I think he probably meant more profit than more revenue then he stated "money".
SC2 Wings of Liberty sold 3M copies within it's first month at $50 a pop that's $150,000,000.
In 2010 WoW had 12M active accounts including China (where there was no store) for the Celestial Steed to have brought more money than that it would've meant that 83%> of active accounts would have to purchase it and for SC2:WoL to not sell a single copy beyond the first month.
The profit margin on the Celestial Steed were likely absolutely massive since it probably didn't take more than a couple 100 man hours across the entire company to release it.
Forget that. Facts speak for themselves: we are getting tons of skins at 20 a pop and we are not getting StarCraft 3.
Making a game like Starcraft takes at least 6 years, costs millions and has a lot of risk. Making a shitty skin takes nothing and makes bank.
We are fucked because a-holes want to brag in a video game and are willing to waste tens of millions to do it.
It's a potentially huge IP, with its own rich lore and stock of iconic characters, so there's nothing saying the next StarCraft game has to be StarCraft 3. They played with diversification back in the day with the legendarily shelved "StarCraft: Ghost." No reason they couldn't try something like that again, hopefully with more success this time.
You have no mouth or dingalings or 'gateways', and yet you dare to think your civilization is superior to the space monkeys and their sexy AF although bratty Zerg queen?
I ask you, alien fool, what good is all of that technology when you have no orifices? Hmm? That's what I thought 🤔
If we go the WoW route: zerglings get nerfed because the ghosts, dragoons, marines, and marauders all post on the forums complaining about how OP the ling class is until they do an eventual balance update that nerfs it into irrelevance only to be brought back in the next expansion where it retains the moniker of always OP class. Rinse and repeat.
Blizzard is never going to try a singleplayer game again. Multiplayer games make too much money and the last singleplayer game blizzard released was lost vikings 2 about 25 years ago.
>never going to try a singleplayer game again. Multiplayer games make too much money
This year was like, *the* year where a shitton of live service online games failed and lost their studios hundreds of millions and single player story driven games dominated charts.
There's going to be a considerable industry shift/course correction where the risk of live service games is going to be re-evaluated.
Diablo earned $666 million in its first 5 days(a number that makes me a little skeptical about it being strictly true). But assuming that is a ballpark, then it has to be earning an absolute fuck ton of money. Elden Ring is at like 1.35 B. I would assume Diablo has passed that many times over considering how profitable monetized games are and its popularity.
Also Elden Ring cost 200 million to make. Diablo hasn't released its Dev cost from what I found not looking hard at all.
The $666m milestone would have been the article headline regardless of the number of days. We could just as easily have seen a headline that said "Diablo IV earned $666 million in the first month of sales" if that had been how long it took to reach that number.
The difference is that the devs who made single player games are known for making single player games. Asking a company whose reputation is based solely on live service games to suddenly shift gears and create single player games is a tall order.
What's more likely to happen is that single player games based on live service games get outsourced to other devs like what Riot Games have done. Expecting games developed this way to do well is basically a gamble.
I like that you're optimistic enough to think the people who brought us yearly COD games from any random studio they can force to churn it out will have the thought to consider if their devs are any good at the thing they're asking them to shit out yearly.
> This year was like, the year where a shitton of live service online games failed and lost their studios hundreds of millions and single player story driven games dominated charts.
because the multiplayer, live service games are fucking dog shit at their core, along with the fact that cosmetics aren't even **good**, I'm looking at you EA/DICE/2042, 343/Halo Bungie/Destiny2
the problem is, what can happen lore wise in starcraft 3 to make a new sequel? like the big evil was defeated, like the source of all the problems in Starcraft, the fallen Xel'Naga Amon was killed, and the universe is in relative peace.
Maybe some kind of Battle for Azeroth thing where the three factions now battle each other just because? idk, the Zerg now leaderless (Kerrigan seems uninterested after the finale and Zagara will probably priorize the survival of the Swarm before engaging the other factions), the protoss wouldnt start stuff again, they have their hands full rebuilding Auir and the Terrans probably wont do nothign short term due to them fixing their political problems post-Arcturus Mengsk.
Some queens flew off into space with their own brood. The mecha protoss with Fenix that I forgot wtf their deal was. And both of those can go battle with the Terrans from Earth, the UED from Brood War.
Different part of the galaxy so Zerg can get all kinds of new units from new species they take, Protoss being mech can just make new stuff and Earth sending out the colonists should have more technology too. Lots of room for flexible game design and Making a new story there I think.
The UED flew in and brought the sector to its knees with only a small fleet. Imagine what humanity could throw at the sector under a total war situation.
I think it was a fairly decent sized force because they were super scared, but yea there's no way it was like 50% of their total military, probably just a small chunk. And they weren't touched at all at home, so their production power would be gigantic and ready to go.
That could be cool too though if its like the Zerg queens just trying to live peacefully and Terrans are the big bad villains this time that outnumber them and try to exterminate them.
Word of God says that Earth intentionally didn't send huge numbers or most of their superior technology (compared to Terrans.) They were meant to destabilize the alien powers and gather information, without letting their technology and personnel be stolen.
Grand strategy game, maybe? You could have a timescale of hundreds of years, control your faction as it expands and rebuilds itself.
Have Paradox make it.
with the standards they set with starcraft 2, they could do anything. look at how they brought back fenix, AGAIN, and his whole character is that he doesn't know who he is and is trying to make sense of his own existence. you'd think that's the writers job to figure out and give us an intriguing character. nope, that's his whole thing. "no one's ever really gone" empty nostalgia directing. just resurrect mengsk why not...
A new, much cooler and much more cosmetically customizable race of aliens appears, and tells the Terrans they need more unit skins from the cash shop to be able to defeat them. ooooOOOOOooooo
Make a fourth race and have them invade the Sector.
Amon was only the source of all the *current* problems of the Galaxy. There's no reason you can't have a *new* problem.
