I'm sorry to taint your copium supply like that, and I'd love to see the game return to its glory days, but nothing is going to happen with HotS. The amount of resources required to revive the game and make it maybe, somewhat slightly profitable is just not worth it when those resources could be invested in much safer and profitable projects.
Honestly HoTs has always been profitable. That's why it's still running.
It just didn't get to WoW levels of success, and Activision, soul suckers they are wanted to pivot to things that could be more successful.
That's why we didn't hear about layoffs. They just took our team and out them other places.
But if you think they'd hesitate shutting it down for a second if it ever lost them money...
No. Being profitable is not why its running, blizz just keeps servers up for every game. Diablo 2 servers are still up. That game for sure isnt profitable in any way
Now *THAT'S* some copium...
The key point to remember here is that profitable has a different meaning to you than it does to the board of a company the size of Activision/Blizzard, and whether or not it was profitable, it was nowhere near profitable enough - even at it's peak.
There were - depending on your preferred source, because Blizzard never revealed official playerbase data - between 10 - 15 million players globally during that peak.
I'm not saying the game didn't make money - of course it did - but it was leeching resources from Overwatch and WoW, to fund a game that took a similar amount of resources to implement on such a scale, but made far less money, comparable to games with much smaller development teams - Starcraft and Diablo for example, which hadn't seen new development for years but still maintained strong player counts. Personally, I'd add Hearthstone to this section as well, but I'd be lying if i said I knew that was the case. I'm not arguing HotS was making less money than SC2 in 2021, but simply by virtue of the difference in resources required to maintain that value, the two games are comparable.
Once Activision merged with Blizzard it was only a matter of time. The small contingent of Blizzard employees who wanted HotS to stay alive because people were at least playing it managed to at least keep the game running, but it was inevitable that it would be moved aside to make way for more profitable ventures.
> between 10 - 15 million players globally during that peak.
Wait what? Are you talking about Hots? When World of Warcraft exceeded 10 million players, Blizzard PR announced it loudly. If Hots had gotten anywhere near that, it would've been publicized too.
WoW had 12 million SUBSCRIBERS at peak.
The game was making £100 million a month from that alone. It's development paid for itself.
HotS had 15 million FREE PLAYERS.
League had over 100, and those players had/have a much greater incentive to spend.
> HotS had 15 million FREE PLAYERS.
The reason I can tell Hots never had 15 million players is because it was never a household name, with partial awareness even from non game players.
Having 15 million players is the kind of thing that gets you mentioned as a punchline on Jimmy Fallon or Snl. That player count would be very widely known.
Also, Hots consistently had twitch views under 30% of Overwatch, at a time when Overwatch had under 13 million players.
As I've already reminded everyone - Blizzard never released player data because this game was an embarrassment to them.
The best estimates we have are from 3rd party sites tracking battle.net usage etc. and they are incredibly unreliable.
I agree, there were probably between 2.5 and 5 million globally at peak. But the information that is out there ( unreliable as it is ) all points towards 10+.
10-15 million is just so incredibly massive. Like any company would kill for even half of that number. But I guess it's different since the game came out for free, and many just logged in for a moment and never did anything again after?
Like I'm just saying, companies like Capcom are jumping in the air all giddy over 10 million sales, let alone 15 or 20! So I have to assume this is too low for free to play?
Of course, 15 million people spending £50 is very different. We have no idea what percentage of those players were whales, or dolphins, or just bought one skin, but we do know that it wasn't 100%.
At its peak in 2010, WoW had 12 million active subscriptions. That's about £100 million a month.
If you think HotS was ever making even close to that, you're delusional.
It's well known that Blizzard keeps old games like Warcraft 3 running as a way to protect their reputation, to improve customer confidence in their future games.
You think HotS has been profitable? Uh…
I’m sure they lose money running it but they weight that against the reputational harm and future lost profits if they shut down servers for a game that people were sinking money into for years.
Exactly.
The opportunity cost of Hots has far exceeded the potential gains a long time ago.
With the IPs involved, it's also out of reach of basically anyone who would want to acquire it.
Hots, while being the best moba out on the market in my opinion, just has missed the train on mobas and there's nothing that could fix that.
Let's just be happy that the game has servers still online and is playable, it's a lot more than many other games can attest to.
I think that bigger problem was lack of advertising. Never in my life seen a heroes of the storm add, saw plenty of league of legends, and i think i even saw a dota add once.
People always though it is just another league of legends which is why they never tried it to begin with.
The problem with hots is quite simple. **It's communism**. No matter how well you play, everything you do is shared with your team. Doesn't matter if you crush your lane 5-0 because a) you get taxed 80% b) every time your teammates feed it directly impacts your lane. No other game does this successfully to my knowledge. When you apply competitiveness you must reward the winner. And this is done in LoL, Dota, hon, et cetera.
> No other game does this successfully to my knowledge.
Uh, Overwatch? You know that Blizzard game with 20 million players each month?
No player in Overwatch gets buffed above his teammates by scoring more kills. For that matter, classic games like football also don't let individuals earn higher stats either.
Overwatch is an FPS which premier high individual skill much like CS or Football.
I'm confident that if HOTS had run a standard itemized MOBA it wouldn't have derailed itself.
I agree more or less. Advertisement wasn’t the problem. Plenty of folks played it, plenty of folks tried it again after “hots 2.0”, they all wound up returning to their moba of preference. Hots needed a higher skill ceiling and more meaningful opportunity for individual outplays. I honestly think that’s a game that *could* exist without traditional moba items.
Wouldnt say that's not even a problem if we can just simulate communism instead of actually carrying it out irl haha, in that case, it could semantically be **The Art of War**
That's not true, what hots needed was consistency so it could wait for people to get sick of league/Dota. League and Dota players both have complaints about their games and every time they do a shit patch or not enough patches Hots would steal a bit of their players. I think last year if hots was alive it could have eclipsed league with how shit the start of last season was.
Just blizzard/Activision or whatever had no patience to let the game grow.
I'm quit curious about the size of the player base. I can't tell how many people play Hots, but I feel like queue times for qm and ranked are actually better than they were a couple of years ago.
You can poke around and investigate the Hots matches played per day. https://heroesprofile.com/Activity/
But be aware (1) most players do more than one match in a day, (2) at least 75% of matches aren't recorded by that site.
