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

• VWWHFSfQ 5y ago
  do they have any good games still
  • Lapsa 5y ago
    sc2
  • cevn 5y ago
    The good ones (SC2, OW) are running on life support now with barely any updates. Blizzard died when they merged with Acti and now it's a slow descent to 0 players. D3 was also pretty good well after release (no RMAH) but that was released in 2012..
  • 1-6 5y ago
    SC1
    • Lammy 5y ago
      SC 1.15.1 specifically, so you can LAN with your friends who run Mac OS 9 :) https://web.archive.org/web/20140908015809/http://ftp.blizzard.com/pub/starcraft/patches/Mac/ https://web.archive.org/web/20140908015809/http://ftp.blizza...
    • spike021 5y ago
      which sadly isn't supported on M1, and who knows if Blizzard will ever release a patch for that.
    • Pet_Ant 5y ago
      A hot take but I was really disappointed by it when it first came out. While waiting for it to be released I discovered Total Annihilation which really seemed like the next generation of RTS. When Starcraft came out it felt like WarCraft 2.5 or 2 with ramps. Sure the plot was much better, and the races were more differentiated, it did not feel like an evolution of the genre: just more polish. After that RTSes haven't grown IMHO outside of Sins of a Solar Empire, Total War, and Supreme Commander.
  • JohnWhigham 5y ago
    Their remastered Diablo 2 is on track to be a hit, but it won't be out until later this year.
  • MangoCoffee 5y ago
    Hearthstone for casual play. do not sink too much money into it. you can play Hearthstone for free if you do quest and craft a deck that you really like to play
  • vbezhenar 5y ago
    I think that WoW is a good game for some kinds of players.
• nickstinemates 5y ago
  Not surprising, Blizzard has lost its way and its brand doesn't mean what it once did. The fall from grace started with the advent of paid services, and in game cosmetic shop in WoW and all of the issues surrounding the launch of Diablo 3 (let alone the disaster that is OWL/Overwatch, complete abandonment in HotS, etc.)
  • gmaster1440 5y ago
    What about Overwatch is a disaster?
    • AlexandrB 5y ago
      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 even before role-based queuing there was a (very annoying) portion of the community that believed you had to be playing the high-end "meta" even when you're at the lowest ranks or playing casually and would complain endlessly if you did anything different.
      • TameAntelope 5y ago
        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.
        • username90 5y ago
          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.
• sergiotapia 5y ago
  Their games just don't feel like labors of love anymore. They feel like icky skinner boxes through and through. Every aspect of their games are a/b tested up the ass to convert as many MTX as possible and personally it's a total turn off. I downloaded Warzone and tried it out this weekend and uninstalled after 2 matches, it just felt off. Hard to describe. Like a AAA graphics Candy Crush. yuck!
  • Rooster61 5y ago
    Blizzard didn't develop Warzone. Yes, they are both published/owned by Activision, and they share a launcher, but they are from very different developers.
    • disgruntledphd2 5y ago
      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.
      • lovelyviking 5y ago
        For me being outside of thess relations are indeed it is not so clear. Can you describe it more ?
        • icegreentea2 5y ago
          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.
• asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
  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 overlapping audiences with battle royale FPSes. Starcraft 2 is basically dead. WC3 remastered flopped. The RTS genre writ large is definitely in a waning phase. IMO, when a gaming company doesn't make new games, it is going to see some losses in the playerbase. To me it's more remarkable that they've only seen this much of a dropoff.
  • imbnwa 5y ago
    > WC3 remastered flopped Was really looking forward to playing Helm's Deep on Bnet like good ol times but alas
  • zinclozenge 5y ago
    Diablo 3 gets a new season with some changes. It's not a lot, but there's still some attention being paid to the game.
  • tibbon 5y ago
    WoW also just got boring for me a long time ago. Sure, they keep adding new things, but it's still riding in very deep treads they dug long ago. It's still fundamentally the same game, and in my eyes showing its age. I'd love to play a new MMO that explores new ideas. WoW explores WoW.
    • ocdtrekkie 5y ago
      I've tried a bunch of MMOs since WoW... and despite newer engines and some neat features, they often end up just being... mostly WoW once the sheen wears off. I occasionally revisit WoW because if you're going to play a WoW clone, you might as well just play WoW.
      • 5y ago
• Grimm1 5y ago
  Blizzard has released only the WoW expansion and some minor hearthstone expansions in the last 3 years. They have not really pushed any major IP releases. Acti-Blizzard is as profitable as ever though largely because of the MTX they've baked into COD and other games, their mobile games, and things like their overseas market penetration working out for them. That combined with the fact they've lost a significant amount of what constituted their top senior creative talent I'm going to say two things: First they're probably a sound investment, they'll probably keep climbing as the MTX proliferates and as things like Diablo 4 on the horizon release and Warzone through Activision is still massively popular as ever. And second they're probably not a place where you can expect massive innovation and polish in games any longer, and if you were a fan, like myself, that magical time is over, maybe look to Dreamhaven that some of that senior creative talent founded and others have gone to since leaving.
  • Reason077 5y ago
    Hearthstone actually gets regular, huge updates now days. Far more than it did in the first few years. Just today they dropped a surprise update for Battlegrounds. It's clear there's a major, constant effort going into developing new expansions, new game modes, etc. They've figured out a clever model of rotating out the old content to make room for more new stuff. No doubt Hearthstone is very profitable for Blizzard! Starcraft 2 and HotS, on the other hand, have basically been abandoned. Even Overwatch seems to be stagnating somewhat.
