21 ms·

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 moder

• 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.
    • reedf1 5y ago
      You should try playing some older MMOs: EVE, Anarchy Online, Ultima Online, Runescape. All stuff fundamentally untouched by the WoW design - and they are much better for it IMO. When I've played these games, even 20 years on, I am completely stunned. Makes me realize how psychologically kneecapped we are by WoW.
      • ocdtrekkie 5y ago
        I've spent a lot of time involved in the EVE space, I was on the DUST 514 version of the CSM, and I've participated in a couple of wars, even though I am very bad at Internet spaceships. Sometimes I wish EVE was just a tiny bit more like WoW... I wish the environment felt more varied than it does today. It really solely differentiates the game over time and area by player politics. Which is definitely fun, but almost in spite of the game, rather than because of it. ;) (Other games I spent time on, which yes, are newer than WoW: I really enjoyed the moment to moment feel of playing WildStar and Black Desert Online (largely because they replaced casting/cooldowns/calculated damage values with movement and combos), but of course, RIP the first one, and the second one is macrotransactioned to heck, my wallet couldn't take it. SWTOR's early storyline content is insanely well-done, but unfortunately, once you graduate out of it, it literally is exactly the same game as WoW.)
      • paulmd 5y ago
        eve online's formula is... controversial. the significant IRL time grind (doesn't necessarily need to be actively played, your skills train even when offline like an idle simulator...) was always a controversial game design point since it meant newer players were permanently less skilled than older players, they could never catch up... but CCP made it so you could just pay to get higher skill points, which isn't great either. dust failed and it seems like CCP pivoted towards trying to monetize EVE Online harder. And it was already a fairly heavily monetized game (real-money trading was sanctioned even 15 years ago, the game basically required multiple accounts for high-level play, etc)
        • vsareto 5y ago
  • mvzvm 5y ago
    Ive recently revisited GW2, and its been fantastic.
  • abakker 5y ago
    given the graphics horsepower of many modern computers, I've been hoping for a "world of diablo" that focuses more on the gothic horror imagery and the backdrop of the much more exciting world that diablo is set in. Make it dark, atmospheric, and pack it with random dungeons, sorcery, and doom-style jump scares. Maybe as a bonus, put it in VR and innovate controls for attacking and spell casting. I can dream, right?
    • naravara 5y ago
      Honestly BloodBorne might scratch that itch if you're willing to work through SoulsBorne difficulty.
  • vntx 5y ago
    Riot is developing a MMO based on Runeterra. It will be interesting to see how that pans out.
    • haunter 5y ago
      It will 100% be like Genshin Impact. Sure you can treat that as an MMO too but don't expect anything like WoW at all
      • ronsor 5y ago
        So there's going to be a gacha system trying to extract hundreds of dollars from you?
        • setr 5y ago
          Well, they have it LoL, so that's to be expected. (the hextech chest stuff)
    • ronsor 5y ago
      These days I'd be weary of running anything Riot puts out since they got that new kernel anti-cheat.
      • brianwawok 5y ago
        What's the flipside, you want to play with cheaters?
        • thaumasiotes 5y ago
          Yes. Very much. The idea that you should be playing games online with strangers you'll never see again has done terrible things to computer games. The solution to cheaters is to tell them "hey, knock it off", because you know them socially. Or to use the same cheats (call them "mods") while playing with them. Or to be so much better that you win anyway. Any of those is better than what we have now.
  • dwaltrip 5y ago
    I’ve been taking some time away from work recently. I played WoW (classic version) for about three months for the first time ever. I made it to level 47 as a night elf hunter. The environment is beautiful. The fighting is well designed. Dungeons can be a nice social experience. It can be a very fun and relaxing game. But it gets super repetitive after a while. The quests are all minor variations of a few simple formats. I just started playing Minecraft two weeks ago and I’m loving it. I’ve never played it before either. It has the exploration and beautiful scenery aspects and feels like a much more creative game. I’m guessing it will be less stale after 3 months than WoW was. But we will see :)
    • DamnYuppie 5y ago
      You are in the no mans land of wow leveling in the mid 40's. As a hunter you should be able to blow through to 60 in a few days from 47, it is one of the better classes for solo leveling. The real fun of wow classic is running dungoens and instances with a guild. A clean run of a 40 man Molten Core run is a hoot. I would say join a guild and run instances with them and see if that sparks some of the fun back into it.