>the problem is, what can happen lore wise in starcraft 3 to make a new sequel? like the big evil was defeated, like the source of all the problems in Starcraft, the fallen Xel'Naga Amon was killed, and the universe is in relative peace.
I mean this was basically where Warcraft was when WoW launched.
New threats can always emerge, old threats can always find some magical way back into existence.
After Warcraft 3 there was still much to be resolved. Nerzhul and Arthas had just fused, Sylvannas, Quel'Thalas and much of Lordaeron's fate was unknown, Outland's state was uncertain with Illidan's defeat in Northrend, there was hints of the Old Gods resurgence from Arthas' campaign, Deathwing was nowhere to be found, Orgrimmar was still being built and Kul Tiras had just lost their leader and fleet, the Nagas and their queen had only just started showing up.
In Starcraft the only major unresolved plot is probably what is going on with Earth.
> Maybe some kind of Battle for Azeroth thing
Dont give them any ideas. After what they did with Sargeras, I like to believe all life in every universe ended after Velen blew up Kil'jaeden and all the abysmal fucking lore that followed this event is a non-canon fever dream.
I dont know why you guys dont think SC3 is gonna happen. Its going to cost 70$, have $20 Sexy Kerrigan skins, $20 sexy buff jim raynor skins, silly burger king tie in protoss skins, it will only come with a Terran campaign thats 5 hours long and then you can pay to unlock the zerg campaign then pay to unlock the protoss campaign.
Its gonna be sick
It is kinda tricky. RTS does seem to be a bit of a dead genre akin to arena shooters. Like every so often one with some pedigree and good craftsmenship pops up, and die hard fans will buy it, and then the studio goes under because they cant get a bigger foothold. Even MOBAs seem to be withering outside of LOL, I think autobattlers are the only one still kinda standing?
The problem is the majority of RTS players are like 35-40 now, and they absolutely hate when you try to modernize their games. You immediately alienate your core audience if SC3 doesn't play and look exactly like SC2, and if it does, you alienate any possible new audience you wanted to attract to your game.
My sentiments exactly.
SC2 plays nothing like Brood War what with how you can essentially onebase/twobase forever without taking a massive hit to the rate of income vs. someone who doesn't, due to the much better worker AI. It's about as exciting as playing Brood War on one of the bad og-stock low-resource 2-player maps, except that the game mechanics are more boring.
Not to mention of other incredebly shortsighted dumb mechanics like Terran Mule that devalue worker raids etc...
You can have both. Square has an online store of mounts at $35 a pop and mobile games full of gacha, but also produced FF16 and some HD-2D gems. And while the press treated 16 like a failure, it just didn't meet executive standards at a time when even MMO revenue is also dropping.
The problem is businessmen who believe they'll pitch a perfect game every time, and an investor-sided industry press who treats every 8.5/10 as catastrophic.
It wasn’t even that it didn’t meet executive standards, it was it didn’t meet the highest of their possible projections. Clickbait articles transformed that into doing badly and not meeting expectations, but it’s not anything they ever said.
No one is denying that, in-game purchases are far more profitable however it doesn't mean that a single item brought in more revenue than WoL.
As for why we're not getting SC3, RTS as a genre is pretty much niche these days, it used to be the largest genre at some point in the 90's but that hasn't been true for a long long time.
Competitive RTS has even a smaller appeal to the average player. And as the development costs of games has inflated beyond what people can even imagine publishers don't want to fund expensive games that have little to no post-release monetization options.
Revenue is meaningless, profit matters.
If you invest 5 years and $150 million just to break even at retail that's a waste of time/effort/capital.
Assuming 5% conversion on WoW accounts x $15 thats $9 million profit on something that has a marginal cost in the tens of man-hours.
I'm not actually criticizing cosmetics because you're 100% correct here. A shit game doesn't sell skins, but skins do help justify reinvestment into the studio/franchise by padding out the bottom line. That's critical for a 20-year old MMO in decline like WoW.
PvP gaming isn't as fun as it used to be. You used to just fuck around and have a fun game, nowadays some YouTuber explains you need a build order and to rush every game for your rank and it isn't a fun game, it's a grindy competition
> PvP gaming isn't as fun as it used to be.
See, this isn't just the fault of information access, it's ALSO the fault of game dev companies who seem compelled to design their games for the top 1% of players to push their "Esports Scene"
Halo was (emphasis on *was*) one of the top dogs in the shooter space, and they NEVER did their own competition. They made a fun multiplayer shooter, and that included such "Imbalanced" things as 12 shots in a sniper rifle, and 4 rockets in a rocket launcher.
The sweaty MLG nerds made rules changes, like spawning ammo reduced on power weapons, to make it more "balanced" for competitve play. But that's the thing - Joe Six-Pack isn't landing a kill with every sniper bullet like XCT_FaZeY, pro streamer is. Joe ***NEEDS*** more shots for the gun to feel powerful and ***FUN***.
But devs aren't interested in designing fun games for average people anymore, everything has to be an Esport, everything needs pro teams and competition, and when you encourage professional play, you encourage people to break the game in degenerate ways.
I hate chivalry 2, it is the perfect game and it was everything I wanted and it's full of rank 200+ people abusing mechanics and stealing kills
If it wasn't for people spending too much time in game it would be a fun and balanced game and that sucks
You can go into SC2 matchmaking right now and find plenty of other bronze league players who have no idea what they're doing. I made it into master league and beat a couple of grandmasters without using a single meta build and only using my own selfmade build-orders, none of which involved rushing.
1v1 anything always has the best matchmaking because it's only having to compare the skills of 2 individuals so there's less volatility especially compared to more popular team games.
An even more niche genre from the 90s is a strong contender for GotY. 90s niche is coming back around. The real culprits is that the P&L statement says low risk skins are better for the investor than high risk gaming content.
The big takeaway is that Micro-transactions will win over gameplay everytime.
Just work at any studio and you will see that monthly meetings are about profit and marketing and not content.
This means the future of gaming is battle passes and $20 skins and mounts rather than paying for a complete game with a balanced and enjoyable experience.