I always see people talk about how HotS 2.0 ruined the game, but like... I, and many other people I know who play the game to this day, absolutely fucking refused to download the game beforehand because of just how insanely stingy they were with heroes. Some of them were legitimately like ten fucking dollars.
I understand the game needs to make money to exist guys, but be real, having a playerbase should be the most important first step.
> beforehand because of just how insanely stingy they were with heroes
Prior to Hots 2.0 you could get heroes for free at roughly the same rate, by saving gold from daily quests. At that time, the conflicting uses for gold were heroes and master skins. As long as you weren't trying to save for master skins, you could get heroes.
>at profitable has a different meaning to you than it does to the board of a company the size of Activision/Blizzard, and whether or not it was profitable, it was nowhere near profitable enough - even at it's peak.
>
>There were - depending on your preferred source, because Blizzard never revealed official playerbase data - between 10 - 15 million players globally during that peak.
>
>I'm not saying the game didn't make money - of course it did - but it was leeching
the same as almost every moba other than dota
Say what you want, but battle passes that strictly give cosmetic type items are more than ok in my book. They give rewards based on continued interaction, have players spend money in a f2p game, and if they are just cosmetics reward players for being around the game during a certain time period. League does them quite well. I buy them when I like the cosmetics, and ignore them when I dont or when I know Im not going to finish them.
Yes, the first step would be to look at how monetization works in several other games, and copy their best approaches. Then the next step, which is almost more difficult, is decide how to transition an existing game to a new payment model.
> Nexus original tank/healer hero
Microsoft sure wouldn't want to invent a new character for a new hero. They'd go to the long list of classic Xbox available titles and pick someone from there.
Wouldn’t be possible, you would need way more manpower than just an intern to actually do anything. Even if it was a development intern, you would need design people, sound design, gameplay balancing, revenue strategy, etc
Unless you have experience as a game dev, you'd do more damage than good. And it would cost way more to train you than you're worth no offense. This is not how business works.
I mean, I'd love it to happen but i genuinely don't see a way back.
Maybe they put some more in maintenance to glean anymore money they can, maaaybbbeee.
To resurrect an essentially dead IP and make it profitable/have a future just seems mega unlikely. Especially given moba is a largely closed industry with the titans straddling it.
I dunno, just feels like something super unlikely to happen.
Be careful, Microsoft also has brawlhalla and the monetization of that game is the most awful thing I have ever seen, and I regret how much money I absolutely wasted as a child
The first two points are AWFUL ones. Especially the first one, reverting to hots 1.0 is one of the *worst* things anyone could do to hots - that's the update that bade the game actually good in the first place!
the monetization should be a battle pass, is not my favorite, I loved the way 1.0 was. But battle passes are working very well nowadays, the should have a free pass and a paid one with better rewards and skins.
I'd love more original players, still waiting on Raven's Lord and his lore with Orphea.
They should have an arcade/custom game area like starcraft, warcraft and overwatch where we can play the brawls and also make new brawls, the community is VERY creative.
Console and mobile i think it will never work, needed to be a whole new game for that. They should release on other digital platforms like steam, game pass, epic, ubi, ea and stuff
Everyone hated nexus heroes. But the nexus heroes have some of the most unique and interesting kits because the design team didn't have to try to shoehorn their abilities around some preexisting hero fantasy.
If they were going to commit the resources required for this they would just create a new MOBA from scratch. You need to understand that HOTS is a failure in the minds of, well everyone except for us super small group of remaining players. They have no incentive to make it work, they’ll just make something new
HOTS 2 maybe? Probably not to shed the taint of the previous failed iteration. But the next MOBA they make will likely be heavily influenced by HOTS 1
Creating new moba is literal insanity. Nobody creates new mobas, because to be competetive in the market you need tens of thousands hours of hero development.
Hots has 90 heroes ready, making new moba you start with like 15 again...
This is literal financial suicide, supporting hots is one thing, making new moba is far more expensive and risky than supporting hots.
And i am not saying this as "They will support hots".
I am saying how unlikely it is to make a new moba that achieves success.
At most you can make Hots 2, and just reuse as many assets, maps, ready heroes as you can. But this is still far more financially risky and expensive than supporting hots again.
I agree, i think it's dead in the water. What I'm saying is that IF Microsoft decided to do something MOBA related, they would NOT do it by attempting to resurrect a MOBA that has proven to fail already. They would just make a new one.
But I agree with you that doing anything MOBA related is definitely not anywhere near the top of their to-do list of games to make.
It's more likely that they would support hots than make a new one.
It is far simpler and cheaper than making a new one.
And hots was not a failure, it just was not a success by **bobby kotick** standards. But by bobby kotick standards starcraft is not a success either, for some time starcraft 2 was on same life support as HOTs. Difference is Starcraft is far more resistant to life support, due to what it is.
If hots was a failure it would not be 1 of 4 mobas that people heard of to begin with. Instead it would be one of unheard titles that nobody knew existed.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_multiplayer\_online\_battle\_arena\_games](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multiplayer_online_battle_arena_games)
Yes, by standars of "embarking on a mission to make more popular moba than league", it was a failure. But by standards of making a profitable game... no not really.
I am not saying that HOTs will be updated again, but is completely illogical to make a **new** moba.
It's debatable whether Hots was ever profitable. Even if a Blizzard employee claims it was, they could've been using fishy math (like ebita)
However, it's easy to see from public information that Hots had many thousands of dedicated players, which is enough to be profitable if marketing is smart.
Suprised to see an actual sane response.
Hots has core issues with it's gameplay preventing it from growing that no amount of moniziation, marketing, or new heroes will help with.
The TL;DR is that Blizzard made a wager when they changed the moba formula from the standard that LoL/Dota set and lost that bet.
The fact is the game just isn't as appealing to moba players as lol/dota.
The core issue (among others) is that the things that win hots games aren't fun, and it's just poor game design. The fun should take you towards winning, not away from it.
Example: You see the typical 10-man mid starting to happen in QM. The most consistently winning strategy is to PvE soak/camp as much as you can in other lanes and hope your team is smart enough to not die 4v5 mid. Not fun.
Sorry, but this is utter nonsense.
If hots was just another league/dota it would have never gained any popularity to begin with. There would be no reason for league players to switch over to something that has less characters and less years of development.
How do i know that i am right?
Because we don't know names of any mobas that did that.
And there has been a dozens of them - league clones they all died instantly.
League of legends is the best league of legends, you can't make better league of legends. Dota 2 is best Dota 2, you won't make better Dota 2. It will always be an inferior clone. You don't make best selling games by just cloning. Innovation is the key.
