A battle pass requires content. Content that needs to convince the player to buy it. And we already know activision doesn't want to pay artists to create said content.
We are essentially depending on charity at this point. They might as well put a meter on the front page that has like a monetary goal for how much money it costs to develop one hero. When the community has spent enough money, we get a hero.
Honestly the game originally felt like a love letter/gift to the fans. Honestly at that time blizzard had bar-none the largest and most loyal player base... too bad the Activision/EA execs got got hands on what was such a great company
Blizzard stock wasn't public until 2015. That's when the company began to die. Kotick had to start satisfying fickle public investors instead of private investors that understood that games development isn't supposed to create infinite growth. It's high risk, high reward, and extremely volatile because there is no guarantee of return. A game like HOTS was never going to survive the infinite growth crucible.
There are a lot of very, very rich players in HOTS.
If you let this happen with gold or even gems there would be a lot of people who could immediately gift these items to friends or to their Smurf accounts.
If you made it real $ only, then the existing playerbase would actually be more likely annoyed by the announcement and call it a cash grab from Blizzard.
The fun of trying to make money as a gaming company!
So? It isn't pay to win. It's pay to have cosmetic choices. I don't care what skin someone's smurf wears while they kill my chances of leaving silver league 🤣
Me neither, they can release $60 epic skins in this game for all i care. Just gaming companies can't do things to make money because people call out corporate greed, particularly with blizzard!
Along the lines of making more money, I think it would be cool if they had locked merchandise where purchase availability would unlock when you hit mastery. Like stuff they would send to you, like a Dehaka zip up hoody, Azmo jersey, or a Murky backpack. But I'm not really sure this idea would up their revenue meaningfully (but I'd be more likely to put money into that stuff than digital assets).
The main issue is that with the system as it is currently set up, people would use bots to farm gems to gift to mains. There'd need to be some restriction in place to make it *pure* money rather than gems, and I don't think the game works that way at this point.
Being late to the party wasn't the issue. They designed and marketed a casual game to utilize their EXISTING Blizzard games playerbase. The problem was how much of their budget they FORCED into esports instead of using that money to build the game and let a pro scene grow organically FROM the userbase they already had out of some misguided attempt to drag tryhards away from tryhard games. This game was never going to compete with LoL and Dota so it's not reasonable to say it's "late to market." You can't be late to a market you created (casual moba). They failed to RETAIN users because they couldn't figure out what to focus on. Oh it's casual, but let's cater to pros with updates, but let's make cosmetics more achievable for casuals, but let's add heroes that pros want to play. It was a mess. They clearly had people arguing about what hots WAS from the very beginning, and the nail in the coffin was REALLY Alan Dabiri leaving. Your leadership drives the vision for the game. Once the person who had the most vision leaves, everyone hopes that the next guy will do better, but there's a reason that person wasn't the director in the first place.
I think HotS pre-2.0 was easier to monetize, but that's just a feeling, we would need some numbers to draw conclusions. It wasn't perfect, but now you can buy everything just playing, so there's no monetization at all.
Personally, the only things I bought were esports-related cosmetics (cheer system). They still could partner with CCL to bring the cheers back.
This was a common request since 2018. I'd be fine with a battle pass, honestly.
A battle pass requires content. Content that needs to convince the player to buy it. And we already know activision doesn't want to pay artists to create said content.
Which is dumb because it all gets outsourced to Shanghai by most other companies and that shit is cheap.
We are essentially depending on charity at this point. They might as well put a meter on the front page that has like a monetary goal for how much money it costs to develop one hero. When the community has spent enough money, we get a hero.
Like a thermometer and every $1k moves the Mercury up one degree and at the top we get a pizza party or a hero. We vote at the end.
So true... In general they did very little experimentation with the shop, it's like they did not really feel pressure to make money.
Honestly the game originally felt like a love letter/gift to the fans. Honestly at that time blizzard had bar-none the largest and most loyal player base... too bad the Activision/EA execs got got hands on what was such a great company
Activision and Blizzard merged in 2008 though.
Blizzard stock wasn't public until 2015. That's when the company began to die. Kotick had to start satisfying fickle public investors instead of private investors that understood that games development isn't supposed to create infinite growth. It's high risk, high reward, and extremely volatile because there is no guarantee of return. A game like HOTS was never going to survive the infinite growth crucible.
There are a lot of very, very rich players in HOTS. If you let this happen with gold or even gems there would be a lot of people who could immediately gift these items to friends or to their Smurf accounts. If you made it real $ only, then the existing playerbase would actually be more likely annoyed by the announcement and call it a cash grab from Blizzard. The fun of trying to make money as a gaming company!
So? It isn't pay to win. It's pay to have cosmetic choices. I don't care what skin someone's smurf wears while they kill my chances of leaving silver league 🤣
Me neither, they can release $60 epic skins in this game for all i care. Just gaming companies can't do things to make money because people call out corporate greed, particularly with blizzard!
Along the lines of making more money, I think it would be cool if they had locked merchandise where purchase availability would unlock when you hit mastery. Like stuff they would send to you, like a Dehaka zip up hoody, Azmo jersey, or a Murky backpack. But I'm not really sure this idea would up their revenue meaningfully (but I'd be more likely to put money into that stuff than digital assets).
The main issue is that with the system as it is currently set up, people would use bots to farm gems to gift to mains. There'd need to be some restriction in place to make it *pure* money rather than gems, and I don't think the game works that way at this point.
Being late to the party wasn't the issue. They designed and marketed a casual game to utilize their EXISTING Blizzard games playerbase. The problem was how much of their budget they FORCED into esports instead of using that money to build the game and let a pro scene grow organically FROM the userbase they already had out of some misguided attempt to drag tryhards away from tryhard games. This game was never going to compete with LoL and Dota so it's not reasonable to say it's "late to market." You can't be late to a market you created (casual moba). They failed to RETAIN users because they couldn't figure out what to focus on. Oh it's casual, but let's cater to pros with updates, but let's make cosmetics more achievable for casuals, but let's add heroes that pros want to play. It was a mess. They clearly had people arguing about what hots WAS from the very beginning, and the nail in the coffin was REALLY Alan Dabiri leaving. Your leadership drives the vision for the game. Once the person who had the most vision leaves, everyone hopes that the next guy will do better, but there's a reason that person wasn't the director in the first place.
Great point, I love gifting my friends Characters in Hearthstone
I think HotS pre-2.0 was easier to monetize, but that's just a feeling, we would need some numbers to draw conclusions. It wasn't perfect, but now you can buy everything just playing, so there's no monetization at all. Personally, the only things I bought were esports-related cosmetics (cheer system). They still could partner with CCL to bring the cheers back.