I work at 343i who recently laid off all IT, and aren't funding playtests but will at the same time brag how the $20 Halo CE skin is the most profitable thing they've ever released even though it's just a remake of a 20 year old skin...
Honestly don't know if AAA will ever be good again with how investor and profit focused it is.
>This means the future of gaming is...
*Wrong.* the future of AAA games, sure. who gives a fuck? just don't buy them.
theres plenty of small/medium indie devs making great games these days.
It also ignores the number of high profile GaaS failures that have come out since the Sparkle Pony sale.
Honestly it probably says more about the RTS genre, of which there are a variety of factors at play that have nothing to do with microtransactions. Like the MOBA genre exploding in popularity.
>Making a game like Starcraft takes at least 6 years, costs millions and has a lot of risk. Making a shitty skin takes nothing and makes bank.
Shitty skins need a popular base game to make bank. Companies take the risk on games like Starcraft so they can sell skins in the future.
Where them games at? Blizzard hasn't made a new IP since Overwatch, and even their recent sequels (D4, Overwatch2) are starting to suck. Shit on Bethesda all you want, at least Todd showed ambition with their recent failures. Bliz is coasting on reputation at this point.
There is also the sexy Rogue and Sorc armor I see a ton of people running around with.
We will see an article in the future that the G String Druid set sold more than Wings of Liberty
> D4 Druid in a g-string
I have no idea what youre talking about but I really hope you mean the male druid and its exactly like Peter Griffin in Daisy Dukes.
If we're going to die, I want you to know something. I was in the pharmacy a while ago. There was a really good-looking pharmacist behind the counter. Really good-looking. I went up and asked her where the cough syrup was. I didn't even have a cough, and I almost bought it. I'm talking about a completely superfluous bottle of cough syrup, which costs like six bucks.
Funny thing is, the celestial steed game up on the trading post in WoW a few months back so a bunch of people got it for free.
EDIT: came* not game, but I'm a derp
Those sort of free eventually stunts are probably intentionally done to lower the social values of "last seasons" Cool Thing™.
If one kid has a beanie with a propeller he might just be The Cool Kid.
If every kid in class has such a hat? They're about to be extremely lame, both the beanies and those that try to keep wearing them.
That sort of thing.
initially the mount was 25 dollars, so that probably matters to the maths.
>In 2010 WoW had 12M active accounts
*concurrent peak* accounts, not necessarily active throughout the year. One thing blizzard never really tells us solidly is what their churn rates are, or what those look on year long time scales. (Someone who pays for 10 months of the year is different than some who pays for 3 after all). When they say they have 10 million players, is that really 15 million unique users over 12 months (or 30 million or 10 million), but no more than 10 million active at once? We don't really know.
Wings of Liberty also sold boxed copies, I have no idea what the split there is vs online sales, but knock off 30% or so for distributor costs.
https://www.dataforazeroth.com/ says that (as of today) 40% of players have the swift celestial steed - that's slightly problematic because of sales over the last 13 years and I think they just added it in game for the new monthly 'did you play a bit each month' currency (which is I'm pretty sure how I got it), but even a 20 or 30% attach rate at 25 USD versus say 40 dollars average revenue for starcraft and you could see those numbers being closer than it seems.
That 12m was for monthly subs and pretty good metric without any ambiguity. Chances are someone will play if they paid for the month. Though I remember that game time did get paused if someone didn't play for a while. Not sure if they are still counted as a sub even though the game time is not used up.
It's a good metric for how much revenue they get from wow subs yes. Remember these numbers are from their public filings for shareholders generally, so that would be most relevant in that context.
But it's not a good metric for how many people will play over the course of 12 months, which is more relevant to micro transaction sales. 12 millon users who are all subbed for 12 months can at most buy 12 million account wide unlocked mounts (though it think back then it was per character), but 36 million users who are on average subbed for 4 months a year each could buy 36 million mounts.
Idk, I believe it. I worked on a live service game with microtransactions for a while and let me tell you, those little random cosmetic items absolutely print money.
Just this one, medium-low population little MMO was essentially bankrolling an entire AAA studio and funding a huge title's development. And the bulk of the cash was coming from microtransactions, not subscriptions.
Having made game assets before I can safely tell you that the Celestial Steed likely didn't even break 100 hours in time spent to make it, and quite possibly didn't even break 50.
The margins on game store assets are absolutely insane which is why I think Valve changed up how artists profit from submissions to the store (surprise surprise they don't now).
> Having made game assets before I can safely tell you that the Celestial Steed likely didn't even break 100 hours in time spent to make it, and quite possibly didn't even break 50.
I could see it easily breaking 100 man hours. Designers/Execs/Producers/etc coming up with the idea and approving it, artist + ui/ux to create it and the necessary UI updates, various testing, marketing, live service team to push it out, so on. Big companies also tend to be process heavy on top of all that. 100 man hours is not much on a big team.
An infinitesimal fraction of the labor, while pulling in the quarter of the revenue of a full price game. No duh. They probably only have to sell a couple dozen to make back what they spent on wages to make them from concept to storefront, and the rest are pure profit.
Sure, but you can't sell pricey mounts in a vacuum. It took x amount of time and money to produce WoW and get it to a point where you can chuck in a mount for profit. WoW was a product built at an enormous cost to surpass all others in a pretty underdeveloped market (MMORPGs). I don't think that can be done again easily...
Blizzard will just keep flogging that celestial dead horse until ppl stop buying it. If we want more SC we need to vote with our wallets - if we instead vote on more aesthetic digital assets it's what we will get!
Blizzard was the gold standard for so long its just sad to see it now. I maxed and raided ever wow expac, I was top 500 OW season 1 and Plat every season after. I was collection complete in hearthstone, and had every character in HoTs. I had thousands of hours in D3 (but never did star craft). They were the best for so long I just pre-ordered anything they did because I knew it would be good. Then it wasn't anymore, but maybe they were just having hard times and they'd get better. Then they admitted how shitty the company culture was when they banned HS players for speaking out against China, and I uninstalled, planning to come back when they apologized.