    • scruple 5y ago
      That's true, and I love Hearthstone and play regularly (I really prefer the rule sets in HS to MTG:Arena, for example) and have played since Beta... But, Hearthstone is also monetized like crazy today, as well. Especially as compared to 3 years ago.
      • Reason077 5y ago
        I think they have actually struck a pretty good balance when it comes to paid content. There isn't really anything (except maybe some of the hero skins?) you actually have to pay for and can't get for free. You can be top-level competitive without spending a cent, so long as you play enough and spend your gold & dust wisely...
• Covzire 5y ago
  I still can't believe they butchered WC3:reforged so badly. It could have been a massive boon for them were it not for the hideously greedy ToS along with all the technical issues and straight up downgrades from the original in terms of multiplayer. There have to be some epic stories of mismanagement or hubris, if only someone would tell them.
  • david422 5y ago
    WC3 was my favorite game ever, so much so that I bought multiple copies. I calculated that I probably played so much that my price per hour was a couple of cents. But I didn't buy reforged after how bad it was - and still is. It should have been easy money for them, and instead it was just a half finished money grab.
    • Jetrel 5y ago
      Ironically, having been a huge WC3 fan; I felt like reforged was great. I bought it, loved it, and am still routinely playing it (in fact, I've picked it up as a semi-regular routine, whereas I'd kinda mostly stopped playing the original). I love the new graphics, the bugs were pretty minor and quickly fixed, and the stuff the community complained about was either irrelevant (complaining about the game being heavier when it runs really fast on my not-very-good gaming rig), or was not a regression against the prior version of the game (not delivering the promised cutscene overhauls didn't make the existing game worse). The community complaints about the mod license changes were like - yeah, I sympathize, but it's not relevant to my enjoyment of the game. I get that blizzard doesn't want to have its lunch stolen a second time by LoL/Dota, but it's not a change that had any negative impact on me as a player. If I'm angry about anything with blizzard, it's that they've stiffed a bunch of these existing communities by not giving long-term support+content updates. Like, reforged had pretty much the same level of bugs or unfinished stuff practically every game has on release, but after a couple months of the devs fixing a bunch of these, blizzard's management got cold feet and laid the whole team off. We might have gotten the promised cutscene upgrades. But now - now we'll never get them. SC2 has this wicked game mode, "co-op commanders", that supposedly is one of their most popular things (and directly sells DLC), and what do they do? They stop making more content for it - all they'd have to do is make more DLC, and it'd print money. I've been playing a bunch of it lately, and I'm just plain mad, knowing that what I'm playing is truly all I'll ever get. I genuinely don't get Blizzard, these days. I could understand them diverting their investment towards a far more lucrative pot (much like how Valve has doubled down on their real moneymakers like Dota/CS:GO, at the expense of i.e. Portal), but ... what is Blizzard even investing in? I thought Overwatch and Hearthstone were the new hotness, but if even those are getting stiffed, and blizzard's making money hand-over-fist, then... ... ? Like, what's even left?
• uyt 5y ago
  I am pretty hyped about playing d2 again with "Diablo 2 Resurrected". But I guess it's a bad sign that the most exciting thing they have going is a remake of a 20 year old past glory.
  • devoutsalsa 5y ago
    Coming soon... WC3 3.
  • MangoCoffee 5y ago
    Diablo 4 look good with its trailer but who know if they going to botch it like Diablo III until Reaper fix.
  • ericbarrett 5y ago
    I'm way less excited for D2R. I was a hardcore Diablo 2 player, but the D2 endgame was spamming Diablo runs over and over, Cow Level farming, and one or two other things I've forgotten; not exactly dynamic content. Path of Exile has taken D2 game design to the next level, and the level after that, and even that game is aging (PoE2 is in the works). Obviously World of Warcraft Classic is the counter-example that will come to mind, but even original WoW still had plenty of content and grinds to do once you hit 60 (Booty Bay pirate hat, anyone?). Nothing in D2 will keep people around for more than a week or two once they've rediscovered how to play it.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  • hinkley 5y ago
    Meanwhile it sounds like the Runic folks have also lost the taste for Diablo games. They made Hob, which looks cool but the basic story arc is not compatible with multiplayer (also PC only). They let some other studio make Torchlight III.
• TOSSAWAY_1 5y ago
  I quit playing overwatch and hots when they sided with SJWs (and by extension censorship and china). I also skipped tlou2 and other big titles. I'm old enough to stand up against censorship and for the right to use ugly speech. I'm not saying I expect blizzard to not exercise its rights as a private company, but I am saying I dont support companies that dont support unfettered free speech.
  • aaomidi 5y ago
    Good, players like you leaving makes the game a better and safer place for everyone. Players like you, and Blizzard's inaction to do something about it is why I left. Players Overwatch with my girl friends has been the worst experience. Players any multiplayer game as a woman just seems to be toxic. I expected more from Blizzard here.
    • TOSSAWAY_1 5y ago
      Exactly. I can tell where I'm not wanted. Enjoy! Edit: sorry I caught this before your edit to include popular buzzwords like "toxic". Good for you, I'm actually looking for games and experiences that are outside the realm of sanitized things my mother would like. And I'm sorry about your girlfriend, it was likely my girlfriend giving her so much shit. She's a real sailor when she gets going. And mean too!