      • thaumasiotes 5y ago
        > The real fun of wow classic is running dungeons and instances with a guild. This does nothing to solve the parent's problem: >> But it gets super repetitive after a while. The quests are all minor variations of a few simple formats. Instead, your proposed solution makes this much worse. > A clean run of a 40 man Molten Core run is a hoot. And this is an... unusual perspective. I raided Molten Core in WoW Classic (the recent release, not the original). It's a huge slog in which the only challenge is mustering the willpower to stay in there for the hours it takes to clear. Once my power cut out during raid, and it came as a big relief.
  • floatingatoll 5y ago
    I’d love to play World of Warcraft with Diablo/Starcraft fixed-POV and gameplay controls. It could be such an interesting story if it weren’t for the camera controls that make me wish I had a flight simulator joystick.
• ocdtrekkie 5y ago
  Overwatch is just feeling stale because OW2 has been in development so long. I'm sure they'll get a huge boost when it launches. But yeah, all their current titles are pretty much just rolling along with nothing new, people are going to go elsewhere in the meantime. The FPS crowd is extremely cyclical, mostly owing to Call of Duty and Battlefield's annual release cycles. Gamers buy the latest FPS, play it for a few months until the next one comes out. A game like Overwatch just... feels old now, even though it's a high-quality well-balanced game.
  • aaomidi 5y ago
    If it launches, one of the major faces of that project has left. There's not a lot of trust @ Blizzard releasing good updates to games anymore.
    • ocdtrekkie 5y ago
      I'll miss Jeff, but he's not the end all of why Overwatch is a fantastic game. Bear in mind "faces" are often just that... the "face" of a large group, who generally is comfortable being in front of the crowds and talking with everyone.
      • jrockway 5y ago
        Hearthstone just wasn't the same without Ben Brode.
    • seoulbran 5y ago
      I wonder if the reason Jeff left was that he was asked to leave for taking so long with the game...? I would rather he not leave as he has been the face of OW for a long time and beloved by the fan base. But, this is a public company and deadlines and dollars matter...
      • ocdtrekkie 5y ago
        I highly doubt it. Very visible employees that are community-loved are incredibly stupid to let go of. Jeff's community fame is worth dozens of other employees' worth to the company. My guess is that Jeff wanted to move on, either due to issues internally, or for something different.
• derekdahmer 5y ago
  Plus Overwatch development has stagnated for the last year or so as their team has been focusing on Overwatch 2, which probably won’t even come out this year.
• jandrese 5y ago
  Blizzard kinda killed the RTS genre with Starcraft 1. It's basically the perfect RTS so everything that came after it seems inferior. Even Starcraft 2. There are still niches for specialized audiences, like historical battles with a more strategic bent, but for mass market RTS nothing has been able to beat a 23 year old game.
  • haunter 5y ago
    .
    • SAI_Peregrinus 5y ago
      Neither is an RTS. They're MOBAs.
      • vaylian 5y ago
        True. But these Mobas are descendants og these RTSs. WarCraft 3 gave birth to Dota 1. StarCraft 1 had the Aeon of Strife map.
        • redisman 5y ago
          Sure but mobas are much closer to action RPGs than RTS games in the actual game experience. The origin story as a mod for a RTS is interesting but doesn’t lock in the genre
    • dgritsko 5y ago
      Those are MOBAs, not RTS.
    • the_lonely_road 5y ago
      I guess it wasn't clear but he is talking about RTS games of which your examples are MOBA games and would not apply.
    • idle_zealot 5y ago
      DOTA and LoL are not RTS games; they’re MOBAs.
