According to SuperData Hearthstone makes 240 million dollars per year.

[Nerraw]

You are not helping them either.

The money simply goes to "profit".
It doesn't "produce" any extra new content.

There wouldn't be any new content if no one played or paid...

[antelope591]

It started as a very small project, but is now making a bank. Can't even hate on it because I honestly think that the game managed to wrap a very nerdy basement tier concept into an extremely compelling and addictive main stream experience. The designers behind the game are fucking smart. Not even talking about the cards and interactions, just how health, damage, card text etc. are presented. You can live your entire life in a cave, pick up hearthstone and it feels intuitive after 5 minutes.

Yep, Blizz having every one of their titles be wildly successful is no accident. They simply realize that the most important aspect when developing a game isn`t fancy graphics or technical achievements. But rather GAMEPLAY. Every single one of their games is far superior in gameplay to other titles in the same genre while still being able to avoid being "too" complex. Frankly its amazing that no other developer is able to figure this concept out esp in this age of who can come out with the fanciest graphics.

[Gorgodeus]

They are delusional if they think WoW only made 700~ million dollars last year. Ill take this with a grain of salt.

Learn how to read. That chart was for only the first 3 quarters of 2014.

[Deleted]

They are delusional if they think WoW only made 700~ million dollars last year. Ill take this with a grain of salt.

Read the thing to the end before you talk. It is a YTD chart for January to September 2014. Not the whole year.

At the end of 2014, there was 7.8 million subs. Take that down8 4 million (roughly half) and they are still making over 700 million dollars in subs alone. This doesn't include the REVENUE from the East, nor the all micro transactions. The fact is, WoW made Blizzard way more than 1 billion dollars in 2014.

'In 2013, WoWs market share in China was 38% - the closest competitor was at 9% with 240 million in revenue with a similar payment system. So it's safe to say in 2013; WoWs revenue from China was in excess of 7-800 million dollars. But considering that most of the "sub" drops during 2013-14 were from China, it's safe to assume that it market share was half of that, at around 20/5% - that's still in excess of 350 million dollars.'

WoW made Blizzard barely 1 Billion Dollars in 2014. To be precise exactly 1,038 Billion with only 0,867 Billion recognized during the year 2014 and the rest deferred to 2015. This does include all the WoD preorder and lauch sales, revenue from the the East in form of royalties and all micro transactions and other income from WoW.

The source you refer to says WoW had 36% market share not 38%. The 38% refers to the remaining top 2-10 on that list. That list is not for the Chinese market. It is for popular multiplayer online games and MMOs that offer a subscription. Optional ones like for SWTOR count too.

Seems low, they reported that hots + HS + destiny = 1,25bn usd in the last year. So destiny is 1 bn?

They reported combined sales of 1,25 Billion Dollars NON-GAAP and 1 Billion Dollars GAAP for the three life to date. That means since launch to the end of the period for that is reported, not just 2014. For Destiny that is the last 10 months and HS the last 15 months before July 2015. For Hots it is only June when it was launched. Destiny already made a buttload of that with its first batch of shipped boxes. See Chickat's post .

[Alvito]

In my opinion Hearthstone is responsible for the shift in direction in Blizzard where they focus on smaller pvp games that have less development time and resources and still make a lot of profit.

Game designers aren't going to ignore companies like Super Cell. That make a killing Clash of Clans with 10 full time employees. Sure they are the exception not the rule, but when things like that happen companies have to rethink things.

[antelope591]

Game designers aren't going to ignore companies like Super Cell. That make a killing Clash of Clans with 10 full time employees. Sure they are the exception not the rule, but when things like that happen companies have to rethink things.

Jesus 10 employees....talk about going from zero to multi-millionaire overnight. I know people who have spent hundreds of dollars on that game, even thousands (depressing I know). They must be literally swimming in cash :O

[xenogear3]

Jesus 10 employees....talk about going from zero to multi-millionaire overnight. I know people who have spent hundreds of dollars on that game, even thousands (depressing I know). They must be literally swimming in cash :O

The sad part is that the lead may get a promotion, but other 9 employees just get a pat on the back for "good job".