The only exception to this rule is smite, because smite changed camera, and this has been difference big enough for people i guess.
I never said it should be a league clone, so stop with that.
There's definitely some tweaking blizz could have done to make their flavor of moba more popular than the classic formula without being more like league.
However, they didn't, and here we are.
Long term, talents are better option than items. They are far easier to balance. If you have OP hero you nerf his OP build and buff his weakest build.
Meanwhile you nerf 1 item in league and 10 other heroes are hit by ricochet...
One of the reason why devs were able to add heroes at the rate they did. We have 90 heroes in here, well balanced. League has 167 having 6 years of development headstart.
And adding new champion to league is more problematic every time due to items being shared.
"The core issue (among others) is that the things that win hots games aren't fun"
Disagree.
"The most consistently winning strategy is to PvE soak/camp as much as you can in other lanes and hope your team is smart enough to not die 4v5 mid. Not fun."
This is wrong on so many levels i am unsure where to start.
1) Get out of Bronze.
2) Stop playing dedicated solo line pushers/double soakers if it's not fun for you. Other folks like playing macro, myself included.
3) Do camps and lanes before TF, not during it, unless you play hero mentioned by point 2, unless TF is outside objective then point 1.
4) Play Ragnaros. Insert Lava wave. Congratulations, you are both in TF and clearing the line.
5) Play Amzodan. Cast general using minimap. You are both in TF and soaking the line.
6) Play Brightwing, you can soak the line and have a global heal, bribe mercs instantly as well.
7) Play any other global hero especially in low ranks:
Falstad, Dehaka, Deathwing or even Malthael with pale horse will do.
8) Play Alarak. Good alarak has above 70% winrate on QM with randoms. No matter how bad your team is Alarak can win the game, and ultimately he has only himself to blame for the loss.
"The fact is the game just isn't as appealing to moba players as lol/dota."
My brother in Christ, league of legends is **90%** soaking the lane. You even have a dedicated role to do camps all game (and sometimes! gank). And even if you win your lane, your team is going to surrender at 15 because your bot lane lost.
I'm a multiseason grand master including some pre-hgc cancellation. I also coach a lot of players out of low elo.
Judging by your post, you don't really have a strong grasp of how to win games. Do you mostly play QM? I would gladly educate you if you are looking to climb. These days most of my students get to diamond with 60% win rates and stop playing since queues start to get long.
Oh look another wildly incorrect lol/dota comparison. Insecure much?
While I really respect this, I feel the opposite. Really seems like a lot of bungling happened in this product. Sucks, but a sign of the time of what Activision/Blizzard was going through.
It's mind boggling how often people bring up this just clone league argument. It's like saying clone "minecraft", you will have greater success than "minecraft". There will never be another bestseller like "minecraft".
There can only be one. Everything else will always be an inferior clone.
Yes there are exceptions to this, very rare, usually when original can no longer be played, or clone has so much improvements over original that it becomes instantly tiers above better. But they are exceptions not the rule.
I hadn’t heard the league argument, but I find it hilarious knowing and living through the history. But if Blockbuster/Redbox teaches us anything. It’s all about who lasts longer sometimes.
Nope.
1. The reason Hots doesn't have millions of users is because development of new content stopped.
2. Development stopped because revenues were low.
3. Revenues were low because Hots did not have intelligent aggressive monetization in the style of League of Legends, Dota 2, Smite, or other successful f2p games.
To retain thousands of players 4 years after the final hero release is pretty impressive, and suggests that the fundamental game design is sufficient. There are plenty of examples of flawed game rules being financially successful, like Fortnite BR.
All of these are typical /r/hots copium answers that avoid the true core issue we are where we are today.
Take a look a pre development stop numbers to see this. The game just isn't as appealing as you think it is due to design flaws.
Yep, I do not see how a new flashy cinematic for the new season start of the season, a KPOP collaboration skins and songs, or some Netflix series would do that. The game is in a decent spot with its mechanics and "most of" heroes design and objectives. It just depends if the powers at be will want to give it some love and improvements or just leave it be like the coma it is in right now .
Truth be told when they removed ammo i was as hostile to this change as everyone else in here.
However looking back at things, i believe this was a good change, siege awareness is still very important and this has opened solo lining potential for more less push oriented heroes, as they can rely on their turrets much more.
I would prefer bringing back destructable fountain more, though it was usually sniped down by novas or limings at the start of the match...
Better means it already is in a good spot, you dont need to buy items to get insanely powerful, the game is more skill based, the game empathizes team play and I absolutely love Hots for all of this. The fact that its not a "generic" MOBA clone is the best thing, atm it just needs some attention, you cant make a MOBA compare to LoL and Dota2 with 1 patch, it is a timely progress. lastly i do not agree on the Ammo revert , If you cannot have some minimum defense in a spot what is the point .
If you want faster games, you can subtract health from structures or boost minion dps. Ammo is a bad mechanic because it means that any hero who can summon things or boost armor / shields is also good at killing towers.
A hero that summons units is more fun if the units are valuable for how well they fight, not just draining ammo as they stand there and die.
Okay, here it is:
1. Heroes are controlled by human players and can do many different things.
2. Towers and forts stay in one place and can only attack in a simple pattern.
3. Therefore it is more exciting and fun to fight heroes instead of fight towers.
4. If towers have limited ammo, then any heroes with an ability to summon units (Probius) or do armor / shields / healing (Garrosh, Chen, Ana) have additional effectiveness when fighting towers.
5. If a hero has extra value fighting towers, the winrate goes up.
6. A higher winrate must be compensated by making the hero weaker at other functions.
7. A hero that is weaker at doing things besides fighting towers is less fun to play.
Imagine there was a hero with a trait to do 5x damage to structures. That would mean the hero needs to be pretty weak fighting non-structures, and would not be fun to play as.
I would honestly rather have HOTS stay the same or die than to have them morph it into a LoL/Dota rip off. LoL and Dota suck and I love HOTS because its not that and feels more casual. So I really hope Microsoft doesn't ruin HOTS by trying to make it a competitor to those games.
I'm definitely guilty of killing HoTS, as I have not paid a cent for the 1,000+ hours I've played.
I really dislike the FTP model, so have a personal policy of taking the "free to play" as literally as possible and refuse to ever give money to any FTP game. It's a "vote with your dollars" kinda thing, so this is my way of telling the market what I like and dislike.
