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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

#291

Post by blibble »

xxpor wrote: post #285
tokipin wrote: post #250

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…

This is the first time I'm hearing any complaints about the modern overtime system. It seems totally fair to me, the defending team has to actually win the final fight. What would you change about it?

oh it's fair, but extremely frustrating to lose after 60 seconds of overtime

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

#292

Post by Tsarbomb »

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

This describes me. I was playing WoW Classic with a close friend and regular WoW with a guild doing scheduled raids. Basically the day it all went down I disabled my account and uninstalled the bliz client. It was so weirdly easy to let go of it for some reason.

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

#293

Post by donio »

mbesto wrote: post #86

It's worth noting that this is specific to Blizzard . They have: - an MMO (not a growth area compared to other genres) - a FPS that tried to create a unique twist - a card game that essentially created a new genre (with a commercial ceiling) - remastered classics Compared to the rest of the market that is growing in the following areas: - large mobile presence - MOBA (HotS has been discontinued) - battle Royale

> - MOBA (HotS has been discontinued)

Development has certainly slowed down but it's still alive with new content, Hero reworks and balance patches.

https://heroespatchnotes.com/patch/summary.html

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

#294

Post by ineedasername »

skystarman wrote: post #282
phillryu wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Hardcore gamers love to trash ATVI/Blizz but they are without a doubt dominant gaming developer/publisher in the business, and it's really not even close unless you count Tencent. Ask people on HN if they like CoD and they'd laugh at you but the games are IMMENSELY popular every release and they print cash for ATVI.

When people bash Blizzard, they aren't bashing them based on their revenue or market penetration. A bad opinion of Blizzard does not translate into also believing they are failing to generate revenue or attract players. They have plenty of other reasons to bash Blizzard.

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

#295

Post by freeflight »

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 any kind of social protests, at the Tokyo Games [0].

Yet the popular mainstream response to that is not "The IOC is bowing down to attempts of censorship by an evil regime!", as it was the case with Blizzard and China, but all around agreement how the Olympics shouldn't be a political platform.

[0] https://thebridge.in/tokyo-2020/wearing-blm-apparels-social-...

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

#297

Post by donio »

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…

> Stay in lane for 20 minutes? Sure, why not

You mean you are pretty much stuck doing just that for half the game. Hope you like lasthitting all day, GLHF.

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

#298

Post by shmageggy »

blibble wrote: post #265
frozenlettuce wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used my first salary to buy WC3 on 2003, so I may have an "exaggerated" emotional connection with that game. Two months before the release it was clear that they could not polish the (many) rough edges that the remaster had. Removing features like ladder and tournaments was something so unprofessional and unreal that even today I can't digest it. Looking at the screens for the Diablo 2 remaster, it looks like that…

diablo 2 has been entirely outsourced as Blizzard aren't working on it: it's possible it might actually be good

If you watch this dev interview, you can see they actually love the game and put an incredible amount of thought and care into it. It looks really promising

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3dL7ZeIAsE

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

#299

Post by username90 »

TameAntelope wrote: post #76
AlexandrB wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can only speak from personal experience. I absolutely adored Overwatch at launch but about a year ago I uninstalled it and never looked back. What finally killed it for me is the role-based queueing. It locked in the developer-proscribed 2/2/2 meta and made the game feel very static and uninteresting. Previously, if you saw a gap on your team you could switch to a completely different role to fill the void. Though…

I used to completely agree with you re: 2/2/2, but I've been getting back into competitive lately, and the matches are much more predictive and it's much easier to figure out what you're supposed to be doing based on your role now. It's very "coachable"/"trainable" in a way that open queue isn't.

The problem was that for a long time they had no open queue, you either had to play healer or wait a long time. That killed the game, there is no coming back after losing that many players.

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

#300

Post by ineedasername »

drewwwwww wrote: post #216
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…

you're presenting this a little bit disingenuously. expectations were high that diablo 4 would be announced in 2018, and instead there was the announcement of a partnership to develop a mobile version of diablo. folks were upset and the presenter reacted poorly. the following year diablo 4 was announced and much was forgiven. the mobile game is still not out (in closed beta rn) and early reports are good. you can fau…

They probably picked a poor audience for the announcement. By nature, those present were never going to be all that receptive to a new mobile-first game. Slightly better venues would have been either E3 or PAX, where the audience doesn't consist almost exclusively of hardcore fans of their more traditional offerings.
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