Comment by Grimm1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Grimm1 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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.

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...

Yes, I agree. The paid content is good (and the changes they've made to F2P are good, too), and I also think that it's required to maintain the level of development that they are pumping into the game, but... IMO, it is not as easy to play Hearthstone _casually_ today as it was 3 years ago and that's the time frame that the article is discussing wrt MAU.

edit/ The addition of classic mode may make it more approachable for casual players. Time will tell.

Didn't they just copy the MtG model on cycling content for competitions? I could be wrong but I thought it was almost exactly what Wizards of the Coast starting doing in the early days of Magic.

Quite possibly. I'm not familiar enough with MtG to say. But it keeps the game fresh, while conveniently (for Blizzard) also ensuring the fans keep paying.

I'll admit Hearthstone is the only mobile game I've consistently played over the years. As a huge gamer, nothing else in the mobile space has had the breadth and depth of Hearthstone, while being accessible for 5-20 minute sessions.

I’m excited to see life in the Diablo franchise after (personal opinion) the abomination that was Diablo 3.

But I’ve really lost trust in the company and have a hard time imagining Diablo 4 being much better than Diablo 3.

Diablo 2 Resurrected looks intriguing and seems to be going about things in the right way, involving the community, etc. but I believe it’s a contract job by a third party? I have a hard time imagining Blizzard proper ever making a single-player, offline-friendly game.

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

D3 is really, really fun. It started out at launch ok at best. Pretty grindy, and slow. One or two playthroughs was enough for most people. Nowadays though the endgame is definitely on my top 10 list. Once you hit level 70 and get an armor set finished with some Kanai's Cube and start leveling up your legendary gems... Oh man

D3 is a good game marred by a sub-par launch.

Interesting, I played at launch so perhaps I ought to check it out again.

That’s how I saw it. My wife and I each have hundreds of paragon points, so that new characters are born ridiculously OP. But IMHO that’s fun, too! I collected all the speed runs, like “beat Act I in 1 hour” and that was challenging. Going for the ludicrous achievements like “kill 400 enemies consecutively” was fun. Running through a ridiculously hard timed dungeon, getting an electric charge, and watching all these uber-powerful demons explode as I sprint past them was way satisfying. Coming up with equipment sets where every piece doubles my damage points was engaging.

At launch, it was alright. Now that I’m a wildly powerful godlike thing that can kill Diablo by looking at him sideways, it’s an awful lot of fun in a completely different way.

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

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

I thought it was fun for what it was, but that it was sold and pushed as something it wasn’t. And overall (just my opinion) lacking gravitas.

For one it felt too easy. Some of this was likely console controller vs. mouse - and so maybe not the game itself’s fault - but it felt like point-and-click turned into just click, making it more one dimensional.

And two, I felt less weight/permanence in character building decisions. One of my favorite aspects of d2 is specialized builds, that you can screw them up, and generally delaying spending skill/stat points until certain. I thought d3 character customization felt more cosmetic and like my choices ultimately didn’t matter as all builds were so strong. Like it didn’t matter how I allocated points on my tree in the same way it felt like navigation and attack, described above, had lost some nuance. And that seems off to me when every character pretty much plays as a gear-independent caster.

> Blizzard has released only the WoW expansion

I think the last thing WoW needs is more expansions.

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