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The most recent of Blizzard’s mainline games was released about 5 years ago. The second-to-most recent a decade. Diablo III, HOTS, and Starcraft are all now in
by falcolas 6y ago
The most recent of Blizzard’s mainline games was released about 5 years ago. The second-to-most recent a decade. Diablo III, HOTS, and Starcraft are all now in maintenance mode, with no new development. Warcraft III was recently “remastered” into oblivion, replacing the original game for all its fans.
Only WoW and Overwatch are currently active, and both are fueled mostly by their microtransactions. Yes, WoW has a subscription, but despite having a fraction of the player count they used to, they’re making more money than ever thanks to those microtransactions.
Reportedly, DI, D4 and Overwatch 1.5 are in development, but how long will that last now that the last of the old guard leadership (saying nothing about the talent) from Blizzard of old is gone?
Blizzard, the company of old that we loved for its innovative and polished games which were released when they were ready, is dead. There’s nothing left but the name and thoroughly flogged IP.
- oneplane 6y agoI fear that is all pretty much true. I suspect a downside of the mass market game business becoming so generalised and generic. Business goes where the money is, and apparently it's not in the niches of old (which is what PC gaming was tbh - we thought it was big but it was nothing compared to where we are now)
- Xixi 6y agoThe Blizzard I know (from when I was playing a lot more video games) has never been releasing a lot of games. Between 2000 and 2010, they released only four games: Diablo II, Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, World of Warcraft and StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty. I'm sure even today's Blizzard can somehow manage to release four games between 2020 and 2030, although I doubt they will have as strong an impact as these four.
- kzrdude 6y agoThose four are all legendary, one can note. They were big titles.
- lacker 6y agoHearthstone is still quite active! World of Warcraft and Hearthstone were both top-20 games streamed on Twitch in the past week, with Overwatch coming in at #33. Even though Hearthstone was released in 2014, it's still the premier digital card game. It's just a different model than the old "big release" model - there is no need to release a "Hearthstone 2", the game constantly gets new content and new game formats based on the same IP.