• ketamine__ 5y ago
  How do you lose revenue as a gaming biz during a pandemic? Kotick needs to lean in and build out WOW.
  • scruple 5y ago
    Revenue is up, up, up, but MAU is down.
• void_mint 5y ago
  > 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 "only when ready", continuing to lose touch with their playerbase, etc. They made it public that there would be no more Overwatch updates until Overwatch 2 (and also made it public that Overwatch 2 is actually a PvE expansion). There is no release date for OW2, so Overwatch players will be sitting with no new content for over a year. It is very obvious why Blizzard is losing players and not really competing in 2021.
  • AlexandrB 5y ago
    This analysis is probably correct, but it's also depressing as hell because Fortnite is a shallow, money-hungry game. Nothing like Blizzard's best work from the past (Diablo 2, Starcraft) that could be played for years with no "season passes" or other MTX.
    • void_mint 5y ago
      Eh I mean. It's the biggest game in the world for a reason. It's shallow and money hungry to you, but a huge % of its players love it. > Nothing like Blizzard's best work from the past (Diablo 2, Starcraft) that could be played for years with no "season passes" or other MTX. The people responsible for that iteration of Blizzard no longer work there, is the problem.
    • nemothekid 5y ago
      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 content.
• lhorie 5y ago
  > Starcraft 2 is basically dead. WC3 remastered flopped Paradoxically, I've noticed an uptick of new creative Starcraft 2 content on Youtube (similar to those "can you beat the game by doing [insert crazy premise here]" types of videos you see in the Mario community). I think the two company direction things that were noticeable for me were that they decided to try to embrace two major cop-outs: milking cash shop (skins, voice packs) and trying to pull Disney-like re-runs of classics (SC and WC remastered). Many in the community are lamenting that e.g. the dev team behind Starcraft is essentially disbanded. It's like they fundamentally gave up being a game company, and decided to be a collectibles company instead.
  • AceJohnny2 5y ago
    > It's like they fundamentally gave up being a game company, and decided to be a collectibles company instead. If there's one business lesson to take from the history of the video game industry, it's that being a video game company is extremely unreliable. Being a collectibles company is much more reliable. As the company leaders look for ways to make their business endure, it's natural for them to turn to more reliable business models. Nobody likes layoffs.
    • lhorie 5y ago
      I dunno. I think riding on nostalgia can only get you so far. Disney's new Mulan and WC3 remastered getting flak were due to happen at some point, and the criticisms are well deserved IMHO. On the other hand, Mario keeps reinventing the adventure genre with creative mechanics, even though storyline/CGI of each new game is basically non-existent compared to Blizzard's capabilities. WoW obviously did very well in spinning the Warcraft lore into new directions, and Starcraft Ghost was also highly anticipated before the vaporware lost its steam. I think the main difference between Nintendo and Blizzard - and why Nintendo still commands such strong brands - is Nintendo plays the long term game, never getting drunk on a single unicorn success.
  • meowface 5y ago
    The competitive Starcraft 2 scene has definitely seen a new surge of excitement within the past two or so years. (This is just my subjective impression; no idea of the actual numbers. And I'm not sure what the non-professional scene is currently like.) I think a large part of it is that after around 10 years of dominating Starcraft 2 and 20 years of dominating Starcraft 1, there are now some European players who are repeatedly beating Korean players (and everyone else) in the big tournaments. (Including in-person tournaments, so you can't chalk it up to latency differences. Though of course there haven't been any of those in the past year, so we'll see if that'll be sustained.) The two main usurpers, Serral (Finland) and Reynor (Italy) also have a really entertaining rivalry. I'd go so far as to say that those two may have single-handedly kept professional Starcraft 2 interesting and alive.
• pradn 5y ago
  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 because of the art style, but the game play looks good.