      • meristohm 5y ago
        “Girl friends” isn’t the same as “girlfriend”, and your mother does not represent all mothers. It seems aaomidi is recounting personal experience, and from my own experience, when a person earnestly uses “toxic” to describe how other participants behave it is often an apt description. If you are human, you’re a person with emotions. When a person describes something you might enjoy as toxic, are you able to pause and notice what you’re feeling, and then choose whether or not to act? I did this before responding to you, in an effort to help others that struggle with this, (I do, in some contexts). If a person still chooses to respond in a dismissive manner, or worse, then perhaps they enjoy being mean to others.
• bluescrn 5y ago
  World of Warcraft was so far ahead of the competition that it basically killed the MMO genre. Even 15+ years later, it's not really been beaten. But players have drifted away, or just grown up and have less time for gaming. It's kind of a shame we never got to find out what MMOs could have become if the market had remained more competitive.
• MangoCoffee 5y ago
  i used to be a active Blizzard's game player. i started to play WOW since the Cataclysm release but each expansion is the same stuff over and over again (go gather this, go kill this...etc.). I stopped my subscription a while back. i only play it with if i got enough gold to pay for the subscription time and time to play. Hearthstone is a money sink with each expansion release the cost of acquire new expansion cards is too much. the wild format is not balance. Blizzard rarely trying to rebalance the card after the expansion goes to wild. after buying couple expansion bundle. i stop purchasing each expansion bundle. i only buy some special bundle. Heroes of the Storm, its an interesting take on MOBA but it seem like Blizzard is abandoning it. i've spend some money on early deal but eventually stop playing the game. Diablo II and III, II is a great game. III suck until Blizzard fix it with Reaper of Souls and they wanted $15 for diablo iii rise of the necromancer that just add another class.
• donatj 5y ago
  I'd almost entirely stopped playing Overwatch for a couple years, but I got back in recently and feel like the tone is overall better than it had been. I think a lot of the toxic players may have actually just moved on?
  • derekdahmer 5y ago
    As someone whose been playing regularly for the past 4 years, 2-2-2 role lock was by far the biggest reduction in toxicity. It removed an entire class of bad communication like “switch off DPS” as well as the stress of convincing 5 strangers to use a particular comp at the beginning of the game. Before role lock it seemed like every single game was a freaking argument. They also released player reporting and endorsements though it’s harder to say what the overall impact of those are.
  • Svperstar 5y ago
    I was super hyped for Overwatch, I loved my time with the beta. I thought Overwatch was going to be the new Counter-Strike, Quake, or Halo. One of those games that just defines its time period. Then it launched and I got bored after 1 month. Too few maps too few variety.
    • elliekelly 5y ago
      And whatever algorithm they use for match-making should just be completely scrapped so they can start over. It seems like most games are really lopsided - you're either stomping on someone or getting stomped on. Maybe it's different in the high-ranked competitive play but the hard-fought matches that go back and forth until the very end are infrequent, in my experience, and those are the best part of playing!
      • blibble 5y ago
        this is a nature of the game's design: ultimate advantage snowballing short of reducing the power of the ultimates: I'm not sure they can do too much about it
    • 5y ago
• freshair 5y ago
  "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 been able to foresee, the old customers were indeed alienated and the new customers never materialized.
  • taneq 5y ago
    "Trust me, you think you want it, but you don't" - Blizzard, about vanilla WoW, a year before releasing WoW Classic.
    • scruple 5y ago
      Yeah, JAB (who the quote is attributed to) is now the President of the company, too... To be fair to him, however, he did admit his failure on that one.
    • knuthsat 5y ago
      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.
      • SuoDuanDao 5y ago
        This is so true, and most people in these spaces will still defend the metrics they're using. I've encountered this a lot when trying to suggest how advertising could be a social good.
      • inteoryx 5y ago
        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.
• dstaley 5y ago
  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. Blizzard has made many attempts to make World of Warcraft more modern, more accessible to newer players (and some have even worked!), but nothing they've done has been able to recapture people in the same manner as it did originally. I think this isn't so much Blizzard's fault as it's just a factor of our world now; there's so much competition for our attention that the "average" gamer doesn't really have the motivation to immerse themselves into the game world (nor can they really when there's so much research you end up doing while playing). The last truly transformational gaming experience I had was with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild back in 2017. I suspect much of that experience was due to the fact that, in those crucial first few days, there wasn't really anything online about the game. (Sure, there were articles here and there, but nothing near the vast amounts of information about World of Warcraft that exist now). To a lesser extent, I think a lot of the experience I had was due to the single-player nature of the game. I've said this for years, and I still stand by it: Blizzard should create single-player games set in the Warcraft universe in the vein of Skyrim. They've spent so much time and effort crafting these elaborate stories and worlds that I think the best way to really experience them now is with a single-player game. I could be convinced to accept a group-up mechanic for larger enemies (sort of in the vein of Monster Hunter), but a single-player narrative-driven game set in the Warcraft universe (with art done by the cinematics team) could be a blockbuster if done correctly. However, there's no indication that Blizard cares about crafting that sort of experience anymore. They seem to be almost commpletely focused on multiplayer, microtransaction-based gaming, which is probably the way to be the most profitable these days I guess. [1] https://kotaku.com/world-of-warcraft-classic-maybe-you-cant-go-home-again-1844611355 https://kotaku.com/world-of-warcraft-classic-maybe-you-cant-...
