Originally Posted by
Eats Compost
It's actually possible that HotS is making a loss right now. Blizzard sinks a lot of money into their operations, and it's a mystery to no-one that HotS is nowhere near as popular as they projected it would be. Obviously I couldn't say whether or not it really is unprofitable, but it's possible in a way that makes it a totally different kind of beast than any of Blizzard's other projects.
It'll be interesting to see how that impacts the game itself. Blizzard normally poops money, even with a relatively bad game by their standards (see: Diablo 3 at launch) so HotS (possibly) haemorrhaging money whilst demanding ongoing updates/support would be a rude shock to the involved bean counters. I wouldn't be surprised if there is significant pressure on Blizzard management to ramp up HotS' popularity quickly, or to push down ongoing development costs.
They're unlikely to abandon it (they'd lose so much face!) but there are probably some stressed-out managers and devs scratching their heads about how to turn it around.
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To be fair, I think he's right. HotS' big thing was that it was going to be the accessible MOBA, but it still carries some weight from time constraints, and some other games (Overwatch being the big one) came along and totally trounced it in the accessibility category.
I used to play HoTS, and I started playing that because it was more convenient for me to do that than DotA 2 (despite sorta liking Dota 2 more). But then Overwatch came along, and it totally pushed HotS out of my routine. Obviously they're in different genres and it's hard to make any direct quality comparison, but Overwatch is a REALLY good game that can be played even when you have a very small amount of time, without needing to grind and unlock characters or anything. It nailed HotS' own target audience pretty hard.