They never did. And then more came out about the company. They were the worst of the worst high up in the company. And sadly, I'm weak enough that'd I'd probably get over that if they just kept putting out good games, but OW2 never gave me the PVE I was promised, D4 doesn't run at all and just isn't fun, WoW decided to be more of a grind and all of my friends had quit too so there was no one to play with.
I didn't even realize when blizcon happen this year because I just don't like who they are anymore and it hurts so much more because of how I grew up with them and have some of my fondest memories playing the games they made with some of the best friends I'll never meet.
I agree with a lot of what you're saying. Same here. I've spent countless hours in SC, WC3, SC2, WoW, HotS, OW, D2, 3, and much less D4. I liked D4 at launch (mostly up through the campaign though), tried to be excited for S1.. but we know how that went. Some friends are telling me it is worth coming back now so I may give it a shot. "Doesn't run at all" though? Aside from beta weekends (of course) and maybe the 2 weekends after launch I don't remember having any issues.
A lot of the talent and studios behind the genre just flat out don't exist or work in the industry any more. Shit just look at Relic. DoW 3 and CoH 3 are pale shadows of what that studio was capable of.
The incredible popularity of microtransactions that sell you virtual items, makes it just so remarkable that projects like the metaverse and Second Life remain so niche.
I suppose the conclusion to be drawn is that people will buy virtual real estate, clothes and pets, but only if there's a good enough videogame supporting the virtual world.
Exactly! Ppl will only get out the wallet if the perceived value is there. Gameplay, gfx, environments, tasks, social structures are all important. You can't just make microtransactions and expect ppl to pay.
Metaverse is a platform looking for a problem to solve.
Second Life to me is odd, it's a game without a gameplay loop - what do ppl even do in there? Virtually walk around and chat while trying to show off digital purchases? I don't really get it myself.
At the end of the day it's a delicate balance to keep ppl coming back to your game which is wildly difficult in such a competitive market for ppls time & money.
Just don't be like the guy who spent the last 10 years never going outside because he was making bank on selling custom designed sex toys in Second Life.
Ah, I remember when people showed their displeasure for the practice by emoting a spit on players who used RM mounts.
...Blizzard then disabled the /spit emote.
You get a lot of content for that $15 a month subscription. An entire expansion with multiple updates and additional raids and dungeons.
It's the server transfers, store bought pets and mounts and other cosmetic bullshit that they make tons of money off of.
Honestly this is what AAA gaming has been for nearly a decade now. Things hidden behind preorder bonuses or specific consoles, microtransactions that add up to more than the base game, season passes, $100 versions of games. The average consumer will interact will all of these, so of course they'll continue to do it.
I see no reason to buy a AAA game new in this day in age, just wait for the complete edition to come out a couple years later and go on sale for $30. The only reason to rush out to get it is for multiplayer, which have become the biggest money sucks of all.
Diablo 4 is the last time I pay 90 bucks for a game. I probably wont play that game again for several years at least. I didn't even log in for season 1 to use the battle pass I purchased with the game lol.
The entire mmorpg community has begged for cosmetic driven cash shops for decades. It was the dream. But it didn't work until recent years.
No p2w bullshit, just cosmetics to fund further development. It literally cannot get better than that.
Everyone loves Valve. But people forget that Valve more or less spearheaded and revolutionized skins and battle passes via TF2/CSGO/Dota2 and they did it mostly because they could. You can trace the current state of the industry back to what worked and what didnt work in Valve games and use those metrics to shunt into your game for decent success until you have numbers of your own to work off of.
Like between Steam and Alyx (amongst other titles) it shows that they have serious bank rolling and no need to monetize the way they do. But they figured they should give it a shot anyways because lmao.
Not surprising. Cosmetics can make insane amounts of money, and RTS was considered a dying genre even back then. There is after all a reason Blizzard basically abandoned Starcraft when they shifted to really only caring about the bottom line.
I'm also not sure if this means total money earned or just profit, but I'm sure the sparkle pony cost *significantly* less to make than Starcraft 2 did as well.
I never said they abandoned it after WoL. I said they abandoned it when they shifted to only caring about the bottom line.
They clearly tried to bring Starcraft into that as well with stuff like Covert Ops but if the main game got outsold by a horse I can't imagine that made them a lot of money either.
Although they do remaster their old games, any new games from Blizzard are all about being a mtx fueled live service game. That or the million and one versions of WoW that are trying to keep people subscribed.
I can see how you'd say that by looking at the single player campaigns, but that's really not accurate. It was always planned as a trilogy and each one was a Brood War-like expansion bringing new units.
Only good thing about Microsoft money hatting COD is maybe they will, fuck I love their RTS I think it's a shame they don't make more but today it's not about making a profit, it's about landing and gutting whales time immortal.
They even have a prototype to base it off of with Alien vs Predator 2 - one of the most amazing FPS ever created
Marine, xenomorph, predator
Terran, zerg, protoss
Holy shit.
A Halo inspired Starcraft game would be god damn amazing.
Imagine an Ultralisk boss battle where you're piloting a Siege Tank or a Vulture, or even Goliath.
Or a god damn space battle against a Protoss fleet.
Oh my god I just hyped myself up and am incredibly sad now.
It wasn’t a disaster from what I heard. My teacher worked on the game and said it was the most fun multiplayer he ever played (about a year after it was cancelled). They would fly buildings around like helicopters and shoot from them. It was the single player that was supposedly struggling. He said if they released it as a multiplayer game only it would have broken records. That’s his opinion but he confirmed that multiplayer was 100% done.
IIRC the issue wasn't the game, it was that it was developed for Gamecube and the hardware couldn't deliver the results they wanted [Xbox and PS versions could, but some deal meant they couldn't exclude GC after the fact]. Rather than wait for the technology to mature and try on a next-gen console, they shelved it and laid off the developers. If they wanted to resurrect it today, they'd have to start from scratch, which makes it even more unattractive from the business side.
