alt Hacker NewsI think the reason you see things like Blizzard killing off Overwatch 1 is because the Lindy effect applies in gaming as well. Some things are so sticky and preferred that you have to commit atrocities to remove them from use.
From a supply/demand perspective, if all of your customers are still getting high on the 5 (or 20) year old supply, launching a new title in the same space isn't going to work. There are not an infinite # of gamers and the global dopamine budget is limited.
Launching a game like TF2 or Starcraft 2 in 2025 would be viewed as a business catastrophe by the metrics most AAA studios are currently operating under. Monthly ARPU for gamers years after purchasing the Orange Box was approximately $0.00. Giving gamers access to that strong of a drug would ruin the demand for other products.
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Petition related to companies like Blizzard killing games: https://eci.ec.europa.eu/045/public/#/screen/home
I purchased "approximately $0.00" in TF2 loot boxes. How much exactly? Left as an exercise to the reader.
From a business perspective, launching a game like Starcraft 2 at any time is a business catastrophe. There are obscure microtransactions in other Blizzard titles that have generated more revenue than Starcraft 2.
> Launching a game like [...] Starcraft 2
They can't even keep the lights on for SC2.
We [the community] have been designing our own balance patches for the past five years; and our own ladder maps since +/- day 1 - all Blizzard was to do since 2020 was to press the "deploy" button, and they f-ed it up several times anyway.
The news of the year so far is that someone has been exploiting a remote hole to upload some seriously disturbing stuff to the arcade (custom maps/mods) section. So of course rather than fixing the hole, Blizzard has cut off uploads.
So we can't test the balance changes.
Three weeks left until EWC, a __$700.000__ tournament, by the way.
Theoretically SC2 could become like Brood War, with balance changes happening purely through map design. Except we can't upload maps either.