From MtG and its everchanging sets, significant expense, multiple formats and awful online experience/UI came Hearthstone. A card game that tens of millions have gotten into. It looks fantastic, takes no initial investment, and costs a fraction of what a MtGO deck costs to go from nothing to a top tier competitive deck.
Other examples:
- Roguelikes -> Diablo
- RTS -> Warcraft & Starcraft
- MMO -> World of Warcraft
- DotA/2 -> Heroes of the Storm
- Team Fortress/2 -> Overwatch (not yet released)
It's an interesting case study on a company that's succeeded in taking genres usually reserved for a niche audience and bringing them to the masses. It's not a company without flaws and missteps, but it's an interesting lesson in bringing existing markets to a wider audience. I wonder if there's something more general that can be gleaned from their strategy to products outside of games.
I wholeheartedly agree that Blizzard has not made one bad game yet. On the other hand, we don't need to hype up their success: several of their recent games have been kind of a ... flop, notably Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2. Both had really good sales on release (not necessary great on Blizzard scale), but the longevity is definitely nowhere near the long time plan they originally have. Starcraft 2 was supposed to become the king of Esport, yet LOL took the charge and firmly stay on top with a significant gap. Diablo 3 Real-money Auction house has to be shut down, and even the mighty WOW lost more than 3 millions subscribers in the last 2 quarters. Hearthstone, however is indeed an amazing success.
World of Warcraft is especially an interesting case, seeing that all the 2nd most popular MMO has never came anywhere near the popularity of WoW, it's questionable whether MMO is an actually viable genre in the long run. Note that most other MMO in 2nd place come and go in waves, never lasting more than a few months to a year. The one with the most consistent number of subscribers (and growing) is Eve online, which is firmly in a niche and does not even have 10% of wow players.
I would not call Diablo 3 a flop, by the way. The game has sold over 30 million copies, and the console releases and post-real-money-auction-house balance changes have supposedly made the game great (I'm not a fan of the genre so I don't know first-hand).
Anyway, no need to get into too many details on the particulars. They've had enough breakout successes and "unicorn" level games that there's something about the strategy and execution that sets Blizzard apart.
From what I can observe, it's some mix of the following:
- Simplifying down the core gameplay to something that players can grasp quickly, without compromising complexity (that can be safely ignored for the initial stages).
- Making the core gameplay loop fun and repeatable without being repetitive.
- Making players feel rewarded for playing and purchasing. (see Hearthstone's "won the game" screen and opening pack animations)
- Keeping the games deep enough so that even top, professional players never hit a skill cap.
That doesn't seem to be the case. Wow has 5.6 million players, but it's followed by a few games with 4-5 million players, and a number with >1 million. I'm not sure if that's just current players, or a running total.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_massively_multip...
No trading - cards are bound to the account if I have card A and my friend has card B we can't swap cards with each other.
RNG - apparently Hearthstone is more RNG influenced then MtG the argument being this makes Hearthstone less skill and more luck based then MtG.
The thing I find most objectionable about Magic Online is having to duplicate your paper collection - which essentially means paying for the same cards twice, which is not something I'm all that keen to do. Not an issue for sealed tournaments like drafting but I'm not keen to invest in an electronic constructed format.
Exactly. Not being able to redeem your digital collection out to paper cards means you are completely at the mercy of WotC for the value of your cards.
Um, no. Yes, my physical MtG cards vary in price, but unless WotC actually reprints or bans a card, they tend to stay in a fairly predictable range.
I could come up with many more examples but the true proof to me is that of the loyal consumer. I know of no one who has only played one blizzard game. If you play WC3, you instantly get a visceral feeling that you can trust their other games to be equally good. Even decades later, as Hearthstone reflects, Blizzards DNA is still shining through. So it is with Apple and their products[0]. Though no one and nothing is perfect, you can sense the maniacal focus behind the scenes.
[0] If you consider the years where they've had proper leadership. (i.e. disregard the pepsi years)
I hear the recent versions on MtGO are better, but it still isn't cross-platform or system friendly. It's a shame, because the basic game shone through the cruddy front-end and the servers actually enforced the rules well.
Oh god no.
Yeah, version 1 was bad, (Leaping Lizards was clearly in over their heads) so Wizards stepped in and made everything utterly worse.
First they made a half-assed attempt at a "version 2", which they bungled so badly they had to actually shut the game down while they recovered the pieces. But this, rather than convincing them that they hadn't a clue how to write or operate MTGO, instead convinced them that they needed to double down. For version 3, they decided rewrite the entire thing from scratch. Sort of an unholy amalgamation of second-system effect, NIH syndrome, and the coding skills you'd expect from a company that had never made a computer game before.
Version 3 was hugely delayed, hugely overbudget, and...well...utter, utter crap. The UI was worse, many features were lost, performance was bad, stability was terrible; there was literally no advantage over version 2. It took them 5 years to launch it, more to make it playable, and when it was done, it was so bad I stopped player literally because I couldn't stand the client any more.