  • SiempreViernes 5y ago
    I suppose they mean in the commercial sense, new RTS games certainly don't drive industry leading sales for instance. Certainly in the context of talking about a publisher like Blizzard nothing but raw profit is of any concern. Arty ambitions is the something for the game studios that appear and die off, not for the publisher that seeks to endure.
    • TulliusCicero 5y ago
      To me it just looks like they aren't trying very hard. SC2 did something very smart with its last expansion with the coop mode, and it became very popular despite being only sort of fleshed out. I could easily see that kind of game mode making for a hit RTS if it was the central focus, and had the standard MMO-lite stuff like loot and missions and raids and story and customizable units/armies and support for other group sizes.
      • naravara 5y ago
        Immortal is being built with competitive 2v2 and 3v3 play specifically in mind in addition to 1v1 duels. It should be interesting to see how a pro-scene around that would play out. More combos, more team play, more personality clashes might all make for better eSports engagement. I'm sure PvE modes will be available too.
        • TulliusCicero 5y ago
          Yeah should be cool, I backed it for the alpha.
• baby 5y ago
  Diablo 3 was pretty bad imo, clearly targeting consoles. Path of Exile is a much more faithful sequel to Diablo 2 and has a very active player base. It’s almost like if Valve gave it the same treatment they gave dota2.
  • baumandm 5y ago
    I don't know if this is true or not, but it seems doubtful since it didn't come to consoles for over a year after release. According to Wikipedia: > It was released for Microsoft Windows and OS X in May 2012, the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in September 2013
    • baby 5y ago
      If you played the game it’s a given that they were planning to do that release a long time before it was announced. The gameplay was heavily dumbdowned in D3 exactly for that purpose.
  • supernovae 5y ago
    POE is dangerously close to "2nd job" territory and is struggling to be fun as it heads into curiously complex gameplay and meta game. So i struggle to see how different it is from other blizzard games
    • merb 5y ago
      yeah d3 was lacking meta and PoE overdo's it for the average "hardcore" audience. d2 was mostly fine and the reason why it was so beloved. the problem is that replicating what d2 did with something new is challening or impossible without rebuilding it (thus being a clone)
  • dleslie 5y ago
    I prefer Grim Dawn, myself.
• AmVess 5y ago
  In terms of WoW, I'm sure a lot of it is focusing on the top raiding guilds and leaving the casual player with few rewarding activities. Further, one of their most cherished metrics is how much time people spend doing a certain activity. Instead of making those activities more fun and rewarding, they made them take longer to complete and with fewer rewards. To top it all off, they are nearly completely deaf to their player's concerns, and instead focus on metrics instead of gameplay or fun activities. People at Blizzard certainly have forgotten that games are supposed to be fun. They try to cloak their declining userbase by saying they have the highest number of logins ever, but they quit reporting individual subscribers a long time ago. One of them is a completely worthless metric and the other keeps the lights on. The last of the original WoW dev team quit Blizzard last year, and they are running with a crew that don't have the chops to make engaging games.
  • serverholic 5y ago
    This is why "you can't improve what you don't measure" bothers me. It's rare that you can condense all useful information into a number and it encourages people to remove critical thinking from the equation. People come to rely on the number instead of thinking deeply about what they're doing.
    • oriel 5y ago
      This is basically Goodhart's law (quote from Marilyn Strathern's generalization). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law > When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure
  • slaymaker1907 5y ago
    Definitely agree and a lot of the popular WoW content creators (Bellular, T&E, etc.) seem to agree. They don't always mention casuals, but lack of progression is a major issue, particularly in Shadowlands. As a person spending too much time playing, you are basically forced to do non-LFR raiding, rated PvP, or mythic+ dungeons to actually progress your gear at all. Not to mention they seem to hate flying yet keep creating terrible zones unless you can fly. There aren't clear routes between common locations like roads in Skyrim. That can be ok, but in that case they really need to have a flatter level design like in Oblivion.