  • tsimionescu 5y ago
    Blizzard hasn't produced even one single-player-focused game since... Diablo I? Their strength has always been multiplayer, I very much doubt they could deliver a blockbuster single-player open world game.
• lsiebert 5y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blitzchung_controversy
  • DanHulton 5y ago
    I'm one of those people, but let me tell you, they have made it very easy on me. They haven't made anything even vaguely interesting in years.
    • cdolan 5y ago
      Ditto. Blitzchung incident got me to cancel WoW classic, which is a pretty big deal to me… Sometimes I wish I had a character but I heard they are messing up classic by introducing power leveling!
  • bgutierrez 5y ago
    I didn't like how obsessed I'd become over Hearthstone. When this happened, I took it as an opportunity to delete the app and I haven't played it a single time since.
  • FalconSensei 5y ago
    This type of thing prevented me from starting playing anything Blizzard at all.
  • bcrosby95 5y ago
    I did, but none of my friends did. I went sofar as to delete my Blizzard account. I wasn't having fun with their games anyways though, and I tend to get irrationally addicted to watching numbers go up (WoW achievements) so I think it was a good choice all around for myself.
  • maxkwallace 5y ago
    I did this, and I went through the support process to totally delete my account, including purchased content. Sometimes I wish I could still play SC2 with friends, but expressing support for freedom of speech in Hong Kong and the sinosphere is more important.
• mewse-hn 5y ago
  I'm a WoW classic player and the company is a lot different than it used to be. You can't talk to GMs in-game anymore and they refuse to fix loot problems filed by guild loot masters. It's like they did a cost/benefit analysis before one of their waves of layoffs and decided they'll just automate everything. They did a cosmetic pet thing recently, tied to donations to Doctors Without Borders and I found myself hoping it would fail. Instead of a fun thing where the community would come together it felt like being asked to donate to a charity at the walmart register in order to boost the company's profile. As far as I know war 3 reforged is still screwed up. They acted shamefully during the blitzchung thing and then tried to post some twee black lives matter stuff during the george floyd protests last year. The people who actually cared about the games have fled, most recently Jeff Kaplan. They'll still keep making money to appease the blizzard/activision shareholders but the soul is gone. RIP old blizzard
  • TameAntelope 5y ago
    It's a small thing, but the community really needs to get over these "layoffs". Companies execute layoffs at the volume Blizzard did all the time, they were not any kind of indication of any major strategic shift whatsoever.
    • setr 5y ago
      Strategic shifts are the only reason mass layoffs exist. If it's a slow shift according to market pressure, then you expect the ratio of incoming:outgoing to drop slowly. If it's stable, you expect the ratio to be stable. If someone decides to a do a re-org, or a new strategy and this whole department is no longer necessary in the new model, the ratio drops fast. Otherwise, why would you drop a whole slew of people suddenly? For the fun of it?
      • TameAntelope 5y ago
        They weren't mass layoffs, it was a handful of people. For some reason 50-190 people out of 9,500 is getting called a "mass layoff", when in reality it's nothing more than a fat trimming exercise. 0.9%-2% is not a "mass layoff".
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• gekkonier 5y ago
  There were times we enjoyed slaying dragons in a 40 player raid. But yeah, time passes, you get older, and interests shift. It was great!
• salusinarduis 5y ago
  I have long been a big time contributor to the World of Warcraft scene. I've contributed to MaNGOS, I was a developer for a big server project - that I can't mention here :) -, a best friend of mine developed the most popular WoW addon of all time that I have contributed to, etc. I really was torn about going back to play Classic WoW, but I chose not to, simply because I hate Activision/Blizzard. I refuse to support that company with a single dollar. Their games being lifeless and greedy is bad enough, but as a company they are mean spirited, and will plant a boot in the face of anyone in their community just because they can.
• gundmc 5y ago
  They havent released anything major outside of a WOW expansion in that time period, so this is pretty unsurprising. When OW2 is released it will jump back up as long as they don't totally botch the launch.
• sidlls 5y ago
  There are probably several factors at play, but the two biggest in my view are: 1) increased competition and 2) diminishing quality (technical and qualitative, e.g. in terms of release management, story telling, etc.). Examples in my opinion: Diablo has always had repetitive gameplay, but the stories/lore seems to suffer with each release. They are either working on SC3 in secret or have given up on the franchise. Their management of WoW Classic and rollout of releases has been awful. Without fresh progression servers, Classic is going to truly die in a couple of weeks with the release of TBC.
• Toine 5y ago
  They're losing product-market fit.
• PeterStuer 5y ago
  They are trowing their traditional player-base under the bus and focus on milking the whales. While player numbers are dramatically tanking, ARPU and revenue is up. Their developer churn is through the roof, having a huge impact on their capability to ship quality which they compensate with shoveling in low effort extrinsic reward content systems.
• mbesto 5y ago
  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
  • srg0 5y ago
    counterpoints: - HS is strong on mobile - OW is arguably a MOBA/FPS hybrid - CoD/warzone is the most streamed battle royale on twitch
    • t-writescode 5y ago
      I've said before that it's what PUBG should have been (and could have been, given enough polish)
    • mbesto 5y ago
      > CoD/warzone is the most streamed battle royale on twitch And is an Activision title. > HS is strong on mobile The category is still niche compared to other big titles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-played_mobile_games_by_player_count https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-played_mobile_gam... > OW is arguably a MOBA/FPS hybrid Fair, but isn't doing well. Will be interesting to see how Valorant does.
