[jordan801]

Here's the problem with this game:

- Blizzards slew of beloved franchises makes it easy to entrap nostalgia addicted masses to a number of pay to win clones. Or slowly implement these types of features into existing games.

- Half of the assets are from a 10 year old prequel. This game was cheap to make and will have an insanely high profit margin. Leading to perpetuation of this model.

- Scummy mobile pay to win is already accepted as the standard for mobile. With a desktop port, Blizzard can expand that complacency to further markets.

- Pay to Win models incentivize paid content over legitimate, engaging content. I.e. story, character models and gameplay will deteriorate overtime in favor of producing content that turns profit.

This is inevitable though.

[erulabs]

I don't think its inevitable and I don't think it's a good long term monetization strategy. It's just short term planning with complete disregard for the long term health of the company. How the board of directors doesn't see this is shocking. Maybe they do and also want to milk it today instead of tomorrow just like the C-suite. Yes, exploitative mobile gaming is profitable as hell - but in the current world is alienating your extremely loyal (and higher earning) fan-base worth it?

Either way, it's a shame and a waste of a lot of really great IP that will be buried alive when the coffin that is Blizzard is lowered into the ground.

[mmmmmbop]

> It's just short term planning with complete disregard for the long term health of the company. How the board of directors doesn't see this is shocking.

I wonder if milking the company's reputation like this perhaps actually is the most optimal strategy for Blizzard. Innovation requires investment and luck, and it can create a great reputation for a brand. Once you have that reputation though, perhaps it's not rational to try your luck again. Maybe the expectation value is highest if you just sell out.

It's not just Blizzard, see e.g. the twelfth installment of Assassin's Creed or the eighteenth installment of Call of Duty. For that matter, it's not even just video games. Look at the tenth Fast & Furious movie or the fifteenth iPhone that are coming out soon, and will surely sell like crazy, even though they'll probably not be very innovative.

[VHRanger]

> I don't think it's a good long term monetization strategy

You can look at plenty of games that have lived for a long time on this:

- Supercell games (Clash Royale, Clash of Clans, Hay Day, etc.)

- Genshin Impact

- Heartstone and Magic Arena

- Rainbow 6 The Division (most profitable Ubisoft game)

[erulabs]

Of those listed I've only played Hearthstone and Clash Royale. I reached top rank in Clash Royale, and I believe I only spent 5 dollars on it to get a neat looking board to play on - so I don't think they generate quite the ill-will that a legendary PC competitive game developer like Blizzard generates when they produce something much worse than most existing (at least in the west) mobile free to play games.

My point isn't that these sorts of games aren't profitable - it's that they should have spun up a new studio with a new name instead of lighting the good will of a 25+ year IP that's held so dearly on fire.

[HWR_14]

Except MS is buying Blizzard, and they seem to have a healthy respect for long term recurring revenues by keeping franchises alive.

[ayngg]

Blizzard is close to being a zombie company, the last game with true Blizzard pedigree was probably around 15 years ago, their last decent game was almost 10 years ago, they are milking the last few drops from the geriatric cash cow that is WoW, they have completely failed to capitalize on competitive games with Overwatch, Heroes of the Storm or even WoW arena, and they are all languishing, Diablo Immortal is a mobile p2w game, while all they have to look forward to is Overwatch 2 which is a glorified patch and if Diablo 4 isn't some smash success they have nothing else.

Add on top of that the company culture, sexual harassment scandals, all of the significant employees leaving, the Blizzard everyone knew is long gone. Gamers have moved past Blizzard, new gamers don't care about their games, so the only thing they have left is the IP to milk nostalgia from, which is why they finally started to make remakes of Warcraft 3 and Diablo 2.

[mmmmmbop]

I don't think it's true that their last decent game was almost 10 years ago. Overwatch is a really great game and it came out 6 years ago.

[ayngg]

Compared to the kind of games that made Blizzard iconic like SCBW, TFT, D2, and early WoW which were basically pillars in the gaming world, the game, while polished, was a fairly mediocre Team Fortress variant in comparison. It also had lofty ambitions of sustaining a large e-sports scene to the point where investors were paying tens of millions to have the right of owning a team. That never materialized and the game has basically been stagnant for years, waiting for Overwatch 2 (which was recently teased and didn't appear to change much) while other games like Valorant or Apex have made it largely irrelevant in that space.

[mmmmmbop]

All you said is true, but now you're shifting goal posts. You previously said Blizzard's last 'decent' game was 10 years ago, not the last game that was 'basically a pillar in the gaming wold'.

While Overwatch may not have achieved it's lofty ambitions, it's still extremely well-regarded [0], had 50 million players (which is quite impressive given that it's not free-to-play) and has grossed over $1 billion. It arguably brought the modern hero shooter genre to mainstream popularity and caused a flood of similar games to follow it. You're right, nowadays there are more popular games in that genre, but at the time it was quite a novel concept.

Since you said 10 years since the last 'decent' game from Blizzard, I assume you referred to Diablo 3. I wonder, by what metric is Diablo 3 a decent game and Overwatch isn't?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_considered...

[ayngg]

The game I was thinking about was Hearthstone, which basically legitimized digital card games as a mass market genre. Perhaps I am too harsh on Overwatch, but it is a lot like Diablo 3, which made huge releases with huge hype initially (based on expectations created from their earlier games) and see great initial success but ultimately are unable to retain or grow in the same way their competitors are.

Keep in mind that the profitability of the game is also a result of it being a paid game that also has microtransactions, and even then the gaming market has grown so much that a competitor like Apex is close to making 1 billion a year in comparison.

[abletonlive]

So you're using Hearthstone as an example when it's also P2W and has lootboxes?

Why is everybody so irrational on hackernews now.

[jamespo]

Are you arguing that Overwatch should be F2P like Valorant / Apex?