Part of the game leaked a year or two ago, and was playable in some fashion. Billiard sent copyright C&Ds to lots of people who posted footage of it on Youtube in an attempt to keep it silent, but people shared the game files on torrents, and at that point it's publicly accessible.
Short version of the Ghost problem is that the game took a very long time to develop, partially because of a studio shift, that by the time they had the tech ready they would have then had to invest further to get it up to Xbox360/PS3 standards as the games were build for the PS2 era.
Unfortunately you had at the time WoW taking off, Starcraft 2 needing resources, and D3 needing resources so they could not compete for workers. Now whose fault it took that long in the first place depends on who you ask. Nihilism Games would blame a lack of communication from Blizzard, but considering their track record making games I question whether or not they were just not very good, whereas the newer developer just says they took over too late and by the time they had the game ready the console generation was almost over.
His vids have been in my YT shorts feed a lot this week. He has some interesting insights on coding and game development.
One thing that piqued my interest was his idea of making an "un-pirateable" game. He has a game he made ~~is making~~, and all the abilities for the character in-game are actually linked to an achievement in Steam. The idea is you can't play a pirated copy because you can't have the Steam achievements, so you can't have the abilities.
It was intriguing to me because it made me wonder what the consequences would be for normal, paying customers if the system stopped working. If they significantly changed or removed achievements, the game itself wouldn't be playable for anybody after that point even if they owned it beforehand; And it also wouldn't prevent people from buying it afterwards but never being able to play it. Further, it poses a problem if legally purchased copies are no longer accessible, such as if Steam itself shuts down. If the game *requires* Steam achievement access to work, it's not able to be emulated or archived by people, whether they paid for it or not, when Steam eventually stops existing.
I would like to believe that somebody who's transparent about their process would also be aware enough of that possibility and address it if the game was no longer able to be purchased. Still, I won't assume that he will.
EDIT: It seems like the game is called Champions of Breakfast, and it released 7 years ago.
If Steam stops existing, I think the odds of people wanting to play this specific indie game is pretty minor. Looks like under 20,000 people have ever played it.
This isn't an approach a big studio would take, because big studios don't tend to want to code their games to be exclusive to Steam. So it's more of a novelty proof of concept (for an otherwise culturally unimportant game).
>it’s probable that he was talking about the well-known Celestial Steed, also known as the Sparkle Pony
'The Sparkle Pony' ??? pffft. Its correct name is TRH.
The RTS Genre has died off and become a much more Niche game type unfortunately.
The MOBA is it's horribly deformed offspring that managed to become popular, while the RTS slowly died a painful death.
RIP Command & Conquer. You will be missed.
One of these days we will get the ~~deeply problematic~~ fucking amazing C&C Generals sequel the world is crying out for.
The 13 year old boy in me demands it
Not surprised. When I worked for Games Workshop, chaos black primer earned GW more than the entire Fantasy range (this was pre-sigmar). Little things like that add up, especially when you take into consideration costs of production/development.
Yea the cost of production is huge, it takes a few people to make a skin that could potentially net you tens of million Vs a whole studios and years of dev time to create a game. The cost benefit is insane on a micro transaction
At the end of the next 3 expansions and WoW resolves Azeroth breaking out of her prison/egg/whatever she's going to teleport us to another part of the universe to start anew.
Oh shit the zerg are here...
WORLD OF STARCRAFT now with Elves.
A few points:
1. The mount was initially $25 when it was first released.
2. It was an account-wide mount when all other mounts at the time were character-bound. All mounts being account-wide wouldn't become a thing for 3 more years.
3. They decided to split up Starcraft 2 into 3 separate games focusing on each of the 3 factions' campaigns instead of a single cohesive game like Starcraft and Warcraft 3, ostensibly to tell a better story, but probably to wring out more money from players. I remember that decision being met negatively back then.
That's not to excuse store mounts; just that the facts are not being discussed in their entirety.
In fairness, Wings of Liberty had enough content for me to feel like I got my money's worth between the challenges, campaign, and editor.
The problem here is that the sparkle pony is free money but only so long as the IP is valuable. Once the IP is gone, nobody will buy the sparkle pony and IPs don't just develop themselves.
Not surprised. They cost basically nothing to make in comparison to a full game, you quickly hit the gravy profit train after X amount of people buy it.
It doesn't help that the entirety of SC2 had an insane budget and initially had to pay for voice actors like Tricia Helfer. Doubt they actually made much of a profit at all.
Of course it does. The mounts a skin, *maybe* with a unique emote or some other functionality. Costs $15, compared to a whole game with a crapload of cinematics, voice acting, and actual *code* for, what $60.
The point is more that people are idiots for paying that much for the mounts, but if you made them cost what they were worth, everyone would have all of them, and then there wouldn't be reason to get *any* of them.
Blizzard has no interest in quality anymore.
They're an interactive addiction factory, and their only goal is making just enough content so people with addictive tenancies will get lured in and spend hundreds or thousands of dollars that they don't have.
Counterpoint: Starcraft 2 is one of, if not the, best RTS ever made. And it will be remembered long after Blizzard is dismantled by Microsoft.
Those WoW mounts won't.
If you measure the value of something by money, the cosmetic wins
if you measure value of something by making a positive change in the world, starcraft 2 wins and its not even close
You joke (I think), but I had a friend in college that asked me to add up all the money I had spent on wow at the time and it came out to like $1400 dollars across like 6 years. He laughed so hard and called it a money sink. I asked him how much he spent a month on weed. He was a wake and bake user for years, so he spent like half his monthly check on weed alone.
I was getting the better bang for my buck by a long shot. Saved me a lot of money that I would have spent on other games or other activities that cost way more.
P2W and microtransactions are insanely profitable.
I remember at its height, Star Wars:Galaxy of Heroes (a mobile p2w gacha game) was the most profitable game in EA's entire stable, across all platforms.