With WoW sub drop like crazy, they may not even get a bonus next year.

Remember, every 1 million sub drop is $180 million a year.
The drop is very recent. It hasn't reflected in the earning report.

[Mormolyce]

The sad part is that the lead may get a promotion, but other 9 employees just get a pat on the back for "good job".

With WoW sub drop like crazy, they may not even get a bonus next year.

Remember, every 1 million sub drop is $180 million a year.
The drop is very recent. It hasn't reflected in the earning report.

Didn't they recently reveal that WoW actually made more money at 7 million subs than it did at 12 million? Secondary services are a big pie.

In any case, it's 10 years old, of course its revenue should be depreciating. It's amazing it exists at all.

[Keosen]

It's really a reason to admire Blizzard that took such a simple idea and turned it into massive profit without the need of sub plan.
I mean why any of the other game companies couldn't have done it? Blizzard it seems to be the Midas of gaming industry.

[sam86]

Yep, Blizz having every one of their titles be wildly successful is no accident. They simply realize that the most important aspect when developing a game isn`t fancy graphics or technical achievements. But rather GAMEPLAY. Every single one of their games is far superior in gameplay to other titles in the same genre while still being able to avoid being "too" complex. Frankly its amazing that no other developer is able to figure this concept out esp in this age of who can come out with the fanciest graphics.

Or they are literally consuming their own success
There is no question about older blizzard games quality, Diablo 1 won best pc game ever, sc1 won best RTS game
But you can see here, SC2 is considered - in gameplay and balance - lower than sc1, heck even after sc2 release (before heart of swarm, no idea now since i stopped caring) it was competing in gameplay hours in korea with sc1, with sc1 usually beating sc2 in playing
Activision control them now, and is really milking them dry, wow, bc, wrath you can see developers playing and caring, activision came with the slogan less for more, and put their mark on the end
diablo 3 was released with real money auction house, that only got canceled for miserable failure, while exp did fix lot of problems, they shouldn't been there in first place
HotS is barely competing with the big names and only because activision-blizz backing it up, activision is well known to be willing to spend more money on advertise than actual game itself, because they know most ppl will follow flashy lights over actual content, a strategy that works on short term very well, and when activision is done with blizz, they will devour another company to milk it dry

- - - Updated - - -

Didn't they recently reveal that WoW actually made more money at 7 million subs than it did at 12 million? Secondary services are a big pie.

In any case, it's 10 years old, of course its revenue should be depreciating. It's amazing it exists at all.

Its 'weird' that dota doesn't understand that concept and they are as old as wow if not older, instead of losing ppl with time they gain more ppl

[Zantos]

Honestly, I cannot take that site seriously. They list nothing as far as where they are obtaining this data from. I can't even look at the PDF without paying 2k. Yeah, Im just calling that sites report bogus. There is no doubt hearthstone makes money, but that website certainly has no idea how much.

[xenogear3]

Goblins vs Gnomes was released in December 2014.
We don't see any jump in that chart.

I bet these people don't even play Hearthstone.

I was surprised that Yugioh sold 25 billion cards

[Deleted]

Didn't they recently reveal that WoW actually made more money at 7 million subs than it did at 12 million? Secondary services are a big pie.

That was probably just someone spinning and obscouring the facts and certainly not Blizzard. I have seen some of the usual Blizzard whiteknights on this forum before doing this, talking about subs and WoW, then switch to ActivisionBlizzard numbers in the middle of the sentence, but omit the fact they are talking about two completely different things and often even use figures with deferred revenue while making arguments that ignore that. The intention is obviously to lie about the truth and often just preceeds claims like that all the leftover player are really Western player and WoW only really lost player in the East because of F2P game releases.

Fact is Blizzard made significantly less money at 7 Million subscriber than it did when it had about 12 Million subscriber and much less with the recent 5.6 Million. The sales declined at a very similar rate as the subscriptions. The only numbers in the last years that come close to the past earnings occured when expansion had been released. But that was not 7 Million players and launching an expansion only happens once every few years.

