Blizzcon 2018

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Majes

Golden Member
Apr 8, 2008
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Blizzard has been about screwing their customers since Starcraft 2 was planned. Most people know that they sold it as three separate games. They also released a battle.net 2.0 with it that had less features than the original battle.net had (tournaments, chat channels, etc.).

Diablo 3 released and it was pretty clear that the Auction House was better than the game.

Hearthstone has the highest priced cards in the genre.

It's no surprise to me that they want to get into mobile gaming. I think they will do a good job of it too. There won't be many micro-transactions and they will be fairly high priced. The trick will be seeing if it's just a port of D3 or if they've finally figured out how to make item and build diversity a thing. I doubt it.

I know Blizzcon came as a shock for many people that Blizzard was so out of touch with their customers, but Blizzard has been making games for the wallet instead of games for players a long time now.
 

Majes

Golden Member
Apr 8, 2008
1,164
148
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You even mention Hearthstone in your post, come on.

They've been in mobile gaming. They're expanding their presence.

I'm not sure what you're arguing. Yes, Hearthstone is mobile, but it is the same game as the PC version. The monetization is the same. This will be their first new game on mobile, and it will most likely be monetized as such.
 

DeathReborn

Platinum Member
Oct 11, 2005
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It doesn't bode well for PC releases if they have moved their "best" developers to mobile IP either.
 
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Aikouka

Lifer
Nov 27, 2001
30,383
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It doesn't bode well for PC releases if they have moved their "best" developers to mobile IP either.

I can't profess to know what it's like to work at Blizzard because... well, I don't work there. However, it's not terribly uncommon for game development or even graphic-heavy software development to have various pipelines that stall out at points. What this means is that when your developers aren't really needed, or in reality, aren't needed to such a degree, you'll want to either (a) lay them off, or (b) find them something else to do. What a company can do is attempt to layout project plans to ensure that different teams always have work. If I had to guess, the Diablo III team probably isn't too terribly large at this point.

Although, some of that would suggest using an internal team to develop the engine rather than use NetEase. The only thing I can consider there is that Blizzard didn't really want to focus more developers on Unity (assuming that's what it's using for the cross-platform capability) when that's the aim of the Hearthstone development team.

Writing all this out... it would be interesting to see what sort of project plans Blizzard does have. I imagine it would probably be some massive, ominous Microsoft Project file. :p
 

sweenish

Diamond Member
May 21, 2013
3,656
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I'm not sure what you're arguing. Yes, Hearthstone is mobile, but it is the same game as the PC version. The monetization is the same. This will be their first new game on mobile, and it will most likely be monetized as such.

I'm arguing that they've "been" in mobile gaming. Hearthstone was always a mobile game that also got a PC release. It softened the blow. And it's not their first new game on mobile. That was Hearthstone.
 

Majes

Golden Member
Apr 8, 2008
1,164
148
106
I'm arguing that they've "been" in mobile gaming. Hearthstone was always a mobile game that also got a PC release. It softened the blow. And it's not their first new game on mobile. That was Hearthstone.

I'm sorry, but that's not correct. Hearthstone was a PC game that was later released on mobile. It only took a month for them to port it to iOS, but android took 9-10 months.

Don't get me wrong... I understand and agree that Hearthstone is on mobile. It's just not wrong to say that this is their first new mobile game. Porting a game is different from designing a new game.