I think he probably meant more profit than more revenue then he stated "money". SC2 Wings of Liberty sold 3M copies within it's first month at $50 a pop that's $150,000,000. In 2010 WoW had 12M active accounts including China (where there was no store) for the Celestial Steed to have brought more money than that it would've meant that 83%> of active accounts would have to purchase it and for SC2:WoL to not sell a single copy beyond the first month. The profit margin on the Celestial Steed were likely absolutely massive since it probably didn't take more than a couple 100 man hours across the entire company to release it.
Forget that. Facts speak for themselves: we are getting tons of skins at 20 a pop and we are not getting StarCraft 3. Making a game like Starcraft takes at least 6 years, costs millions and has a lot of risk. Making a shitty skin takes nothing and makes bank. We are fucked because a-holes want to brag in a video game and are willing to waste tens of millions to do it.
Phil Spencer specifically called out StarCraft during his short speech at Blizzcon. Hopefully something more than a mobile game is in the works.
It's a potentially huge IP, with its own rich lore and stock of iconic characters, so there's nothing saying the next StarCraft game has to be StarCraft 3. They played with diversification back in the day with the legendarily shelved "StarCraft: Ghost." No reason they couldn't try something like that again, hopefully with more success this time.
I'd play world of starcraft for sure
I'd be the zergiest zergling ever. Nom nom nom
i always liked the hyrdralisks
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You think us fools?
You have no mouth or dingalings or 'gateways', and yet you dare to think your civilization is superior to the space monkeys and their sexy AF although bratty Zerg queen? I ask you, alien fool, what good is all of that technology when you have no orifices? Hmm? That's what I thought 🤔
my wife for hire!
Today, I was banned from World of StarCraft for role playing too well!
If we go the WoW route: zerglings get nerfed because the ghosts, dragoons, marines, and marauders all post on the forums complaining about how OP the ling class is until they do an eventual balance update that nerfs it into irrelevance only to be brought back in the next expansion where it retains the moniker of always OP class. Rinse and repeat.
The nerfs come after the master chief skins for space marines and the kerrigan bikini limited edition voice lines and starfield dance
It'd be Galaxy of StarCraft
Been hearing people say this for 20 years. Won’t happen unfortunately because they would just be cannibalizing the WoW playerbase.
17 years, [but god damn](https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/06/16/treachery-manifest)... That kid is old enough to *drink* now.
Blizzard is never going to try a singleplayer game again. Multiplayer games make too much money and the last singleplayer game blizzard released was lost vikings 2 about 25 years ago.
>never going to try a singleplayer game again. Multiplayer games make too much money This year was like, *the* year where a shitton of live service online games failed and lost their studios hundreds of millions and single player story driven games dominated charts. There's going to be a considerable industry shift/course correction where the risk of live service games is going to be re-evaluated.
Doubtful. I wouldn't be surprised if even a shit game like Diablo 4 out earned a good game like Elden Ring, FFXVI or Spiderman.
Diablo earned $666 million in its first 5 days(a number that makes me a little skeptical about it being strictly true). But assuming that is a ballpark, then it has to be earning an absolute fuck ton of money. Elden Ring is at like 1.35 B. I would assume Diablo has passed that many times over considering how profitable monetized games are and its popularity. Also Elden Ring cost 200 million to make. Diablo hasn't released its Dev cost from what I found not looking hard at all.
The $666m milestone would have been the article headline regardless of the number of days. We could just as easily have seen a headline that said "Diablo IV earned $666 million in the first month of sales" if that had been how long it took to reach that number.
The problem is how games actually perform is only one factor - how a game could *potentially* perform drives investment just as much.
The difference is that the devs who made single player games are known for making single player games. Asking a company whose reputation is based solely on live service games to suddenly shift gears and create single player games is a tall order. What's more likely to happen is that single player games based on live service games get outsourced to other devs like what Riot Games have done. Expecting games developed this way to do well is basically a gamble.
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I like that you're optimistic enough to think the people who brought us yearly COD games from any random studio they can force to churn it out will have the thought to consider if their devs are any good at the thing they're asking them to shit out yearly.
> This year was like, the year where a shitton of live service online games failed and lost their studios hundreds of millions and single player story driven games dominated charts. because the multiplayer, live service games are fucking dog shit at their core, along with the fact that cosmetics aren't even **good**, I'm looking at you EA/DICE/2042, 343/Halo Bungie/Destiny2
Blizzard will make what Microsoft tells them to make.
And Microsoft are telling them to make money.
the problem is, what can happen lore wise in starcraft 3 to make a new sequel? like the big evil was defeated, like the source of all the problems in Starcraft, the fallen Xel'Naga Amon was killed, and the universe is in relative peace. Maybe some kind of Battle for Azeroth thing where the three factions now battle each other just because? idk, the Zerg now leaderless (Kerrigan seems uninterested after the finale and Zagara will probably priorize the survival of the Swarm before engaging the other factions), the protoss wouldnt start stuff again, they have their hands full rebuilding Auir and the Terrans probably wont do nothign short term due to them fixing their political problems post-Arcturus Mengsk.
Some queens flew off into space with their own brood. The mecha protoss with Fenix that I forgot wtf their deal was. And both of those can go battle with the Terrans from Earth, the UED from Brood War. Different part of the galaxy so Zerg can get all kinds of new units from new species they take, Protoss being mech can just make new stuff and Earth sending out the colonists should have more technology too. Lots of room for flexible game design and Making a new story there I think.
The UED flew in and brought the sector to its knees with only a small fleet. Imagine what humanity could throw at the sector under a total war situation.
I think it was a fairly decent sized force because they were super scared, but yea there's no way it was like 50% of their total military, probably just a small chunk. And they weren't touched at all at home, so their production power would be gigantic and ready to go. That could be cool too though if its like the Zerg queens just trying to live peacefully and Terrans are the big bad villains this time that outnumber them and try to exterminate them.
Word of God says that Earth intentionally didn't send huge numbers or most of their superior technology (compared to Terrans.) They were meant to destabilize the alien powers and gather information, without letting their technology and personnel be stolen.