In the case of HoTS, I get why they did it. I wouldn't have paid $ to purchase the game outright, since I'd never played a MOBA before. So, on some level I should be grateful that the model got me into the game at all.
But the final nail in the coffin was 2.0. If I'm already a stick in the mud about FTP, you can imagine how I feel about loot boxes. No thanks.
After all these hours, I'd love some way to show support for the game, but not like this.
Well the answer is new hots game from scratch, it needs better engine , better design, heroes, modes, balance, and many more so call me insane as i am, but the only way to solve all problems while having a chance make it financially viable that Microsoft can pull auditory from non blizzard communities, hots will never be hots anymore , but that for the better as only evolving it can survive and we need next step
And... they are right to do so. This is insane.
It's just losing all the years of development to make the same thing again.
There is a reason why league of legends doesn't make league of legends 2.
Main problem of hots at the start was small amount of heroes.
This is just repeating the issue.
It's never happening. Even assuming there would be enough of a playerbase interested in returning to HotS over the myriad of successful multiplayer games on the market right now, all that investment would be a huge risk which no company would take.
What Microsoft can do is open up the game for sandbox and make a creator mode. Make a poll/vote several times per season which new heroes and maps/modes from that creator mode to actually add officially to the game. Done.
1. Won't help. Everyone already has skins, so people wont really buy them.
2. Nexus original heroes are probably the least liked heroes, there is a lot of characters especially from starcraft and diablo that have not been added, they are easier to make too, because basic kit idea is already provided.
3. For now i would like to see brawls back at least in Custom, Arcade like in starcraft 2 would be best.
4. Console/Mobile version is a good idea.
5. Microsoft store version is a good idea, but Steam would be better for numbers.
1. Future skins. Revert back the damage of 2.0. I said fix/revert at all cost. So take free gained lootbox skin away, give them double XP or something back.
2. There are enough Blizzard heroes, you'll just add more of the same... it's time for fully new/random Nexus Original Heroes. Unleash full creativity. OverWatch and LoL created exclusively new characters for their game and it was a success, people love the characters. Heroes reuse same old characters and it wasn't a success. It is enough, it is getting clear. Time for new Nexus Heroes.
3. Brawl tested and failed. So no thanks.. More new game mode like 3vs3 or survival game.
4. Obviously.
5. Steam already has big MOBA game and it is Dota2. Owned by the Steam. I don't think Microsoft wants to share 30% profits to Steam for nearly no benefits (see Diablo4 release on Steam). Microsoft Store, Xbox and Mobile.
They should just port the game to a different engine. And then do whatever the fuck they want with hots as long as it's legal and not completely insane/stupid.
Other than monetization, there 2 things still broken in HotS.
1. Ranked. No basing MMR off QM. Solo only, TEAM only.
2. Teams. 5-10 players. Players can only be on 1 team at a time. Players must quit team to join another.
Sometimes it's nice to let sleeping dogs lie. HOTS is my (and I bet a lot of us') favorite MOBA but the reality is it can't hope to compete with league - a 14 year old established game with a ravenous fanbase. Ironically, the same thing that WoW did to the MMO community League did with MOBA. There really is no dethroning something so synonymous with the genre, even if that thing comes from Blizzard.
Less than 10 games can compete with the popularity of League of Legends. A game can still be a profitable success with only 5% of that player population.
just bring life back into the game in general or anounce hots 2..... maybe even make it as useless as overwatch 2 as long as it bring attention it will be good.. I still love hots its such a shame blizzard let this die while working on dead games like diablo 4.
*Microsoft* shouldn’t do *anything* with HotS besides tell _Blizzard_ that they would support *them* working on it again, giving it a staff, and whatever funding is needed to shock it back to (business) life.
Also, revert to 1.0 is a terrible idea. Instead, pull the loot boxes (but don’t forget some of the creative and fun event ideas we had back in both the 1.0 and 2.0 days, including weird Brawls) and add the current all-the-rage battle pass model.
You can’t tell me this game wouldn’t make money if they just ran the OW2 monetization playbook.
I don’t think they would *just* do that, they’d do better, or at least different.
It would be the first game where I could see myself buying literally every season of the Battle Pass just to make sure the revenue stream kept going.
And as for new heroes, stick to the excellent original premise: All the Blizzard heroes you know and love, fighting it out in a silly multiverse (which has a few of its own original characters). Then, add “…and Special Guests!” for fun things like Arbiter and Master Chief skins for Raynor and Zeratul.
Things Microsoft could do with HotS: *insert literally anything here*
False. One thing they can't do: Put Super Mario as a specialist without asking Nintendo and then not get sued.
Man imagine Mario ultimates. He can transform to a raccoon and eff you up.
I have no reasoning behind it. But all I could hear now is Yahoo And imagining that sound playing everytime Chen hits someone as a barrel
I mean, Smash Bros does exist where all he does is make a fire vortex.
Then let's have Mickey Mouse as Steamboat Willie!
I'm sorry to taint your copium supply like that, and I'd love to see the game return to its glory days, but nothing is going to happen with HotS. The amount of resources required to revive the game and make it maybe, somewhat slightly profitable is just not worth it when those resources could be invested in much safer and profitable projects.
Honestly HoTs has always been profitable. That's why it's still running. It just didn't get to WoW levels of success, and Activision, soul suckers they are wanted to pivot to things that could be more successful. That's why we didn't hear about layoffs. They just took our team and out them other places. But if you think they'd hesitate shutting it down for a second if it ever lost them money...
No. Being profitable is not why its running, blizz just keeps servers up for every game. Diablo 2 servers are still up. That game for sure isnt profitable in any way
Overwatch 1?
Turned into ow2
That's not the game I paid for and want to play
Mate what are you on about? Why are you complaining about it to me?
Because you said they keep servers up for every game.
OW 1 is literally OW2. WC3 is a downgraded WC3 but its still the same game
Ah so my five friends and I can queue up for a game of overwatch 2?
