[toast42]

> HOTS is good. Just hasn't taken off.

It's good but it's not great. League of Legends and Dota2 are both superior games in just about every way. Honestly Blizzard is just really late to the table with this one, which is surprising seeing as how MOBAs started in War3.

> Hearthstone is an amazing success and very fun.

Hearthstone is Magic: The Gathering with most of the pain points removed. I'm not saying it isn't fun or commercially successful, but there's nothing innovative about it. MtG never produced a viable online game, so Blizzard did.

> Starcraft 2 is okay. > Diablo 3 kind of missed the mark

I agree with both statements. SC2 will never be as popular as Brood Wars, and they seem to be struggling with game balance a lot more. D3 completely missed the mark with the auction house.

What I see happening to Blizzard is a focus on micro transactions, with gameplay coming second. I think this article accurately summarizes their history, but ignores recent changes to their company that paint a different picture going forward. I'm not expecting SC3 (should it ever happen) to be as amazing as SC1, and I certainly won't be happy to pay $1 each time I run out of pylons.

[harmegido]

When you say "there's nothing innovative about it" regarding hearthstone, you could say that about several of the games Blizzard has made.

WoW is a direct, improved copy of EQ and others. The default hotkeys for EQ and WoW were even the same - NumLock was autorun on both.

How is this a bad thing? You could just as easily have critiqued google for not being "innovative" - they weren't the first search engine. Taking an idea and executing it well is a skill, and a profitable one for Blizzard.

[dogma1138]

WoW arguably had as much influence on EQ as EQ had on it (and it's not like EQ was the first MMO or even the only big MMORPG out there before WoW came out).

Before WoW EQ had no instanced content (had to camp every mob spawn), mobs were rare especially the ones you wanted to take on on the later levels and it's name was a bit of an oxymoron as it barely had any quests.

WoW pretty much "invented" the modern quest based leveling instanced content PVE-Theme-Park MMO genre, and people who played WoW Beta/Alpha know just how much it changed it pretty much started as an EQ clone questing was scarce Blizzard initially planned to have about 30 quests from 1-60, then said it will take a 100, but eventually the figured out the correct formula (even with having orders of magnitude more content than any other game at the time it still was an utter grind to get to 60 in vanilla some people took months to level to that).

WoW initially launched with more content than any MMO on the market which is something that will not and could not ever be repeated again, they launched at an almost perfect a storm sort to speak, as all of the late 90's fresh 2000's MMO's were dying out due to lack of content and game play becoming stagnant.

If SOE at the time decided instead of working on EQ2 which came too late with too little content (and required a computer from the future to play at high settings not to mention ultra, as even my ATI X800 pro at the time couldn't run it well) and instead worked full steam on putting out content for the original EQ with maybe a slight engine overhaul WoW might not have became the monster it is, however anyone who played / still plays EQ1 will tell you that the best content for it came out after WoW was released and it was almost a direct clone of the WoW style of content delivery and progression.

[toast42]

> When you say "there's nothing innovative about it" regarding hearthstone, you could say that about several of the games Blizzard has made.

This makes them good at making money, not necessarily good at making games. I personally see WoW as the beginning of Blizzard's decent. I can't argue that it made a boatload of money though, or that millions of people love it.

As for how it's a bad thing, Blizzard used to develop some seminal games in the RTS genre. These games showed significant innovation and shaped the genre (though they didn't invent it). Compare that to their current lineup of rehashed and cloned games. I don't see the same level of innovation anywhere.

I think Blizzard is so focused on profits at this point that monetization is the primary concern of any new game. It's just my personal, anecdotal opinion but it's also the reason I don't buy Blizzard games at release anymore.