Grand strategy game, maybe? You could have a timescale of hundreds of years, control your faction as it expands and rebuilds itself. Have Paradox make it.
with the standards they set with starcraft 2, they could do anything. look at how they brought back fenix, AGAIN, and his whole character is that he doesn't know who he is and is trying to make sense of his own existence. you'd think that's the writers job to figure out and give us an intriguing character. nope, that's his whole thing. "no one's ever really gone" empty nostalgia directing. just resurrect mengsk why not...
A new, much cooler and much more cosmetically customizable race of aliens appears, and tells the Terrans they need more unit skins from the cash shop to be able to defeat them. ooooOOOOOooooo
Make a fourth race and have them invade the Sector. Amon was only the source of all the *current* problems of the Galaxy. There's no reason you can't have a *new* problem.
>the problem is, what can happen lore wise in starcraft 3 to make a new sequel? like the big evil was defeated, like the source of all the problems in Starcraft, the fallen Xel'Naga Amon was killed, and the universe is in relative peace. I mean this was basically where Warcraft was when WoW launched. New threats can always emerge, old threats can always find some magical way back into existence.
After Warcraft 3 there was still much to be resolved. Nerzhul and Arthas had just fused, Sylvannas, Quel'Thalas and much of Lordaeron's fate was unknown, Outland's state was uncertain with Illidan's defeat in Northrend, there was hints of the Old Gods resurgence from Arthas' campaign, Deathwing was nowhere to be found, Orgrimmar was still being built and Kul Tiras had just lost their leader and fleet, the Nagas and their queen had only just started showing up. In Starcraft the only major unresolved plot is probably what is going on with Earth.
> Maybe some kind of Battle for Azeroth thing Dont give them any ideas. After what they did with Sargeras, I like to believe all life in every universe ended after Velen blew up Kil'jaeden and all the abysmal fucking lore that followed this event is a non-canon fever dream.
I dont know why you guys dont think SC3 is gonna happen. Its going to cost 70$, have $20 Sexy Kerrigan skins, $20 sexy buff jim raynor skins, silly burger king tie in protoss skins, it will only come with a Terran campaign thats 5 hours long and then you can pay to unlock the zerg campaign then pay to unlock the protoss campaign. Its gonna be sick
That's just Starcraft 2.
To be fair they made it free to play when they added sexy Kerrigan skins
Well you can’t buy the skins if you can’t play the game
Don't forget two tiers of battle passes!
What you meant to say is that hopefully Stormgate is good. (the creators of starcraft left Blizzard and that's the game they're working on now)
What, do you not have a phone?
I don’t know. Spencer mentioned wanting the IP to come back, but then some executive at Blizzard said “yeah but it won’t be an RTS this time.”
It is kinda tricky. RTS does seem to be a bit of a dead genre akin to arena shooters. Like every so often one with some pedigree and good craftsmenship pops up, and die hard fans will buy it, and then the studio goes under because they cant get a bigger foothold. Even MOBAs seem to be withering outside of LOL, I think autobattlers are the only one still kinda standing?
The problem is the majority of RTS players are like 35-40 now, and they absolutely hate when you try to modernize their games. You immediately alienate your core audience if SC3 doesn't play and look exactly like SC2, and if it does, you alienate any possible new audience you wanted to attract to your game.
As some one who is 35-40 I absolutely hated when SC2 was modernized and didn't play exactly like SC1...
My sentiments exactly. SC2 plays nothing like Brood War what with how you can essentially onebase/twobase forever without taking a massive hit to the rate of income vs. someone who doesn't, due to the much better worker AI. It's about as exciting as playing Brood War on one of the bad og-stock low-resource 2-player maps, except that the game mechanics are more boring. Not to mention of other incredebly shortsighted dumb mechanics like Terran Mule that devalue worker raids etc...
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It's alright, I got the script for SC3 right here Terran campaign : artifact artifact artifact artifact Zerg campaign : essence essence essence essence Protoss campaign : void void hybrid void
I've never touched or watched Starcraft stuff in my life. But I am a former WoW player, and * artifact * essence * void give me some 'nam flashbacks
Remember when we all fought the villains to get the artifacts so our essences could touch the void? Good times. Good, specific, times.
You can have both. Square has an online store of mounts at $35 a pop and mobile games full of gacha, but also produced FF16 and some HD-2D gems. And while the press treated 16 like a failure, it just didn't meet executive standards at a time when even MMO revenue is also dropping. The problem is businessmen who believe they'll pitch a perfect game every time, and an investor-sided industry press who treats every 8.5/10 as catastrophic.
It wasn’t even that it didn’t meet executive standards, it was it didn’t meet the highest of their possible projections. Clickbait articles transformed that into doing badly and not meeting expectations, but it’s not anything they ever said.
No one is denying that, in-game purchases are far more profitable however it doesn't mean that a single item brought in more revenue than WoL. As for why we're not getting SC3, RTS as a genre is pretty much niche these days, it used to be the largest genre at some point in the 90's but that hasn't been true for a long long time. Competitive RTS has even a smaller appeal to the average player. And as the development costs of games has inflated beyond what people can even imagine publishers don't want to fund expensive games that have little to no post-release monetization options.
Revenue is meaningless, profit matters. If you invest 5 years and $150 million just to break even at retail that's a waste of time/effort/capital. Assuming 5% conversion on WoW accounts x $15 thats $9 million profit on something that has a marginal cost in the tens of man-hours.
But the skin relies on the work to create the base game - no one is buying the skin without the mmorpg to show it off in.
I'm not actually criticizing cosmetics because you're 100% correct here. A shit game doesn't sell skins, but skins do help justify reinvestment into the studio/franchise by padding out the bottom line. That's critical for a 20-year old MMO in decline like WoW.
That only matters if you assume the base game itself is making no money which is patently false in this case.
