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Tuesday, July 14, 2015

Cards vs. Raids

While it's not explicitly MMO related, Blizz is going to have a big Hearthstone announcement on July 22nd. The expectation is that it's more than just a card pack, and my guess is that it means an eSports deal with a league and/or television coverage (see: Heroes of the Dorm, broadcast by ESPN).

I did say "explicitly" for one reason: Blizz has a finite number of devs, and the more devs that work on other projects such as Hearthstone and HotS mean fewer devs working on WoW. Hearthstone and HotS are getting a lot of the press from Blizz these days, and for good reason: their customer base is growing and profits are up. Even Overwatch is getting a lot of love, given the videos coming out about gameplay and whatnot. But if the devs are working on these three titles, what about the others?

It's likely that the "big three" Blizz properties are on a much lower priority track these days.

Sure, WoW will have a new expac announced at BlizzCon, but that also means that people will have to lower their expectations a bit. With 6.2 the last major content patch of Warlords, Blizz is obviously shifting focus in-house.

And WoW just might be on maintenance mode for a while.

Unless, of course, Blizz can figure out how to extract the BGs and Arenas from WoW and make them playable in a standard MOBA format.

2 comments:

  1. Eep for fear of sounding ignorant, what is MOBA?

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    1. An MOBA is a Multiplayer Online Battle Arena. If you took WoW's Arenas and put them as a stand alone player game, that's pretty much the idea. The two big ones are League of Legends and DOTA2 (Defense of the Ancients 2). Blizzard's entry into it is Heroes of the Storm.

      A lot of eSports these days are centered around MOBAs. I really think that the money in MOBAs is why Blizzard decided to create HotS, as League of Legends alone pulls in many times the number of WoW subscribers.

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