In any case, it's 10 years old, of course its revenue should be depreciating.

Says who? No natural or man made law forces them into decline at 10 years age. Of course your statement here is just rubbish, when there are other games that do and did not decline at this age. You can't make a rule for one game and then dismiss all others as an exception.

[Deleted]

In the field of "computer games", 10 years really is an eternity. You could probably count the number of "10-year old computer games that still show wild profits" on one hand, if not one finger. (Ok, maybe "one finger" is just me being snarky)

Ok so you feel like it is eternity. That has nothing to do with the argument I made.
You bring some arbitrary subjective 'wild profits' into the argument. That has nothing to do with the argument I made either and I have high doubts it will lead to anything productive even if I try to make some sense out of yours, but will only end up with you moving around your goalpoasts or dodging to the next irrelevant argument how much more WoW makes than older games that did not follow the mythical 'end of lifecycle after 10 years' trend that is suddenly natural law in the game industry since WoW started to decline. Nevermind you don't even know if WoW makes 'wild profits' despite that you brought it up, because Blizzard never reported such numbers. The discussion was never about profits. I don't need a single hand to count of the cases this sort of argument did.

[BenBos]

Ok so you feel like it is eternity. That has nothing to do with the argument I made.
You bring some arbitrary subjective 'wild profits' into the argument. That has nothing to do with the argument I made either and I have high doubts it will lead to anything productive even if I try to make some sense out of yours, but will only end up with you moving around your goalpoasts or dodging to the next irrelevant argument how much more WoW makes than older games that did not follow the mythical 'end of lifecycle after 10 years' trend that is suddenly natural law in the game industry since WoW started to decline. Nevermind you don't even know if WoW makes 'wild profits' despite that you brought it up, because Blizzard never reported such numbers. The discussion was never about profits. I don't need a single hand to count of the cases this sort of argument did.

For a single computer game 10 years ... IS an eternity.

Certainly when subscriptions are involved. Remember that the Call of Duty Elite subscription lasted ... exactly ... 2 years and it was gone.

Spare me the EVE example too as they had the famous IN game COIN system to inflate these subscriptions just like WOW will do as of now and ~ 400K is quite a different number than the Multi millions of WOW subscriptions.

About your odd statement on "lack" of reported revenue/profits from WOW: you can find these in EVERY financial quarterly report of ATVI and counting it all up it showed a >10 billion dollars revenue stream for WOW in the last 10.5 years.

Unmatched by any SINGLE game btw, no doubt due to the subscription status of WOW.

In fact compared to this LONG 10 year old run of WOW as a pure subscription based games with BILLIONS of revenue, there IS no match to be found in video gaming land.

That's how UNIQUE WOW was and still is in video gaming land. I know you HATE that FACT with a vengeance.

/shrug/care. Enjoy life in the meantime.

[Kathranis]

that chart makes me wonder how good "Crossfire" and "Dungeon Fighter Online" are, never heard of them

DFO is an online sidescrolling beat 'em up MMO, and it has a huge esports scene in Korea, Japan, and China.

Nexon NA released an English version and completely botched it, ran the entire game into the ground by offering no support, never updating it, not moderating it, etc. The original developer, Neople, has been trying to bring it back to English markets since earlier this year: http://www.dfoneople.com/landing

[Deleted]

For a single computer game 10 years ... IS an eternity.

Certainly when subscriptions are involved. Remember that the Call of Duty Elite subscription lasted ... exactly ... 2 years and it was gone.

Spare me the EVE example too as they had the famous IN game COIN system to inflate these subscriptions just like WOW will do as of now and ~ 400K is quite a different number than the Multi millions of WOW subscriptions.

About your odd statement on "lack" of reported revenue/profits from WOW: you can find these in EVERY financial quarterly report of ATVI and counting it all up it showed a >10 billion dollars revenue stream for WOW in the last 10.5 years.

Unmatched by any SINGLE game btw, no doubt due to the subscription status of WOW.