  • donio 5y ago
    > - 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 https://heroespatchnotes.com/patch/summary.html
    • redisman 5y ago
      It’s at a similar patch cadence and size as Warcraft 3. The fall from the good times has been pretty severe
• frozenlettuce 5y ago
  That explains why OW on Switch was on a 50% sale about one month ago (pumping playerbase numbers just before the report)
• 29athrowaway 5y ago
  You can thank MBAs for the demise of every American company. MBAs are the reason China will eat the US.
  • AlexandrB 5y ago
    MBAs and excessive IP protections. The Warcraft 3 mapping community spawned entire new game genres and franchises. Warcraft 3 Reforged style TOSs means that probably won't happen again.
    • 29athrowaway 5y ago
      Blizzard missed the opportunity to capitalize on Defense of the Ancients and as a result they created their own worst nightmares: League of Legends and DotA 2, two successors of the original DotA map. By the time they released their own version, Heroes of the Storm, it was too late. Not to mention many other MOBAs that are direct copies of DotA such as Heroes of Newerth and many others. That, and projects like Diablo 4 were the signs that Blizzard is now dead inside and starting to rot. No sane person would make those decisions. Those decisions can only happen when a company is ran by powerpoint-oriented people that is disconnected from the customers.
• nottorp 5y ago
  From my point of view, Blizzard has been slowly going downhill for ages. Some whines in chronological order: WoW died for me when they introduced the random dungeon finder in Cataclysm and cut down the player-to-player interaction outside dungeons by 99%. Starcraft 2 ... might have been polished and all, but honestly I don't see much difference from Starcraft 1. Also, I don't like memorizing openings (either chess or a RTS) and the multiplayer is toxic enough. Been called a stupid noob a lot, especially when i won :) Diablo 3... i sometimes play that when i feel like doing something that doesn't require even one active neuron. It's about like watching TV. Hearthstone was fun until I realized it's like MTG and you have to spend real money to improve your card collection. They made WoW classic unplayable with their decision to cram 10x as many people on one server (and refusal to fix it). Then WC3: Reforged came up. So two botched remakes/updates. Their other titles don't run on Macs, so considering how good the current titles are, I didn't even look. Heard that the Diablo 2 remake will be Windows only as well. So... i guess good luck to them. They have to do A LOT to convince me they're worth my time now.
  • idrios 5y ago
    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 quickly. I do think the best thing they've done in WoW recently though, for bringing some of that discovery back, is adding secret events and global puzzles. Going into Gnomeregan, seeing a small hidden button, pressing it and having a lvl ?? boss show up and obliterate my max level character was just awesome. And I had a ton of fun doing the Uuna quest-but-not-really. But so much of the game has just stopped being fun.
    • kcb 5y ago
      > Dungeon Finder and Raid Finder made it so you didn't need to find people or be in a guild to do these things. I used to feel this way more but in the past couple of times I picked the game up Raid Finder and Dungeon Finder were completely irrelevant to myself and every player I interacted with. I did 0 Raid Finder and like 2 queued dungeons on my raid geared characters. Having a guild is more important than ever in my opinion as relying on getting invited to pug groups is very frustrating. Especially if trying to gear up a character later in the expansion.
• witherk 5y ago
  Maybe I'm just in the HN echochamber, but this really feels like a case of death by MBA.
  • sgt101 5y ago
    Yup - spreadsheets and an absolute aversion to creative risk.
• asdff 5y ago
  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 lack of sleep, and it's hard to get good enough at a video game to have a fun time that doesn't suck without having time to practice the mechanics. So even if you do squeeze in an hour here or there, that's not enough time to get even halfway decent at a new videogame, let alone understand anything about any meta that everyone else in the community will use against you in every game you play. It quite literally sucks to suck, and you end up not really playing video games as much because you just get slapped every match and you know you don't have the time to practice and actually get better. Publishers need to continually cater to a fresh generation. They risk alienating their existing playerbase when this happens to a firm degree, which makes this an art. Blizzard has failed to compete at young peoples attention as well as other distractions on the market, for this new generation at least.
  • esturk 5y ago
    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.
    • SuoDuanDao 5y ago
      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.
• jvzr 5y ago
  Blizzard died the day it was bought by Activision. It has been descending into mediocrity ever since. Many executives left, and many studios/teams inside Blizzard have been shuffled around and between projects, unlike Blizzard's doctrine of old (tight teams focused on a project until it's great or must be stopped -- Blizzard's infamous "Soon(tm)"). World of Warcraft is still being milked till it dries up (and I'm saying that as someone clocking 560+ days in game). Diablo has been abandonned (see the announcement of a mobile Diablo game last year¹, and its reception by the player base). So has StarCraft. Overwatch is stagnant (no new hero for a year) and Overwatch 2 is probably in development hell (pure speculation on my part I'll admit). Heroes of the Storm is also pretty stagnant (the game went from a hero every month to only two last year, nothing in 2021 so far). In the meantime, there has been a very heavy push for e-sports with Overwatch and Heroes of the Storm (though I have not followed any of those). These efforts seem, to me, extremely centred on American audience, unlike League of Legends which has multiple leagues around the world. I'm sure a ton of money has been poured into this venture, but I'm unsure it has improved the games... Anyway, the last time I launched Battle.net was for Destiny 2... and it has migrated to Steam in the middle of 2019! ¹Wow OK, that was in 2018 o_O Time flies, especially with a global pandemic, it seems...
