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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

#311

Post by enraged_camel »

obviouslynotme wrote: post #284
void_mint wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It still works. The problem is that when they used to delay titles, they came out as blockbusters. The death knell of Blizzard as a premier game maker was WoW. WoW became so amazingly profitable that Blizzard became "the WoW company." I remember being excited for Diablo 3 until I heard that they took away 8 player games so that D3 wouldn't compete with WoW. I never bought D3 and was completely unsurprised to find out…

Diablo 3 was a disappointment at release due to the always online requirement (which was rare back then), the ultra boring campaign, real-money auction house, and no end game.

Diablo 3's expansion though fixed all of those mistakes set a solid foundation. It was very good for several years. But then they stopped developing it, presumably (hopefully) because they started to pour all their resources into Diablo 4... which I have high hopes for, but with Path of Exile 2 on the horizon, I'm not going to be too disappointed if it flops.

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

#312

Post by Blackthorn »

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…

WC3 remaster flopped so badly it killed the original WC3, and the ridiculous clusterfuck of that has ensured that I'll never buy another Blizzard game. You truly have to try to screw things up that badly.

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

#313

Post by kqvamxurcagg »

asdff wrote: post #133

IMO video games are fundamentally unstable and everchanging things, because the customer base is continually growing out of it. Not to say adults wouldn't love to play, but how many people do you know that realistically have the time to get into videogames like the did in highschool, playing wow until sunrise fueled with energy drinks? Practically no one, especially people with families or a 9-5 job that punishes lac…

Very good observation describes my gaming journey very accurately.

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

#314

Post by inteoryx »

knuthsat wrote: post #153
taneq wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Trust me, you think you want it, but you don't" - Blizzard, about vanilla WoW, a year before releasing WoW Classic.

The thing with most companies optimizing addiction (user engagement) is that they use these weird optimization loops that improve metrics one by one (+x% then +y%) but then end up with a product so far from the long-term equilibrium. There's no context as to what each player wants. The loop just works across the whole player base, not really aimed towards any context of the player.

Something like how gradient descent may be able to find a local maximum but unable to find superior global maximums. Or, how if you add one more ad to your website you may increase revenue, but if you keep doing that you will eventually destroy the site's usability, drive off your traffic, and, perhaps irreversibly, crater your revenue.

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

#315

Post by alasdair_ »

tmpz22 wrote: post #150
Ekaros wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>and the top talent keeps leaving because they are miserable

Can you expand on this please? Why are things so bad?

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

#316

Post by Gene_Parmesan »

tokipin wrote: post #250
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…

Overwatch is a frustrating game to play because they almost have it right. It's almost there, if they could just tweak a couple things. A good example is the overtime system. One of the worst ideas in games I've run into. For one, it creates artificial and spiky emotions in players, which just burns people out. It's amazing they don't realize basic things like that, which means they actually haven't had the right tal…

For me, as someone who played OW just to have fun, what pushed me away was just the lack of things to do. No mode diversity meant stuff got stale really fast.

Remember OW was supposed to be a different game, one that they cancelled. They reused a lot of the assets and so on and hashed them together with the ultra-popular genre of the time. It mostly worked at the start but it was pretty clear to me after a little while that they didn't really have any clear idea about where to take it. It always felt like a "recovery" game, a "we spent a huge sum of money building these assets, let's at least get something out of them" rather than something with a well-thought out long term plan behind it.

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

#317

Post by cpuguy83 »

xxpor wrote: post #287
nemothekid wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there will ever be another successful game without "season passes" or other MTX. Overwatch may be used as a singular reason in the industry why the old model doesn't work. Fortnite can afford to keep artists and programmers on staff to develop a huge amount of content because they have consistent money coming in. This isn't the case for OW and I hypothesize this is why they struggled to crank out new co…

I must be getting old. I don't get why everyone's so obsessed with new content or the lack thereof. Overwatch is already huge compared to older FPSes, adding more characters actively makes the game even harder to balance. New maps are incredibly hard to get right (Paris, HLC, Havana...).

Quake3 is still one of my fav games. I could literally play the same map all day even.

I think it may be more that the content is getting stale too quickly. Like place once and done.

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

#318

Post by drdrey »

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 used to be a daily Hearthstone player and I dropped completely given how they handled the situation with the Hong Kong protests

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

#319

Post by SuoDuanDao »

esturk wrote: post #257
asdff wrote: post #133

IMO video games are fundamentally unstable and everchanging things, because the customer base is continually growing out of it. Not to say adults wouldn't love to play, but how many people do you know that realistically have the time to get into videogames like the did in highschool, playing wow until sunrise fueled with energy drinks? Practically no one, especially people with families or a 9-5 job that punishes lac…

That's to say in less words that Blizzard never figured out the formula. This is because they focused on niche genres that doesn't appeal to kids. Take Mario and Pokemon for example. Those IP will always attract new players for years to come. The formula is simple but it works. In contrast, people aren't as crazy about RTS games as they use to be.

I wonder...

Back when I was still in their target market, Blizzard was definitely known for imitating successes better than their rivals. Starcraft, Diablo and WoW were all quite late to the RTS, RPG, and MMO scene respectively, but they had a depth and polish that the pioneers in these fields lacked and that made them powerhouses of their respective genres. They were the Shakespear of popular genres, doing nothing original but doing it better.

Overwatch seemed like it was an example of that approach into the... not sure what to call it, Team Fortress genre perhaps? But I've not seen anything similar since, they seem to have stayed out of the sandbox RPG genre altogether.

I wonder whether they were so focused on customer experience that they couldn't emulate the loot box model, and therefore were left behind.

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

#320

Post by blibble »

freeflight wrote: post #295
lsiebert wrote: post #45

It's anecdotal, but I know at least five or six people who stopped playing blizzard games, especially HS, after they punished a player and staff for expressing support for Hong Kong in a post tournament interview. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blitzchung_controversy

Which was and still is a completely artificial controversy pushed by certain interest groups. Blizzard is a private company, it's their tournament, their platform. If they don't want that to be instrumentalized as a political platform then they have every right to disallow that. For another, very recent, example of this: The International Olympic Committee just issued a strict warning against wearing BLM apparels, or…

they say they don't want their games to be used to take political positions

then they put their president on stage wearing pride pins, make statements about BLM, and go on at length about how "every voice matters"

... whilst simultaneously banning people for saying "free hong kong", censoring the fact that Tracer/S76 are gay (in countries where this would hurt profitability), amongst other things

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