In fact compared to this LONG 10 year old run of WOW as a pure subscription based games with BILLIONS of revenue, there IS no match to be found in video gaming land.

That's how UNIQUE WOW was and still is in video gaming land. I know you HATE that FACT with a vengeance.

/shrug/care. Enjoy life in the meantime.

Your feeling what eternity is 'for games', is as irrelevant as his. Repeating some subjectivity with capslock does not make it level up to some counter argument over time.

Why bring up CoD? Does it posess divine power and makes games that don't follow WoWs revenue trend after 10 years like WoW did not follow the CoD Elite service after 1 year just dissapear? Who said anything about EvE? Don't pretend those horrible and poor examples you came up with are mine.

Don't put 'odd' words into my mouth. I did not say there was a 'lack' of reported 'revenue/profits from WoW'. I said they report no numbers that would let him know how much profit WoW made. No word about no WoW revenue, in fact I quoted defacto WoW revenues one post earlier. Who are you trying to fool? His irrelevant argument about game to game profit was just as baseless as prone to arbitrary subjectivity. You can not find such numbers in the financial quarterly reports of Activision Blizzard as they are not reported.

You slipped the word 'revenue' in there and changed the prashing to fabricate errors and make my parsphrased words vulnerable for your usual spinning tactics. Before you even pull out your classic 'Blizzard reports income and profit that contains money from WoW so there you DO have WoW profit! Just in it! Fact. Fact. Fact.' spin and misconstrue the entire argument. That has nothing to do with what he talked about or I denied to be reported.

But here we go. The arbitrary subjective goalpost got moved. No true scotsman was pulled on an example I didn't even mention. And dodging to the irrelevant 'WoW earns/earned so much more' argument already started. As just predicted if I where to take the bait. And I didn't even went there yet.

As a reminder for everyone. This is the argument from which I did not move a step away from, while dealing with all these derailing irrelevant arguments about profit, irrelevant feelings, strawman arguments, invented lies to discredit me, invented personal attacks to discredit me, attempts to spin and misconstrue the whole argument and other nonsense produced by this chronic liar:
'In any case, it's 10 years old, of course its revenue should be depreciating.'
'Says who? No natural or man made law forces them into decline at 10 years age. Of course your statement here is just rubbish, when there are other games that do and did not decline at this age.'

Still unexplained how the age of a game at some arbitrary point translates into declining revenue for the game no matter what. Which conveniently pushes blame of WoWs financial decline on literally law of nature.What puts that arbitrary point so conveniently on WoWs timeline. And why some others games can just defy that law while it's absolute whenever WoW declines.

[Xar226]

Still unexplained how the age of a game at some arbitrary point translates into declining revenue for the game no matter what.

Okay, so enlighten us: Which games have brought in more revenue 10 years into their existence than they did earlier in their lifetimes? Now compare that to a list of games that were dead before they were ten years old. Feel free to constrain yourself to MMOs where one can actually say it is the same game for 10+ years running.

While you work on that chart, try your reading comprehension again. Nobody has said that a game magically begins a decline at 10 years; that would be words you put into their mouths. They simply said that WoW is 10 years old and it is natural to be declining. Those are not the same thing. Nobody here is so stupid that they don't know WoW's decline began years ago. The fact that they mention the current age of the game is de facto proof that they aren't claiming what you pretend they are claiming. You can recite lists of logical fallacies and yet can't understand that difference? Or do you just choose to ignore what was actually said in favor of an argument that is easier to destroy. Would that tactic happen to be on your list of logical fallacies, under "S" perhaps? Why is it that you get to complain about what somebody says about you and yet call others a chronic liar? You complain about strawmans two posts after your construct your own?

You made your bias clear from the second you entered the discussion: People who don't agree with you are "whiteknights." So be it. Just don't pretend you're the voice of all facts and reason. You're as biased and as proficient at twisting arguments and weaving in logical fallacies as anybody you've accused of doing so.