Apparently there's a version 4 now, but it's basically just 3.1; they didn't fix any of the core issues. If they could bring back something that looked and worked like version 2, I might start playing again, but really, every version they released was some form of pathetically bad. There's literally a half dozen half-assed shareware deck builders from 15 years ago that had better UIs than any MTGO client has ever had. :(
Even before Hearthstone, I used to wonder what might have been if Wizards had signed a deal with a "real" developer like Blizzard to build and run the game properly. With the launch of Hearthstone, I think we know. Oh well.
I know it happens, I know why, but it's still so amazing...
From the players' side, v3 was just much, much, much worse than v2. But I'm pretty sure WotC realized that. I've heard, though I can't personally attest, that the reason they stuck with v3 was that v2 ran on a single server, and they didn't know how to fix it.
From what I've read, the recent versions of MTGO are worse. Yes, worse than the client made in 2002, with fewer features and a worse UI.
https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/2gz8k2/an_average...
It's a disgrace. And should be a software case study.
PS: been playing MtG since 1995
Even with a properly managed team, moving 20+ years of edge cases and odd interactions for a turing complete game is going to be difficult. The fact that they need to come up with a usable ui on top of that only adds to the suffering. Its not unsurprising that what they currently have can only be considered working in the most generous and utilitarian sense.
Don't mistake me for covering for Worth: a top quality group led by management who knew what they were doing would be much farther in both correctness and UX.
On the other hand, the actual cards just work. The hard part for them, it seems, is "operating a game that more than a few hundred people want to play", not the rules engine.
And that's the problem. Everybody sees these as "edge cases". And that leads to failure. You can't simplify the back end engine, each card needs to be fully general and you need to carry around all its characteristics. At that point, you can execute all the actions you need because edge cases aren't. But, if you take even a single shortcut, it ripples outward and causes bugs everywhere.
And, the less said about the GUI designers, the better. The GUI is without a doubt the worst gaming GUI I have ever experienced.
And still, it would make a great case of analysis... I see it as one of the biggest -and saddest- failures in Digital Gaming (if not the greatest), of the last 20 years.
I have no idea what is going on over there. People had to have been throwing money hand over fist to allow them to fail so badly and keep going.
It frustrates me to no end that we don't have anything playable on the web or all over mobile. DotP and Duels Origins don't count. I feel that this type of thing should have been figured out.
I also wonder what internal conversations were going on about the Hearthstone ascendant. I keep hearing that they're not trying to do the same thing and that they're not truly competitors but I see a whole generation of kids and adults that have moved on to that. I like the deep play of MtG but Hearthstone just feels holistically better.
Reports have indicated that Magic Online is around 17% of Magic's revenue ($43 million out of $250 million).
Our game, from the start, was built to: 1) playable from the web with no client (1mb flash, I suppose) 2) bi-directional socket based to avoid polling and be snappy 3) server is scalable horizontally 4) adding complex cards and rules will not require a client update and would be easy.
We managed to complete all these goals and produce what I still consider to be our magnum opus of software development.
The scaling worked by having socket servers provide the end-point to the client, and then behind the socket servers were chat services, game services, trading services, card building services and deck services. So, lets say we had 4 socket servers running: you and I might end up on different socket servers, but we could still play against each other because all the socket servers are doing is relaying your commands to a game server that is running our game. In order to scale, we just add more servers. (Also, if we get disconnected you can reconnect easily. Also, spectating is easy.)
My friend came up with the idea of making the Flash front-end use generic commands. So instead of the server telling the front-end "Ship A attacks Ship B for 5 damage" it says "Draw a red arrow from Card #123 to Card #456 and display a red number 5". This allowed us to make cards that did all kinds of crazy things without having to do anything to the client. To implement a card that does damage to all of a player's ships you just have to update the server to send the command "Draw a red arrow from Card #123 to Card #456, Card #789, etc...".
Finally, the core game engine on the server was an event loop. Thus, making new cards and rules was super easy because all you had to do in code was say "I want this new card to subscribe to the Player Draw Card event, and in that event code: "if drawer is this.owner, draw twice the amount as regular and then this.sendtograve." I was continually blown away by what crazy cards we could make up and how little code it took to implement.
As we were creating this game our day jobs became more and more serious and when we finally had the final version complete we both agreed to burn the code and resources to DVD and put it on the shelve. The idea of starting a new journey in marketing and building a company was overwhelming. (Just three months ago I got it all running in the cloud with very little effort for nostalgias sake).
I still think about pinging WOTC and asking if they'd like to see what we have and maybe make use of it. I knew WOTC had an online version of MOTG but I had NO idea it had so many rough patches or I would have been down in front of their office with a sign asking them to look at what we have.
If anyone from WOTC or other would like to see or talk about the game, feel free to message me.
Add on poor server stability that causes players who paid to participate in events to get kicked out and loose due to the issues and the experience is horrible.
It`s a credit to the quality of the card game that such a crappy experience is even played at all.
I gave up in college after I learned that Magic the Gathering is actually kinda expensive.
http://thedailywtf.com/articles/Do-You-Believe-In-Magic-Onli...