  • icegreentea2 5y ago
    FWIW, they did announce Diablo 4 for PC/Xbox/PS the year after the Diablo Immortal fiasco...
    • jvzr 5y ago
      You are right. Plus, the Diablo 2 remaster announced at the same time as Diablo 4 (IIRC) Based on past track record, I don't hold much hope, though
      • k12sosse 5y ago
        D2 resurrected looks like it's lining up to be fun. The company that was outsourced to rebuild has said they didn't want to fix d2. They wanted to overhaul it's graphics and give it QoL. Same bugs. Same game.
• je42 5y ago
  it seems blizzard is also screwing up WoW. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilaeRQK_FDQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilaeRQK_FDQ
• bob1029 5y ago
  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 get shit done. Blizzard in particular has something like 2 billion dollars in free cash flow to work with. Obviously not exactly the same problem domain but effectively the same sort of cost structure around core product development. Nothing ever works out linear at scales like this, but even assuming a 10x loss in efficiencies of scale (i.e. due to organizational overhead), you would still have resources to run ~200 copies of our software team in parallel on ~200 unique projects. How many teams would have to succeed before that model pays off? 1/200 figuring out how to build a proper WoW killer could get the job done... To Blizzard I say: Take all that capital the gaming community has been injecting into your money bin for the last 2 decades, and invest in an internal startup culture. Spin out tens or hundreds of smaller teams with their own independent creative direction to try out new ideas. If you find some hits on one of these teams, maybe you take a less successful team and add their resources to the more successful one. In this way, you can dramatically expand the portfolio & diversity of the product base. This has caveats for any "common" creative vision, but judging by the comments in this thread, you may want to re-evaluate any convictions around that idea.
  • AlexandrB 5y ago
    > Spin out tens or hundreds of smaller teams with their own independent creative direction to try out new ideas. My impression is that big game studios would rather put all their eggs in one basket where they're (fairly) certain they can make a decent return rather than spreading it around a bunch of smaller projects and hoping one of them turns out to be Minecraft. This is the same dynamic driving large movie studios to invest huge sums of money in a shrinking number of huge blockbusters.
    • catmanjan 5y ago
      Yep another thing is that gaming is a zero sum game - blizzard would be competing with itself for player base
• boringg 5y ago
  They should create a battle royal RTS - bring the best parts of Starcraft II / WC3 and integrate into a Fortnite environment. If they could pull that off, would be unreal.
• boringg 5y ago
  Also worth noting - while they lost 30% of their overall player base -- if they bring in a big game they will probably gain a considerable amount in the door. So to someone's comment the fact that their rate of attrition is so long given the lack of new content in their products and low turnover if actually kind of impressive.
• mbilal 5y ago
  They're a group of corporate shills, they deserve to collapse. What they did to Warcraft 3 is a travesty.
• brundolf 5y ago
  I've been boycotting them since the Hong Kong/Hearthstone incident a few years ago. Before that I was a regular Overwatch player and a semi-regular Hearthstone player. I quit cold-turkey. Hard to say how much of this effect would be from others doing the same, but it's a nice thought.
• gigel82 5y ago
  I'm still playing Starcraft 2 with my buddies every weekend (even more so now during the pandemic). If they made a Starcraft 3 with updated graphics, units / structures and perhaps the new fabled 4th race I'll absolutely pay for it (even on a subscription base which I normally hate). Instead, they've scaled down the investments in Starcraft to such a degree that the servers were almost completely offline over the past winter holidays and despite hundreds / thousands of complaints there was no official reaction from Blizzard. :(
• Ericson2314 5y ago
  Blizzard : Activision :: Boeing : McDonnell Douglas
• yazaddaruvala 5y ago
  90% of my friend group stopped playing Blizzard games when they started to censor speech (specifically speech encouraging freedoms). As an individual cancel culture or voting with my wallet is my only path forward, but as a corporation (specifically in gaming) cancel culture is going to be a huge problem. Its not clear to me what the right solution to this is going to be.
• time0ut 5y ago
  The most recent WoW expansion was beautiful looking but so boring and convoluted I lost interest after a matter of days. I am playing classic WoW, which really stands the test of time as a game. That said, classic WoW exposes Blizzard for what they are even more than their recent expansion flops. Where you could write off the short comings of the expansion as them trying something innovative and failing, their support for classic is shocking compared to what it once was and make it apparent they are just a shambling zombie shell of a company.
• darepublic 5y ago
  I miss the days of RTS games. Used to play a ton of frozen throne, and was getting back into it when Blizzard announced the remaster. Then in the act of launching the remaster they brought down the online ladder, causing me to leave the game and never return. To me it's because they want to be a multibillion dollar company and all their moves have to align with that. It's no longer good enough to make a solid game that devs and fans love and make a decent profit. It's all about the billions, often leads companies to do stupid things.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• mikl 5y ago
  Imagine my shock. Blizzard hasn’t released any new game since Overwatch, and that was in 2016. They have been able to keep their old games going to some extent with updates and expansions, but it’s mostly just been more of the same stuff, no innovation. Not much better on the Activision side. Other than umpteen versions of Call of Duty and re-releases of old games, the only memorable game they’ve done of late is Destiny (1 & 2). You can’t just keep rehashing the same old formula if you want to keep up with the market.