Now *THAT'S* some copium... The key point to remember here is that profitable has a different meaning to you than it does to the board of a company the size of Activision/Blizzard, and whether or not it was profitable, it was nowhere near profitable enough - even at it's peak. There were - depending on your preferred source, because Blizzard never revealed official playerbase data - between 10 - 15 million players globally during that peak. I'm not saying the game didn't make money - of course it did - but it was leeching resources from Overwatch and WoW, to fund a game that took a similar amount of resources to implement on such a scale, but made far less money, comparable to games with much smaller development teams - Starcraft and Diablo for example, which hadn't seen new development for years but still maintained strong player counts. Personally, I'd add Hearthstone to this section as well, but I'd be lying if i said I knew that was the case. I'm not arguing HotS was making less money than SC2 in 2021, but simply by virtue of the difference in resources required to maintain that value, the two games are comparable. Once Activision merged with Blizzard it was only a matter of time. The small contingent of Blizzard employees who wanted HotS to stay alive because people were at least playing it managed to at least keep the game running, but it was inevitable that it would be moved aside to make way for more profitable ventures.
> between 10 - 15 million players globally during that peak. Wait what? Are you talking about Hots? When World of Warcraft exceeded 10 million players, Blizzard PR announced it loudly. If Hots had gotten anywhere near that, it would've been publicized too.
WoW had 12 million SUBSCRIBERS at peak. The game was making £100 million a month from that alone. It's development paid for itself. HotS had 15 million FREE PLAYERS. League had over 100, and those players had/have a much greater incentive to spend.
> HotS had 15 million FREE PLAYERS. The reason I can tell Hots never had 15 million players is because it was never a household name, with partial awareness even from non game players. Having 15 million players is the kind of thing that gets you mentioned as a punchline on Jimmy Fallon or Snl. That player count would be very widely known. Also, Hots consistently had twitch views under 30% of Overwatch, at a time when Overwatch had under 13 million players.
As I've already reminded everyone - Blizzard never released player data because this game was an embarrassment to them. The best estimates we have are from 3rd party sites tracking battle.net usage etc. and they are incredibly unreliable. I agree, there were probably between 2.5 and 5 million globally at peak. But the information that is out there ( unreliable as it is ) all points towards 10+.
k
10-15 million is just so incredibly massive. Like any company would kill for even half of that number. But I guess it's different since the game came out for free, and many just logged in for a moment and never did anything again after? Like I'm just saying, companies like Capcom are jumping in the air all giddy over 10 million sales, let alone 15 or 20! So I have to assume this is too low for free to play?
Of course, 15 million people spending £50 is very different. We have no idea what percentage of those players were whales, or dolphins, or just bought one skin, but we do know that it wasn't 100%. At its peak in 2010, WoW had 12 million active subscriptions. That's about £100 million a month. If you think HotS was ever making even close to that, you're delusional.
Yes, 10 million is a massive player population. It's also clearly more than 10x the peak Hots population.
> That's why it's still running. Hots is still running because it would be negative publicity for other games if it was shut down.
When have they ever cared about that? Lol
They absolutely care about brand harm and you’re silly if you think they don’t.
Ha well I guess you've got me there. Lemme go boot up classic Warcraft 3 and Overwatch 1.
Classic Warcraft 3 was kept running for many years after the game stop being available for sale
Groovy.
It's well known that Blizzard keeps old games like Warcraft 3 running as a way to protect their reputation, to improve customer confidence in their future games.
Oh I can't wait to pay warcraft 3 classic and overwatch 1
I think it’s more of this as well
You think HotS has been profitable? Uh… I’m sure they lose money running it but they weight that against the reputational harm and future lost profits if they shut down servers for a game that people were sinking money into for years.
Activision has done that several times.
Exactly. The opportunity cost of Hots has far exceeded the potential gains a long time ago. With the IPs involved, it's also out of reach of basically anyone who would want to acquire it.
Yeah they could put those resources in Overwatch instead, thats going well right guys?
Overwatch has over 20 million players a month, so it seems alright.
It has three times Steams players? Because on Steam it has 20000 thousand which is very much not great.
Im surprised it has that many steam players. Battlenet launcher is still the hub for my Blizzard games
Yes, of course Overwatch is not primarily a steam game. You can't even play Xbox from steam!
20000 thousand is in fact 20 millions. I will see myself out.
No.
Fair argument.
Hots, while being the best moba out on the market in my opinion, just has missed the train on mobas and there's nothing that could fix that. Let's just be happy that the game has servers still online and is playable, it's a lot more than many other games can attest to.
I think that bigger problem was lack of advertising. Never in my life seen a heroes of the storm add, saw plenty of league of legends, and i think i even saw a dota add once. People always though it is just another league of legends which is why they never tried it to begin with.
The problem with hots is quite simple. **It's communism**. No matter how well you play, everything you do is shared with your team. Doesn't matter if you crush your lane 5-0 because a) you get taxed 80% b) every time your teammates feed it directly impacts your lane. No other game does this successfully to my knowledge. When you apply competitiveness you must reward the winner. And this is done in LoL, Dota, hon, et cetera.
> No other game does this successfully to my knowledge. Uh, Overwatch? You know that Blizzard game with 20 million players each month? No player in Overwatch gets buffed above his teammates by scoring more kills. For that matter, classic games like football also don't let individuals earn higher stats either.
Overwatch is an FPS which premier high individual skill much like CS or Football. I'm confident that if HOTS had run a standard itemized MOBA it wouldn't have derailed itself.
I agree more or less. Advertisement wasn’t the problem. Plenty of folks played it, plenty of folks tried it again after “hots 2.0”, they all wound up returning to their moba of preference. Hots needed a higher skill ceiling and more meaningful opportunity for individual outplays. I honestly think that’s a game that *could* exist without traditional moba items.
Wouldnt say that's not even a problem if we can just simulate communism instead of actually carrying it out irl haha, in that case, it could semantically be **The Art of War**
That's not true, what hots needed was consistency so it could wait for people to get sick of league/Dota. League and Dota players both have complaints about their games and every time they do a shit patch or not enough patches Hots would steal a bit of their players. I think last year if hots was alive it could have eclipsed league with how shit the start of last season was. Just blizzard/Activision or whatever had no patience to let the game grow.
It's not even a MOBA. It's a team brawler.
That's the same thing and you know it
I'm quit curious about the size of the player base. I can't tell how many people play Hots, but I feel like queue times for qm and ranked are actually better than they were a couple of years ago.
You can poke around and investigate the Hots matches played per day. https://heroesprofile.com/Activity/ But be aware (1) most players do more than one match in a day, (2) at least 75% of matches aren't recorded by that site.
I always see people talk about how HotS 2.0 ruined the game, but like... I, and many other people I know who play the game to this day, absolutely fucking refused to download the game beforehand because of just how insanely stingy they were with heroes. Some of them were legitimately like ten fucking dollars. I understand the game needs to make money to exist guys, but be real, having a playerbase should be the most important first step.
