activision). Or sometimes, publishers can straight up own game studios (they'll usually own a whole bunch of them). For example, Microsoft owns a whole pile of game studios (like recently acquired Bethesda).

Activision-Blizzard is the parent holding company. Activision is the game publisher arm, and Blizzard is a separate game studio arm. Call of Duty for example is developed by a family of studios (for example: Infinity Ward) that all (well, at least IW) operate as parts of Activision. Like any creative-ish field, the exact relationship between the creative types, and the money types is... always contentious?

Blizzard's relationship with Activision (the publisher) is different from say Activision's relationship with Infinity Ward in that Activision the publisher actually owns IW, while Blizzard is technically an equal business unit with Activision the publisher.