• thrower123 5y ago
  If not for World of Warcraft Classic, how bad would this be?
• sim_card_map 5y ago
  "Don't you guys have phones?"
• Shadonototro 5y ago
  They keep milking the same aging WoW userbase, of course it'll decline, since that demographic is becoming old enough to not care anymore Their business decision to re-release WoW with WoW: Classic was a poor one They should have made either a sequel, or a full REMAKE, not a lazy-milking-re-release, it just plain stupid And let's not talk about the way they "reforged" Warcraft 3.. They print lot of money, but sadly it goes in the wrong pockets.. poor management, 0 vision for the future, stuck milking an aging player base Doesn't sound great for the future
  • Bayart 5y ago
    >They should have made either a sequel, or a full REMAKE, not a lazy-milking-re-release, it just plain stupid The community would have lost its mind if Blizzard tried anything like a remake, purely because Blizzard has spent all the goodwill it had a long time ago and did nothing to make people think it wouldn't conk it up. To the point everybody was knee-jerkingly refusing any change at all to the game, regardless of how minor or justifiable it would be (which was a mistake, Classic would have been much better with some increased difficulty).
• bruiseralmighty 5y ago
  Isn't this just a case of increasing irrelevancy? I can't think of a single release from them I would describe as 'ambitious' other than Diablo Mobile which has the distinct honor of being dead before arrival. Speaking anecdotally, no one I game with or any of the forums I go to talk about Blizzard games. Many of the Discord servers I play with used to be big into HotS and Starcraft I/II, but I don't hear a peep from them about either anymore. Perhaps worst of all, several of the Path of Exile players I game with are no longer even worried about a Diablo 4 launch affecting the long term health of their favorite dungeon crawler. It's just expected that Blizzard will deliver a polished but shallow experience that will be over within two or three months at most. Maybe they just aren't nimble enough anymore to leverage their huge war-chest of experience and cash.
• vr1 5y ago
  Personally I feel their interface too robotic and out of touch in comparison with Arena of Valor funnel for example
• jwilber 5y ago
  Not surprising as a result of the activision purchase- they don’t care about playerbase, only revenue.
• alasdair_ 5y ago
  I've been playing (and paying a subscription fee for) WoW since the beta and while the current expansion is better than most, I'm definitely feeling bored with Blizzard's other recent offerings - they are all just revamps of existing things (WoW Classic, Diablo 2 etc.). They have lost the ability to innovate.
• scruffyherder 5y ago
  After the Hong Kong incident, I was out.
• f430 5y ago
  can confirm havent opened blizzard client in the past 5 years
• broknbottle 5y ago
  Diablo 3 was garbage. They stopped development of HotS because it wasn't pulling LoL or DotA numbers and Overwatch while overall fun feels slightly off (for me it's the sluggish movement from lack of running..). Activision Blizzard can fall off a cliff for all I care. They were a company that literally put out hit after hit for years and now they are in slow death spiral.
• abledon 5y ago
  IF anyones looking for SC2's spiritual successor: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sunspeargames/gates-of-pyre https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sunspeargames/gates-of-...
• dbg31415 5y ago
  Gonna say what the 14-year-old me would have said... Maybe if they took some of the CEO pay and put it into game development and community building... they wouldn't be losing players. > https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2021-03-17-activision-blizzard-ceo-bobby-kotick-reportedly-due-to-receive-usd200-million-payout https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2021-03-17-activision... As a long-time fan of Blizzard games... have to say... what others have said mostly in here. WoW... peaked in like 2010. They know this, and that's why they re-release WoW Classic. They have been slowly ruining what made the game fun by taking away the community and need for communication. It was too hard to make friends and form groups... so they built automatic group finders. Cool, except they didn't keep the core values in place. The game was about making friends. If you take that away... what's the point of a social game? They dumbed down all the stat weight mechanics to just a gear score. They had that whole expansion where you had to spend all your time not raiding in solo-player mode in your Garrison... oof. Just feels like the people they have running the games aren't actually gamers, but people who sit back and say, "How can I increase hours spent playing... WITHOUT making it more fun?" I hated all the modern cut scenes and NPC's who talked to you, "You're the greatest hero Azeroth has ever seen!" Oof. Like I don't need some pixel playing a recorded affirmation message, if I wanted that shit I'd play a single-player game. I need fun shit to do with friends, I need just enough down time and waiting while we travel between dungeons to talk to people and get a sense for who I like and who I don't. I quit in Wrath, but tried to go back a few times and each time it's pretty painful. So like fair to say I don't have enough experience with the game to say, but it really has no community feel at all to me any more. WoW Classic - relaunch under way. Diablo... D3 sucked. It got a lot better with later releases, but on the whole it's pretty meh and has been pretty meh it's whole existence. The scaling is off, I don't know. Like you get in, and you play for 30 minutes, and you're instantly able to do like nightmare level 15... there's no effort to get there. There's no struggle, so there's no sense of achievement. All that's left is an endless grind, doing the same boring thing, hoping the "Primal Ancient" version of the item you need drops so you can do 1.5% more damage. Again, no community to speak of. They never had a way to monetize Diablo 3, and the "real money auction house" was a disaster. The content was always so stale, they just didn't make enough of it. Or make it challenging enough. When I play... you either zoom at max speed, or you get one-shot and killed. Other than equipping the right gear (based on the instructions of a website), doesn't ever feel like you make any meaningful choices when playing. There's no, "Oh I would have lived if I used X instead of Y..." moments. Always just, "I would have lived if I ground out 400 more stamina by doing ultra-repetitive rifts. Diablo 2 Remastered - relaunch pending. StarCraft... Great game, I thought SC2 was well done. And... inexplicably it has sat dormant. SC2 was never as good as SC. StarCraft 2 Remastered - relaunch happened a few years back. Overwatch... never played it. Don't do FPS. Looked fine, but I hear it's not as fun as PUBG or others. And apparently one of the new heroes really unbalanced some things. Heros of the Storm... never played it. Not a fan of the the gimmicky "hero-based" RTS. Hearthstone... tried it, it's just Magic the Gathering. It's fine, but I didn't have all the cards other people had so I couldn't win. I don't know, I'll blame that. I just wasn't into it. For me, too many bells and noises. Animations were too detailed. Every time you played a card, it gave you some sort of drawn out "oh look at this, this is happening!" animation and it felt like the game was slower as a result. Lost Vikings... GREAT game for SNES back in the 90s. Re-release pending. Ha. Overall theme... they stopped trying to build new great stuff, and just focused on re-releasing old great stuff. The old stuff appeals to some of the old players, maybe some of the new players, but pretty clear example of how a company can "run out of good ideas" and every bit of news you hear about how the company is run... layoffs, more layoffs... old founders starting a new company to get back to "good game development"... CEOs getting huge pay days... it doesn't sound like it's healthy.