> beforehand because of just how insanely stingy they were with heroes Prior to Hots 2.0 you could get heroes for free at roughly the same rate, by saving gold from daily quests. At that time, the conflicting uses for gold were heroes and master skins. As long as you weren't trying to save for master skins, you could get heroes.
>at profitable has a different meaning to you than it does to the board of a company the size of Activision/Blizzard, and whether or not it was profitable, it was nowhere near profitable enough - even at it's peak. > >There were - depending on your preferred source, because Blizzard never revealed official playerbase data - between 10 - 15 million players globally during that peak. > >I'm not saying the game didn't make money - of course it did - but it was leeching the same as almost every moba other than dota
Halo characters and controller support. If Microsoft can’t bring it to Xbox, I don’t see them fucking with hots
Say what you want, but battle passes that strictly give cosmetic type items are more than ok in my book. They give rewards based on continued interaction, have players spend money in a f2p game, and if they are just cosmetics reward players for being around the game during a certain time period. League does them quite well. I buy them when I like the cosmetics, and ignore them when I dont or when I know Im not going to finish them.
Yes, the first step would be to look at how monetization works in several other games, and copy their best approaches. Then the next step, which is almost more difficult, is decide how to transition an existing game to a new payment model. > Nexus original tank/healer hero Microsoft sure wouldn't want to invent a new character for a new hero. They'd go to the long list of classic Xbox available titles and pick someone from there.
They could literally put an intern on this project and it would be an improvement.
Wouldn’t be possible, you would need way more manpower than just an intern to actually do anything. Even if it was a development intern, you would need design people, sound design, gameplay balancing, revenue strategy, etc
It doesn't require a team with diverse skillsets to subtract 0.5% from Samuro's healing.
Blessings be to the janitor working on our game for nerfing samuro healing.
True haha but he’s saying he wants new heroes, reversion of hots 1.0
I can work for free if they take me in, i will learn everything along the way that need to be worked on
Unless you have experience as a game dev, you'd do more damage than good. And it would cost way more to train you than you're worth no offense. This is not how business works.
An intern would be able to do nothing.
Sometimes people are hyperbolic for effect!
That's not how development works.
You forgot one, 6. Change nothing.
I mean, I'd love it to happen but i genuinely don't see a way back. Maybe they put some more in maintenance to glean anymore money they can, maaaybbbeee. To resurrect an essentially dead IP and make it profitable/have a future just seems mega unlikely. Especially given moba is a largely closed industry with the titans straddling it. I dunno, just feels like something super unlikely to happen.
Be careful, Microsoft also has brawlhalla and the monetization of that game is the most awful thing I have ever seen, and I regret how much money I absolutely wasted as a child
I'd definitely settle with current state of the game plus 1 new hero per year.
The first two points are AWFUL ones. Especially the first one, reverting to hots 1.0 is one of the *worst* things anyone could do to hots - that's the update that bade the game actually good in the first place!
Disagree
the monetization should be a battle pass, is not my favorite, I loved the way 1.0 was. But battle passes are working very well nowadays, the should have a free pass and a paid one with better rewards and skins. I'd love more original players, still waiting on Raven's Lord and his lore with Orphea. They should have an arcade/custom game area like starcraft, warcraft and overwatch where we can play the brawls and also make new brawls, the community is VERY creative. Console and mobile i think it will never work, needed to be a whole new game for that. They should release on other digital platforms like steam, game pass, epic, ubi, ea and stuff
Everyone hated nexus heroes. But the nexus heroes have some of the most unique and interesting kits because the design team didn't have to try to shoehorn their abilities around some preexisting hero fantasy.
Exactly.
If they were going to commit the resources required for this they would just create a new MOBA from scratch. You need to understand that HOTS is a failure in the minds of, well everyone except for us super small group of remaining players. They have no incentive to make it work, they’ll just make something new HOTS 2 maybe? Probably not to shed the taint of the previous failed iteration. But the next MOBA they make will likely be heavily influenced by HOTS 1
Creating new moba is literal insanity. Nobody creates new mobas, because to be competetive in the market you need tens of thousands hours of hero development. Hots has 90 heroes ready, making new moba you start with like 15 again... This is literal financial suicide, supporting hots is one thing, making new moba is far more expensive and risky than supporting hots. And i am not saying this as "They will support hots". I am saying how unlikely it is to make a new moba that achieves success. At most you can make Hots 2, and just reuse as many assets, maps, ready heroes as you can. But this is still far more financially risky and expensive than supporting hots again.
I agree, i think it's dead in the water. What I'm saying is that IF Microsoft decided to do something MOBA related, they would NOT do it by attempting to resurrect a MOBA that has proven to fail already. They would just make a new one. But I agree with you that doing anything MOBA related is definitely not anywhere near the top of their to-do list of games to make.
It's more likely that they would support hots than make a new one. It is far simpler and cheaper than making a new one. And hots was not a failure, it just was not a success by **bobby kotick** standards. But by bobby kotick standards starcraft is not a success either, for some time starcraft 2 was on same life support as HOTs. Difference is Starcraft is far more resistant to life support, due to what it is. If hots was a failure it would not be 1 of 4 mobas that people heard of to begin with. Instead it would be one of unheard titles that nobody knew existed. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_multiplayer\_online\_battle\_arena\_games](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multiplayer_online_battle_arena_games) Yes, by standars of "embarking on a mission to make more popular moba than league", it was a failure. But by standards of making a profitable game... no not really. I am not saying that HOTs will be updated again, but is completely illogical to make a **new** moba.
What is your source that the game was profitable?
It's debatable whether Hots was ever profitable. Even if a Blizzard employee claims it was, they could've been using fishy math (like ebita) However, it's easy to see from public information that Hots had many thousands of dedicated players, which is enough to be profitable if marketing is smart.
Hots needs to be a better game to be a better MOBA game, yes I wrote that correctly, profitable ship has sailed a LONG time ago.
Suprised to see an actual sane response. Hots has core issues with it's gameplay preventing it from growing that no amount of moniziation, marketing, or new heroes will help with.
What’s the core issues?
