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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

#401

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…

> Starcraft 2 is basically dead. WC3 remastered flopped. The RTS genre writ large is definitely in a waning phase.

I wouldn’t call SC2 “dead.” You can still queue up for a game within a couple of minutes if you want to play, which is all that matters. This is even true of Brood War.

I think the dominance of Starcraft 2 on the RTS esports scene basically smothered any contenders in the crib. The oldheads who still like it seem to prefer playing Brood War with all its incomprehensible esoterica (to uninitiated audiences) to anything new. Now that Blizzard has put the game in maintenance mode I expect there will be more sunlight to nourish new seedlings as its canopy withers. All the influential Blizzard RTS developers seem to have decamped for Frost Giant games to create a new RTS, and it looks like they have the industry clout to make a splash when their title finally lands (maybe in 3-5 years ha).

Meanwhile Sunspear Games, which made the innovative “Vanguard” mod tor SC2, just got done with a (purely hype-focused) kickstarted launch for Immortal: Gates of Pyre (slated for late 2022). And then Relic is putting out a new Age of Empires as well.

I am WAY more optimistic about the future of the RTS genre now than I’ve been at any point since Heart of the Swarm came out and half of SC2’s active player base decided it wasn’t worth it to continue playing.

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

#402

"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…

All this talk is making it sound like Valve did everyone a favor by bailing on game development at their peak :\

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

#403
I played Starcraft 1 and 2 for the past ~20 years and a few months ago I decided to call it quits. I permanently deleted my account and haven't looked back.

I really hope Blizzard doesn't give up on the franchise and creates a Starcraft 3 for the next generation of kids (and adults).

To me Starcraft is like a modern form of chess, and one of the best games ever created.

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

#404

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…

Overwatch development has basically stopped; everything is on hold waiting for Overwatch 2. Because they announced Overwatch 2 in 2019, with a strong implication it was already well along the track, and because they announced they were stopping all new content for Overwatch in 2020, a lot of people expected Overwatch 2 to drop sometime in late 2020. Well, it didn't happen. And in fact, communication about Overwatch had dried up, and the lead designer (the much loved Jeff Kaplan) has left. At this point, people are guessing Overwatch 2 may be landing in 2022 - which means ~2 years of Overwatch being abandoned.

In context, there's no surprise Overwatch is haemorrhaging players. They've as much as told people "go away, Overwatch is dead, check back in 2022 for the sequel".

Meanwhile on the World of Warcraft side, the Warlords of Draenor expansion (released 2014) was badly bungled; many headline features were scrapped, and the pipeline of content that keeps subscriber numbers up between expansions wasn't there. They (very obviously) panicked, and threw EVERYTHING at the next expansion, Legion (released 2016). It was quite well received, and it was clear player numbers had recovered. The problem is that the following expansions (Battle for Azeroth, released 2018, and Shadowlands, released 2020) have been pretty underwhelming. But with a two year expansion release cycle, and two underwhelming expansions in a row, that lines up with a sharp drop in active players over the last three years.

Also don't forget the announcement of the Diablo mobile game; some PR missteps made the fans think it was a Diablo 4 announcement; when it turned out to be a mobile game it was, basically, worse than nothing.

There's also the misteps relating to WoW Classic. It had been a perennial fan request, but Blizzard had always refused, at one point infamously telling fans that "you think you want it, but you don't". Well, they finally released WoW Classic, and it turned out the fans really DID want it. Without that the collapse in WoW subscription numbers during BfA would have been much worse. But when you think about a team that struggles to make compelling new content, then argues with fans about whether there's any appetite to revisit old beloved content, then finally discovers they were wrong and there is...well. It raises some serious questions about whether the current team understands what the player base even wants. Because on some level, you can look at the last few years as Blizzard saying "you guys are wrong, you don't want Vanilla back, you guys want BfA!" But no, the player base wanted Vanilla, and did not want BfA.

Finally, there's been a long, long series of horrible esport misteps, from the re-written EULA that ensured the Warcraft 3 remaster couldn't possibly become an esports staple, to their successful efforts to ensure that if they couldn't run a SC2 esports scene nobody else could either, to some very puzzling choices around Overwatch team and tournament structures, to the killing of of HoTS, to their repeated awkward attempts at creating an esports scene in WoW, despite the game being unsuited to it and the player base having no interest. (Seriously, between Startcraft 1 and DoTa, Blizzard had the modern esports scene handed to them on a plate, and threw it away in an attempt to gain control.)

29% decline? You don't say...

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

#405
post #54

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'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 feel like RTS would have a second awakening if they could de-emphasize the all-important actions-per-second somehow. It’s not appealing to new audiences because most people cannot execute multiple threads in their brains well. I think Factorio has some of this, where there is strong pressure to automate things that would otherwise demand your constant attention.