[Mormolyce]

Says who? No natural or man made law forces them into decline at 10 years age. Of course your statement here is just rubbish, when there are other games that do and did not decline at this age. You can't make a rule for one game and then dismiss all others as an exception.

Um, says sanity?

[Deleted]

Okay, so enlighten us: Which games have brought in more revenue 10 years into their existence than they did earlier in their lifetimes? Now compare that to a list of games that were dead before they were ten years old. Feel free to constrain yourself to MMOs where one can actually say it is the same game for 10+ years running.

While you work on that chart, try your reading comprehension again. Nobody has said that a game magically begins a decline at 10 years; that would be words you put into their mouths. They simply said that WoW is 10 years old and it is natural to be declining. Those are not the same thing. Nobody here is so stupid that they don't know WoW's decline began years ago. The fact that they mention the current age of the game is de facto proof that they aren't claiming what you pretend they are claiming. You can recite lists of logical fallacies and yet can't understand that difference? Or do you just choose to ignore what was actually said in favor of an argument that is easier to destroy. Would that tactic happen to be on your list of logical fallacies, under "S" perhaps? Why is it that you get to complain about what somebody says about you and yet call others a chronic liar? You complain about strawmans two posts after your construct your own?

You made your bias clear from the second you entered the discussion: People who don't agree with you are "whiteknights." So be it. Just don't pretend you're the voice of all facts and reason. You're as biased and as proficient at twisting arguments and weaving in logical fallacies as anybody you've accused of doing so.

Why don't you show me your comprehensive chart of game data that shows a decline that can be definitely tied to the games age and definitely not any other reasons first? I asked for the explanation for these excuses which still are just naive and sweeping claims. The obvious lack of that is the whole point I am making. Now you start with a 'lol proof the excuse wrong first' an want to tell me how to argue and what the true fallacies are?

People responded to me when I used my own words and they responded when I quoted others, trying to argue in defense of them and against me, to defend this commonly used bad excuse. You write unsreasonable nonsense like this 'The fact that they mention the current age of the game is de facto proof that they aren't claiming what you pretend they are claiming.' while I even quote the people on the word and ask for a rational explanation how their excuse makes sense exactly as they phrased it. Why should I take you serious after this complete nonsesense followed by all these accusations.

Let us answer that with a just as well explained response: No. What I claim they claim and what I quote is absolutely correct. That fact they add the age is not proof for all the stupid things you just come up with after it and not contradictiing at all. Everything that followed about 'not understanding' and 'ignoring' or 'fallacies' and 'twisting' are unsubstantial assertions to project the faults and flaws I pointed out earlier back on me.

Just because you have an opinion and the will to be unsreasonable you can't just insist I am wrong or making flawed arguments. You are talking about arguments. Make one. You say my explanations are flawed and fallacies. Say why. Then you won't need to misconstrue and spin the arguments and words anyone said even further than others already did either just to talk back to me. And I may not get tired of predictable stupid replies like that goalpost moving.

And what? I am not in the position to call someone chronical liar after pointing out exactly which words he put into my mouth and changed the whole prasing on, that produce something I never remotely claimed and proving it, like with many lies he made up before?.

You could have just said 'In my opinion everything you say is wrong. So you are wrong. Shame you.'. That's equal to what you entire post contributes to the discussion.


A bad excuse you don't understand is just a bad excuse you just don't understand. You make or defend the excuse? Come up with something better than 'it is just reasonable' or 'prove me wrong' to defend it or admit you are too lazy to deal with it like I did whith the stupid goalpost shooving argument. Back to the real argument that is so aggressively dodged and derailed again:

'In any case, it's 10 years old, of course its revenue should be depreciating.'
'Says who? No natural or man made law forces them into decline at 10 years age. Of course your statement here is just rubbish, when there are other games that do and did not decline at this age.'

Still unexplained how the age of a game at some arbitrary point translates into declining revenue for the game no matter what. Which conveniently pushes blame of WoWs financial decline on literally law of nature.What puts that arbitrary point so conveniently on WoWs timeline. And why some others games can just defy that law while it's absolute whenever WoW declines.