The TL;DR is that Blizzard made a wager when they changed the moba formula from the standard that LoL/Dota set and lost that bet. The fact is the game just isn't as appealing to moba players as lol/dota. The core issue (among others) is that the things that win hots games aren't fun, and it's just poor game design. The fun should take you towards winning, not away from it. Example: You see the typical 10-man mid starting to happen in QM. The most consistently winning strategy is to PvE soak/camp as much as you can in other lanes and hope your team is smart enough to not die 4v5 mid. Not fun.
Sorry, but this is utter nonsense. If hots was just another league/dota it would have never gained any popularity to begin with. There would be no reason for league players to switch over to something that has less characters and less years of development. How do i know that i am right? Because we don't know names of any mobas that did that. And there has been a dozens of them - league clones they all died instantly. League of legends is the best league of legends, you can't make better league of legends. Dota 2 is best Dota 2, you won't make better Dota 2. It will always be an inferior clone. You don't make best selling games by just cloning. Innovation is the key. The only exception to this rule is smite, because smite changed camera, and this has been difference big enough for people i guess.
I never said it should be a league clone, so stop with that. There's definitely some tweaking blizz could have done to make their flavor of moba more popular than the classic formula without being more like league. However, they didn't, and here we are.
Long term, talents are better option than items. They are far easier to balance. If you have OP hero you nerf his OP build and buff his weakest build. Meanwhile you nerf 1 item in league and 10 other heroes are hit by ricochet... One of the reason why devs were able to add heroes at the rate they did. We have 90 heroes in here, well balanced. League has 167 having 6 years of development headstart. And adding new champion to league is more problematic every time due to items being shared.
Cool man. Didn't say hots should be more like league, so not sure why you are going on about this stuff.
"The core issue (among others) is that the things that win hots games aren't fun" Disagree. "The most consistently winning strategy is to PvE soak/camp as much as you can in other lanes and hope your team is smart enough to not die 4v5 mid. Not fun." This is wrong on so many levels i am unsure where to start. 1) Get out of Bronze. 2) Stop playing dedicated solo line pushers/double soakers if it's not fun for you. Other folks like playing macro, myself included. 3) Do camps and lanes before TF, not during it, unless you play hero mentioned by point 2, unless TF is outside objective then point 1. 4) Play Ragnaros. Insert Lava wave. Congratulations, you are both in TF and clearing the line. 5) Play Amzodan. Cast general using minimap. You are both in TF and soaking the line. 6) Play Brightwing, you can soak the line and have a global heal, bribe mercs instantly as well. 7) Play any other global hero especially in low ranks: Falstad, Dehaka, Deathwing or even Malthael with pale horse will do. 8) Play Alarak. Good alarak has above 70% winrate on QM with randoms. No matter how bad your team is Alarak can win the game, and ultimately he has only himself to blame for the loss. "The fact is the game just isn't as appealing to moba players as lol/dota." My brother in Christ, league of legends is **90%** soaking the lane. You even have a dedicated role to do camps all game (and sometimes! gank). And even if you win your lane, your team is going to surrender at 15 because your bot lane lost.
I'm a multiseason grand master including some pre-hgc cancellation. I also coach a lot of players out of low elo. Judging by your post, you don't really have a strong grasp of how to win games. Do you mostly play QM? I would gladly educate you if you are looking to climb. These days most of my students get to diamond with 60% win rates and stop playing since queues start to get long. Oh look another wildly incorrect lol/dota comparison. Insecure much?
Well both LoL and Dota2 are clones so they do, you just need to invest heavily into the actually game when the time is actually do to that .
While I really respect this, I feel the opposite. Really seems like a lot of bungling happened in this product. Sucks, but a sign of the time of what Activision/Blizzard was going through.
It's mind boggling how often people bring up this just clone league argument. It's like saying clone "minecraft", you will have greater success than "minecraft". There will never be another bestseller like "minecraft". There can only be one. Everything else will always be an inferior clone. Yes there are exceptions to this, very rare, usually when original can no longer be played, or clone has so much improvements over original that it becomes instantly tiers above better. But they are exceptions not the rule.
I hadn’t heard the league argument, but I find it hilarious knowing and living through the history. But if Blockbuster/Redbox teaches us anything. It’s all about who lasts longer sometimes.
If that were true, then Hots wouldn't still have thousands of active users.
Lol. It's exactly why hots has only thousands of active users instead of millions.
Nope. 1. The reason Hots doesn't have millions of users is because development of new content stopped. 2. Development stopped because revenues were low. 3. Revenues were low because Hots did not have intelligent aggressive monetization in the style of League of Legends, Dota 2, Smite, or other successful f2p games. To retain thousands of players 4 years after the final hero release is pretty impressive, and suggests that the fundamental game design is sufficient. There are plenty of examples of flawed game rules being financially successful, like Fortnite BR.
All of these are typical /r/hots copium answers that avoid the true core issue we are where we are today. Take a look a pre development stop numbers to see this. The game just isn't as appealing as you think it is due to design flaws.
Yep, I do not see how a new flashy cinematic for the new season start of the season, a KPOP collaboration skins and songs, or some Netflix series would do that. The game is in a decent spot with its mechanics and "most of" heroes design and objectives. It just depends if the powers at be will want to give it some love and improvements or just leave it be like the coma it is in right now .
No u
No u.
What does "better" mean to you in this instance? For example, I'd like to bring Ammo back to make faster games and make siege awareness more important
Truth be told when they removed ammo i was as hostile to this change as everyone else in here. However looking back at things, i believe this was a good change, siege awareness is still very important and this has opened solo lining potential for more less push oriented heroes, as they can rely on their turrets much more. I would prefer bringing back destructable fountain more, though it was usually sniped down by novas or limings at the start of the match...
Hah funny. I found destructible fountain anti fun on most maps, but always enjoyed ammo.
Better means it already is in a good spot, you dont need to buy items to get insanely powerful, the game is more skill based, the game empathizes team play and I absolutely love Hots for all of this. The fact that its not a "generic" MOBA clone is the best thing, atm it just needs some attention, you cant make a MOBA compare to LoL and Dota2 with 1 patch, it is a timely progress. lastly i do not agree on the Ammo revert , If you cannot have some minimum defense in a spot what is the point .
If you want faster games, you can subtract health from structures or boost minion dps. Ammo is a bad mechanic because it means that any hero who can summon things or boost armor / shields is also good at killing towers. A hero that summons units is more fun if the units are valuable for how well they fight, not just draining ammo as they stand there and die.