• nemothekid 5y ago
  >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 about the slow trickle of balance changes and the casual community has always complained about the lack of new content (maps, events, heroes). The communication was decent at first then fell off a giant cliff. A lot of competitive players and streamers burned out of playing boring and/or frustrating metas (for a year or more) and casual players ultimately got bored. My theory is (I'm stealing this from someone else) is essentially Activision saw they had a huge player base who paid $60 once and never again. The extremely consumer-positive loot box system (you can get ample loot boxes by just playing the game, and loot boxes avoid giving you items you already have) means that most players didn't need to buy loot boxes; in fact if you played the game a lot (as a potential whale) you didn't need to pay at all for your favorite skins. Activision saw that after Year 2/Year 3 the revenue growth for OW fell off a cliff and deprioritized people who would have been making new art/content for the game. In order reclaim that revenue those people were then moved to "Overwatch 2" and all new content was focused on that game. However that game has been delayed (again, and again) so now the player base is hemoragging even harder. I say this as someone who loves the game, and doesn't play any other game. The game might have lasted longer if they followed Riot's model and made it free to play with micro transactions.
  • phillryu 5y ago
    It seems like they're setting up for that with OW1 being compatible with OW2 multiplayer. They'll probably just make OW1 free to play shortly following launch of OW2.
  • vkou 5y ago
    The problem is not how Overwatch was maintained, the problem is that the core formula isn't fun. Forcing two tanks, two healers, two DPS characters leads to eight minute DPS queues. But if you don't force this kind of team composition, the game becomes incredibly unfun for the team that has five DPS characters and no tank. You'd figure that this would drive DPS players to switch to the other roles, to reduce the time they spend in queue - but no, the queues today are as long as they ever were. It's probably because a lot of people don't find the support roles fun to play. Contrast it to something like League of Legends, where queues for each role are much closer in length - probably because a large portion of the player-base finds supporting roles fun in that game.
• alpaca128 5y ago
  > 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 rare exceptions. So now suddenly you do have a couple different objectives, but those never change and set the pace and timing for every single round, always in the same way. In comparison, LoL and DotA always have the exact same map and objectives on it, but the teams are free to do what they want. Stay in lane for 20 minutes? Sure, why not, if none of the teams force the next phase. Focus on teamfights and kills or try to get the next dragon? Whatever you want. I played HotS for 2 weeks and then I just needed to see the next map's loading screen to know where I'd need to stand exactly 2 minutes into the round. It becomes a game of kill-and-fetch quests where you also have to rely on 4 other people to do the right thing. Not fun.
  • mrgordon 5y ago
    I strongly disagree. The maps add tons of variety and the objectives force you to have team battles instead of just one vs one landing to last hit minions all game. Shared XP is another part of making it less about winning your one lane The issue is they were late to MOBAs and made the game entirely free so there was no reason to really support the game. Eventually the finance people notice
    • hengri 5y ago
      If that was true, we would still be using myspace and friendster.
    • alpaca128 5y ago
      > The maps add tons of variety The maps remove variety because they shrink the possible space of what you can do to a finite number of gameplay objectives. The game tells you that some objective starts in exactly 1:27 from now and if you're not there at that time your team is disadvantaged and probably about to lose. That's not variety, that gets old quick, as a player as well as an audience for a professional league that you'd need to even start competing with any other Moba.
• brobdingnagians 5y ago
  I didn't know about Valorant before. Thank you! I'm going to go look into that. Every time I play Overwatch the matchups seem so off and if you get a bad healer or tank you are toast, I end up thinking "Why do I still play this game". Valorant seems to have a better way of dealing with differences in the classes and mix-and-match with the weapons, which seems like a good player can play solo casual and make a bigger difference without having their team just completely fold.
• ainiriand 5y ago
  All of this started with the Activision buyout. They wanted to milk the cow as much as possible, outsourcing ALL. It is not working.
• neatze 5y ago
  > Starcraft 2 is basically dead. Do you have source for this claim, because population in StarCraft is fairly stable, at least based on ranking statistics.
• drbojingle 5y ago
  RTS genre is waning, but Age of Empires 2 is still holding on.
