The numbers haven’t fallen off too much but that just can’t be what they were hoping for. I wonder how much the average person has paid in.
Just took a peek at the action on Twitch. Gaara (a Tempo Storm pro and usually a Hearthstone streamer) is:
Constructed - Current Score: 66-7
Looks like another major stumbling block toward gaining and retaining new players. I don’t know much about the game at all but that appears to mean that those with experience will be totally crushing the newcomers; probably not enough luck in the game to keep potential whales coming back except for a handful of pros who’ve been playing since Beta first started.
Well, it’s a failure. 24 hour peaks are under 20000 after a week. This is definitely not the direction that a successful tcg/ccg goes.
Twitch viewers have dropped precipitously. They peaked at 60,000 the day after release – last night there were 1,700.
It doesn’t seem to be an interesting game to watch. It looks like an interesting game to me, but I’m certainly not buying in now. And I don’t watch other people play anything on Twitch.
Something else I found interesting is this isn’t even Richard Garfield’s only new recent release. He also has a game called Keyforge that just came out. I would think he would want to focus in one or the other.
Oh, this was Garfield, too?
It is indeed.
My impression is that Garfield has more game ideas than time to implement them, so he definitely does not focus on one thing for very long.
Looks like this game is dying. Only 2200 players after a couple of months is not good.
Yeah, it’s doing about as badly as a dota-themed valve-published game could do, I think.
I’m curious what numbers hearthstone pulls, to compare to what a wildly successful card game does. I know they say millions of players, but Blizzard will fudge their numbers all the time if they want. I believe it to be extremely profitable though, at one point it was in the top 10 of all digital purchase games on all platforms in its first year, and I think it grew for at least the first 2-3 years.
You have to be careful in how you count number of players for Hearthstone, as the base game is free. I downloaded, installed, and tried it out, and then decided that it wasn’t for me and quit, without ever spending any money on it. Anyone who wanted to make the numbers look impressive could pick a standard which would include me, but any real reflection of how popular the game actually is wouldn’t.
Oh definitely. The thing I’d want to compare would be concurrent player count, which I’ve always been curious about. You could compare gross revenues, too, but hearthstone would crush it there - it made 416m in 2017 apparently.
I guess this game is all but dead. Player base is down 99% from peak and devs have been fired and contracts terminated.
It’s heartwarming when games that deserve to die do, and they can become a cautionary tale.
I’m just sad that, of all the games that Valve could have chosen to make themselves, they chose this one, instead of the next Portal or Half-Life or whatever.
I guess that million dollar tournament isn’t happening.
I never did buy it, and neither did anyone I know. Are there any links to stories about dev layoffs and such?
Also it was 15+ years ago.
I can’t imagine it’s possible to launch a successful CCG-like game online without a freemium model, and it probably hasn’t been possible for a decade.