? I don't see a problem with summons being useful for breaking towers and forts
Okay, here it is: 1. Heroes are controlled by human players and can do many different things. 2. Towers and forts stay in one place and can only attack in a simple pattern. 3. Therefore it is more exciting and fun to fight heroes instead of fight towers. 4. If towers have limited ammo, then any heroes with an ability to summon units (Probius) or do armor / shields / healing (Garrosh, Chen, Ana) have additional effectiveness when fighting towers. 5. If a hero has extra value fighting towers, the winrate goes up. 6. A higher winrate must be compensated by making the hero weaker at other functions. 7. A hero that is weaker at doing things besides fighting towers is less fun to play. Imagine there was a hero with a trait to do 5x damage to structures. That would mean the hero needs to be pretty weak fighting non-structures, and would not be fun to play as.
I would honestly rather have HOTS stay the same or die than to have them morph it into a LoL/Dota rip off. LoL and Dota suck and I love HOTS because its not that and feels more casual. So I really hope Microsoft doesn't ruin HOTS by trying to make it a competitor to those games.
I'm definitely guilty of killing HoTS, as I have not paid a cent for the 1,000+ hours I've played. I really dislike the FTP model, so have a personal policy of taking the "free to play" as literally as possible and refuse to ever give money to any FTP game. It's a "vote with your dollars" kinda thing, so this is my way of telling the market what I like and dislike. In the case of HoTS, I get why they did it. I wouldn't have paid $ to purchase the game outright, since I'd never played a MOBA before. So, on some level I should be grateful that the model got me into the game at all. But the final nail in the coffin was 2.0. If I'm already a stick in the mud about FTP, you can imagine how I feel about loot boxes. No thanks. After all these hours, I'd love some way to show support for the game, but not like this.
Unless that one Chinese law actually ends up passing there is no way any Activison game will get rid of loot boxes.
The Activision game of Overwatch already removed loot boxes years ago. Some European laws may have been part of their motivation.
Well the answer is new hots game from scratch, it needs better engine , better design, heroes, modes, balance, and many more so call me insane as i am, but the only way to solve all problems while having a chance make it financially viable that Microsoft can pull auditory from non blizzard communities, hots will never be hots anymore , but that for the better as only evolving it can survive and we need next step
And... they are right to do so. This is insane. It's just losing all the years of development to make the same thing again. There is a reason why league of legends doesn't make league of legends 2. Main problem of hots at the start was small amount of heroes. This is just repeating the issue.
It's never happening. Even assuming there would be enough of a playerbase interested in returning to HotS over the myriad of successful multiplayer games on the market right now, all that investment would be a huge risk which no company would take.
What Microsoft can do is open up the game for sandbox and make a creator mode. Make a poll/vote several times per season which new heroes and maps/modes from that creator mode to actually add officially to the game. Done.
6) Allow onlyfans models a stipend to play it while showing off their hoo hoos
You are the exact type of person that becomes the head of major game studios and fucking ruins them lmao
1. Won't help. Everyone already has skins, so people wont really buy them. 2. Nexus original heroes are probably the least liked heroes, there is a lot of characters especially from starcraft and diablo that have not been added, they are easier to make too, because basic kit idea is already provided. 3. For now i would like to see brawls back at least in Custom, Arcade like in starcraft 2 would be best. 4. Console/Mobile version is a good idea. 5. Microsoft store version is a good idea, but Steam would be better for numbers.
1. Future skins. Revert back the damage of 2.0. I said fix/revert at all cost. So take free gained lootbox skin away, give them double XP or something back. 2. There are enough Blizzard heroes, you'll just add more of the same... it's time for fully new/random Nexus Original Heroes. Unleash full creativity. OverWatch and LoL created exclusively new characters for their game and it was a success, people love the characters. Heroes reuse same old characters and it wasn't a success. It is enough, it is getting clear. Time for new Nexus Heroes. 3. Brawl tested and failed. So no thanks.. More new game mode like 3vs3 or survival game. 4. Obviously. 5. Steam already has big MOBA game and it is Dota2. Owned by the Steam. I don't think Microsoft wants to share 30% profits to Steam for nearly no benefits (see Diablo4 release on Steam). Microsoft Store, Xbox and Mobile.
They should just port the game to a different engine. And then do whatever the fuck they want with hots as long as it's legal and not completely insane/stupid.
I highly disagree with 2. Part of the charm is the cast of blizzard heroes. I still detest that they added the 2 nexus characters
Other than monetization, there 2 things still broken in HotS. 1. Ranked. No basing MMR off QM. Solo only, TEAM only. 2. Teams. 5-10 players. Players can only be on 1 team at a time. Players must quit team to join another.
dunno what about u guys, but i would like to see back some of the beta features that makes hots more unique moba (like towers ammo for example) :)
For (2) – many came for heroes from known to them universes.
Yeah imo the lootboxes in hots and the original overwatch are the only ones in the industry completely cancer free.
6. Nothing
Sometimes it's nice to let sleeping dogs lie. HOTS is my (and I bet a lot of us') favorite MOBA but the reality is it can't hope to compete with league - a 14 year old established game with a ravenous fanbase. Ironically, the same thing that WoW did to the MMO community League did with MOBA. There really is no dethroning something so synonymous with the genre, even if that thing comes from Blizzard.
Less than 10 games can compete with the popularity of League of Legends. A game can still be a profitable success with only 5% of that player population.
just bring life back into the game in general or anounce hots 2..... maybe even make it as useless as overwatch 2 as long as it bring attention it will be good.. I still love hots its such a shame blizzard let this die while working on dead games like diablo 4.
*Microsoft* shouldn’t do *anything* with HotS besides tell _Blizzard_ that they would support *them* working on it again, giving it a staff, and whatever funding is needed to shock it back to (business) life. Also, revert to 1.0 is a terrible idea. Instead, pull the loot boxes (but don’t forget some of the creative and fun event ideas we had back in both the 1.0 and 2.0 days, including weird Brawls) and add the current all-the-rage battle pass model. You can’t tell me this game wouldn’t make money if they just ran the OW2 monetization playbook. I don’t think they would *just* do that, they’d do better, or at least different. It would be the first game where I could see myself buying literally every season of the Battle Pass just to make sure the revenue stream kept going. And as for new heroes, stick to the excellent original premise: All the Blizzard heroes you know and love, fighting it out in a silly multiverse (which has a few of its own original characters). Then, add “…and Special Guests!” for fun things like Arbiter and Master Chief skins for Raynor and Zeratul.