• gentleman11 5y ago
  > don’t you have phones? Blizzard isn’t the same company it once was. It used to be known for deep gameplay and creative stories but now it’s focused entirely on the free to play skinners boxes of card games, a mmo, and loot boxes to monetize the other games. Almost the entire early-days staff has moved on to other companies. Blizzard doesn’t exist any more, just a big corporation with the same name
  • dleslie 5y ago
    Ain't this the truth. Most of the OG Blizzard team members have left; it is nowhere near the company that made Warcraft, Diablo, Blackthorne, Starcraft et al. The writing was on the wall with Diablo 3's item market. D3 itself is just... Forgettable?
• Blackthorn 5y ago
  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.
• drdrey 5y ago
  I used to be a daily Hearthstone player and I dropped completely given how they handled the situation with the Hong Kong protests
  • ajuc 5y ago
    Same but with sc2.
• AussieWog93 5y ago
  >I can't say what's driving all the playerbase losses It's because the current culture at Blizzard is dominated by theorycrafting eggheads who believe that the poor, misguided players aren't playing the game "properly" and need to be told what to do.
• hnick 5y ago
  What is missing from the title is that revenue is up. They are wringing more cash out of fewer players. This could be aggressive monetisation driving people away, either directly due to how it feels or indirectly due to dev resources pushed into fancy hats instead of core content. The article does say that Shadowlands and WoW Classic carried the torch for revenue. One is old-Blizzard quality I guess, the other pretty much as expected for a new WoW expansion. People are going to buy it. Whether or not they stick around is another story. It does note that they did not confirm if subscription numbers are rising or not in WoW (modern).
  • AmVess 5y ago
    The monetization in WoW is pretty invisible. Many games have a core of players who love playing no matter what and don't mind buying whatever new thing pops up on the store. Everquest 2 is such a game. It is basically dead in terms of attracting new players, but people who love playing it have been keeping the parent company afloat for a while. IIRC, WoW and EQ2 came out at the same time. I can easily see Blizzard having the same fate in the not too distant future.
    • hnick 5y ago
      Well the monthly sub is quite clear, as well as paid expansions. Which I'm a fan of (I play FFXIV a bit). Otherwise, there's no clear price signal. In f2p or bolted on cash shops like FFXIV I'm always wondering, should I buy some mtx? I don't really want to encourage them too much. I don't know what is reasonable to spend to keep the game afloat, I don't want to feel like a leech, but I really have no interest in cosmetics. I don't know if buying or not buying sends a stronger signal to them to spend more effort on mtx rather than the game - sometimes it just seems like all roads lead that way. FFXI is in a similar state to EQ2 I'd guess, it only has the monthly sub but a really hardcore base who's still there (or dips their toes back in like I did for a bit) after all these years. It still gets minor monthly updates and probably has a nice ROI for the effort.
• maerF0x0 5y ago
  > The RTS genre writ large is definitely in a waning phase. I've been longing for a good RTS for a long time. Give me something like Lords of the realm 2, C&C Generals, Future Cop: LAPD (ps1) plz.
• andoofthewoods 5y ago
  add to that their foray into Mobile gaming (ignoring their main player base), as well as the controversy around Hong Kong.
• krageon 5y ago
  I stopped playing their games and being particularly excited about what's coming when they got taken over by a large publisher. That's always a deathknell for fun, and without fun there's no point to video games.
• nickik 5y ago
  > Starcraft 2 is basically dead I just started playing. Awesome game.
• naravara 5y ago
  > 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.
• Lazare 5y ago
  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...
• redisman 5y ago
  I just don’t understand what they’re doing. I played every Blizzard game since Warcraft 1 but after them killing HotS and me growing bored of Hearthstone and WoW years/decade ago there hasn’t been anything for me to buy from them in years.
• riffraff 5y ago
  How about hearthstone? They release new content regularly and have significantly extended the game with new modes of play over the years. I think it has its own set of problems but they seem different from the ones you mention.