• huachimingo 5y ago
  If you liked OW, maybe you would like Quake(and 2 and 3), Openarena, Xonotic, Sauerbraten or Assault Cube. Those are nearly free these days ;) (at least the online part). Maybe not current AAA quality, but nothing better than the raw speed and fraggin everything you can see (and where the crosshair sees it) with no waits and respawning every time... Seriously, try one of them. Sauer or xonotic would be a nice start.
  • bombcar 5y ago
    Nothing since has compared to Action Quake II though some get close.
• namelosw 5y ago
  They have struggled for developing new franchises and serious for more than a decade, but eventually, they still get some hit with HearthStone, Heroes of the Storm, Overwatch. Just not as dominating as what they previously did. But in these years they don't seem to even try to develop new franchises at all. All they do is just shitty remasters - it seems to me that the equity holders want the suck all the value from the brand and the company and then just get rid of it. So disgraceful.
• jszymborski 5y ago
  I doubt there are many of us, but I played a lot of Hearthstone for 3 years but ditched it after they banned a player for making a pro-democracy statement[0]. As I said, I don't think many players left hearthstone on account of this, but I do think it's one example of the many ways large publishers like Activision aren't capable to serve the communities they've acquired due to the many perverse incentives that comes with huge companies. [0] https://www.vox.com/2019/10/8/20904433/blizzard-hong-kong-hearthstone-blitzchung https://www.vox.com/2019/10/8/20904433/blizzard-hong-kong-he...
• holler 5y ago
  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.
• yubiox 5y ago
  Screw blizzard. Years ago they threatened Wow addon authors with legal action for asking for donations. Addons made the game much more fun and playable. Let them die.
• diveanon 5y ago
  Blizzard just letting Starcraft 2 die with no clear replacement in sight makes no sense to me at all.
• KingOfCoders 5y ago
  I don't care, I only care why Valve does nothing against bots pandemic in TF2.
• tdsamardzhiev 5y ago
  A popular esports caster said the following a few days ago, and it really got stuck in my head: > "We can't have new games like Brood War anymore, because devs would patch out everything that's fun about it in a few days." Please get the designers away from the spreadsheets and in a game. Trade some of that polish away for a soul. Delegate more responsibility to junior people, instead of forging them into (strictly inferior) clones of the senior staff.
  • bick_nyers 5y ago
    Data analysis/science has its place in a game imo. Balance is important (but equality of all strategies and classes should NEVER be the goal in a game, it's a recipe for staleness). In general though, people are terrible at using data properly. You can look at a spreadsheet and see that a particular faction is underperforming at high ELO, but a blind buff to damage or economy will often not be the correct move. Similar to how single player campaign difficulty settings will sometimes just be a glorified multiplier on enemy attack/health. A proper difficulty setting changes enemy behavior. There is a story everywhere that there is data, but people tend to be way better at sorting a column in Excel and sending an email about it than they are at investigating (and effectively communicating) the underlying story. Games (and businesses) need less analysts, and more scientists.
• 8fingerlouie 5y ago
  Perhaps if they started making new, innovative games like they used to (prior to Activision merger), instead of just rereleasing their old stuff. There's nothing new, with the exception of expansions to WoW, which is essentially also just "more of the same". They tried to make the entry bar to WoW smaller by squishing max level from 120 to 60, but somehow completely failed to accomodate casual players by timegating everything worth doing behind a massive time investment.
• ipiz0618 5y ago
  How they handled the Hong Kong issue was totally stupid [1]. But I doubt it was the main reason why many gamer stopped playing their games. To me it's either this or the Diablo mobile game fiasco. [1] - https://slate.com/technology/2019/10/hong-kong-hearthstone-blitzchung-blizzard-ban-protest-remarks.html https://slate.com/technology/2019/10/hong-kong-hearthstone-b...
• theknocker 5y ago
  This is what happens when you decide you're too special and important to make good games instead of easy money and then you hire a bunch of SJW PR assholes to deflect from your crappy user-hostile attitude.