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

#406
post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So true about WoW. Dungeon Finder and Raid Finder made it so you didn't need to find people or be in a guild to do these things. They also took the sense of enormity out of the world because you don't have to physically go places anymore. The deeprun tram, boats, zepplins were all such elegant solutions to create a breathtakingly open and connected world, and flying mounts & dungeon finder killed the feeling so quick…

> They also took the sense of enormity out of the world because you don't have to physically go places anymore. The deeprun tram, boats, zepplins were all such elegant solutions to create a breathtakingly open and connected world, and flying mounts & dungeon finder killed the feeling so quickly. I don't know... i think they originally wanted to sell WoW by the hour (I think it actually was sold like that in Asia some…

Being able to teleport in GW2 ruined any sense of where I was in the game. In WoW classic the flight system was incredible. You had to actually fly to the different flight points. Like OP it created a sense of the world you were and grounded you to the zones. Not only that, it was an incredibly unique system that to this day hasn’t been rivaled. No other MMO that I know of has a similar travel system.

I remember going on flight paths through Ashenvale with the full moon and was struck by how beautiful the game was.

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

#407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> the conclusion should have been: we aren't able to make healers and tanks fun, let's try something else. Instead, they forced people to play them Healers and tanks are fun! The problem is that they keep introducing balance changes that make it incredibly frustrating to play certain tanks/supports. With DPS, this isn't an issue, because there are literally more DPS characters than there are healers and supports comb…

Agree. I've been playing DPS a lot since priority passes came out, and every time I do I wish I was playing tank instead. (I think I have the most fun playing Echo, copying one of the tanks and making a play. Ever eaten a grav as Echo? Very enjoyable. The enemy Zarya is going to be mad at the game for the rest of the afternoon.)

The problem with DPS is that you can either pick a fun one with a ton of weaknesses that loses your team the game, or you can play hitscan. Pro players and people with a background in other games really love the hitscans, and Blizzard obliges them, to the point where it's kind of throwing to not pick one. (Have you ever been upset to have a McCree on your team? Stun the dive. Cancel ults. Two tap someone across the map. Flank around and McRightclick a support. The dude does everything!) That's not to say you can't win games with the off-DPS -- there is someone out there streaming how you can pick Symmetra or Bastion every game and win 60% of them against the pros.

Support is a fun role. I've always said that Ana is the sniper for people that think Widowmaker is too easy. There's a character where if you play perfectly, you win the game. You make a mistake, or your mechanics falter, you lose the game. (Does anyone ever watch ML7 play and not want to play Ana immediately afterwards? You can do so much... if you're good.)

I'm pretty happy about the current state of tanks. It wasn't always this way, but you can pretty much pair any two of them and not instantly lose. Both players can pick "a fun one". Shields were once pretty much mandatory, but people got better at the game (and they shields got nerfed into the ground), and they have less effectiveness than they once did.So you can get away with the weird combinations. Ball/Hog was meta for quite a while. Winston/D.va has always been good with the right players and coordination. Rein/Zarya is of course a lot of fun for the Zarya player. I've even lost some games to Hog/D.va, though I'm not sure I'd personally pick one of those if the other was already locked in ;)

Anyway, I keep reading that nobody wants to play tanks, and I don't get it. You can spend 15 minutes in DPS queue, pick Widowmaker, get one sick kill for your montage, and then spend the remaining 8 minutes of the game being chased around by some Wrecking Ball spamming "Ho ho ho!" with a D.va in tow that shows up from time to time to remind you that it's the perfect weather for a hotteok. I'd personally rather spend 30 seconds in the queue and be able to switch between 8 dramatically different heroes depending on the situation that unfolds.

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

#409
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…

> The last truly transformational gaming experience I had

For me it was Subnautica. That game *hooked* me so hard. It had an incredible progression and such an interesting game loop. Recapturing that experience is like lightning in a bottle, which I agree is like when WoW hit peak numbers.

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

#410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m excited to see life in the Diablo franchise after (personal opinion) the abomination that was Diablo 3. But I’ve really lost trust in the company and have a hard time imagining Diablo 4 being much better than Diablo 3. Diablo 2 Resurrected looks intriguing and seems to be going about things in the right way, involving the community, etc. but I believe it’s a contract job by a third party? I have a hard time imagi…

Am I the only person who really liked Diablo 3? I introduced my wife to it as her first game in the genre, and we’ve spent a lot of hours making team runs through hard dungeons. For sheer “let’s kill 300 things at once” endorphin hits, it’s great.

D3 has had a strange life. I think it's still a great casual Diablo game, but it totally lacks the depth that other titles in the genre (Path of Exile, Last Epoch, even Grim Dawn) offer, and has some very degenerate systems like paragon points and legendary effect scaling that make the game unbelievably boring for more serious/committed players. You basically get all of your endgame gear within 8 hours of starting a new season, and then there's nothing to do but push slight stat increases on the same items or with paragon points or gems. The game totally plays itself.

There was a time around the Reaper of Souls prepatch where the game could have been reworked into something actually quite good, and that just never came. Coupled with a multi-year content drought up against massive PoE leagues every 3 months, it's just a tough sell.

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