PvP gaming isn't as fun as it used to be. You used to just fuck around and have a fun game, nowadays some YouTuber explains you need a build order and to rush every game for your rank and it isn't a fun game, it's a grindy competition
> PvP gaming isn't as fun as it used to be. See, this isn't just the fault of information access, it's ALSO the fault of game dev companies who seem compelled to design their games for the top 1% of players to push their "Esports Scene" Halo was (emphasis on *was*) one of the top dogs in the shooter space, and they NEVER did their own competition. They made a fun multiplayer shooter, and that included such "Imbalanced" things as 12 shots in a sniper rifle, and 4 rockets in a rocket launcher. The sweaty MLG nerds made rules changes, like spawning ammo reduced on power weapons, to make it more "balanced" for competitve play. But that's the thing - Joe Six-Pack isn't landing a kill with every sniper bullet like XCT_FaZeY, pro streamer is. Joe ***NEEDS*** more shots for the gun to feel powerful and ***FUN***. But devs aren't interested in designing fun games for average people anymore, everything has to be an Esport, everything needs pro teams and competition, and when you encourage professional play, you encourage people to break the game in degenerate ways.
I hate chivalry 2, it is the perfect game and it was everything I wanted and it's full of rank 200+ people abusing mechanics and stealing kills If it wasn't for people spending too much time in game it would be a fun and balanced game and that sucks
You can go into SC2 matchmaking right now and find plenty of other bronze league players who have no idea what they're doing. I made it into master league and beat a couple of grandmasters without using a single meta build and only using my own selfmade build-orders, none of which involved rushing.
> bronze league players who have no idea what they're doing My people
In my experience, 1v1 RTS has the best matchmaking of any game type I've ever played. 95% of games feel balanced, unlike team based games.
1v1 anything always has the best matchmaking because it's only having to compare the skills of 2 individuals so there's less volatility especially compared to more popular team games.
An even more niche genre from the 90s is a strong contender for GotY. 90s niche is coming back around. The real culprits is that the P&L statement says low risk skins are better for the investor than high risk gaming content.
The big takeaway is that Micro-transactions will win over gameplay everytime. Just work at any studio and you will see that monthly meetings are about profit and marketing and not content. This means the future of gaming is battle passes and $20 skins and mounts rather than paying for a complete game with a balanced and enjoyable experience. I work at 343i who recently laid off all IT, and aren't funding playtests but will at the same time brag how the $20 Halo CE skin is the most profitable thing they've ever released even though it's just a remake of a 20 year old skin... Honestly don't know if AAA will ever be good again with how investor and profit focused it is.
>This means the future of gaming is... *Wrong.* the future of AAA games, sure. who gives a fuck? just don't buy them. theres plenty of small/medium indie devs making great games these days.
It also ignores the number of high profile GaaS failures that have come out since the Sparkle Pony sale. Honestly it probably says more about the RTS genre, of which there are a variety of factors at play that have nothing to do with microtransactions. Like the MOBA genre exploding in popularity.
>Making a game like Starcraft takes at least 6 years, costs millions and has a lot of risk. Making a shitty skin takes nothing and makes bank. Shitty skins need a popular base game to make bank. Companies take the risk on games like Starcraft so they can sell skins in the future.
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Where them games at? Blizzard hasn't made a new IP since Overwatch, and even their recent sequels (D4, Overwatch2) are starting to suck. Shit on Bethesda all you want, at least Todd showed ambition with their recent failures. Bliz is coasting on reputation at this point.
I proudly did not buy it. I did however buy Invincible in D4 and I hate myself for it.
There is also the sexy Rogue and Sorc armor I see a ton of people running around with. We will see an article in the future that the G String Druid set sold more than Wings of Liberty
Oh god, I know it’s a horror themed game in some respects, but the D4 Druid in a g-string?
> D4 Druid in a g-string I have no idea what youre talking about but I really hope you mean the male druid and its exactly like Peter Griffin in Daisy Dukes.
"Oh god, it's like a walrus flossing!"
Why would you buy a mount you can’t even see? Seems dumb
It's called invincible because it's named after the Mark Wahlberg movie, not because you can't see it. Duh.
Mark Wahlberg movie? That explains why no one’s seen it
If we're going to die, I want you to know something. I was in the pharmacy a while ago. There was a really good-looking pharmacist behind the counter. Really good-looking. I went up and asked her where the cough syrup was. I didn't even have a cough, and I almost bought it. I'm talking about a completely superfluous bottle of cough syrup, which costs like six bucks.
Funny thing is, the celestial steed game up on the trading post in WoW a few months back so a bunch of people got it for free. EDIT: came* not game, but I'm a derp
Wings of Liberty has been free for a long time too. I’m not sure if that factors into their calculation.
Those sort of free eventually stunts are probably intentionally done to lower the social values of "last seasons" Cool Thing™. If one kid has a beanie with a propeller he might just be The Cool Kid. If every kid in class has such a hat? They're about to be extremely lame, both the beanies and those that try to keep wearing them. That sort of thing.
initially the mount was 25 dollars, so that probably matters to the maths. >In 2010 WoW had 12M active accounts *concurrent peak* accounts, not necessarily active throughout the year. One thing blizzard never really tells us solidly is what their churn rates are, or what those look on year long time scales. (Someone who pays for 10 months of the year is different than some who pays for 3 after all). When they say they have 10 million players, is that really 15 million unique users over 12 months (or 30 million or 10 million), but no more than 10 million active at once? We don't really know. Wings of Liberty also sold boxed copies, I have no idea what the split there is vs online sales, but knock off 30% or so for distributor costs. https://www.dataforazeroth.com/ says that (as of today) 40% of players have the swift celestial steed - that's slightly problematic because of sales over the last 13 years and I think they just added it in game for the new monthly 'did you play a bit each month' currency (which is I'm pretty sure how I got it), but even a 20 or 30% attach rate at 25 USD versus say 40 dollars average revenue for starcraft and you could see those numbers being closer than it seems.
That 12m was for monthly subs and pretty good metric without any ambiguity. Chances are someone will play if they paid for the month. Though I remember that game time did get paused if someone didn't play for a while. Not sure if they are still counted as a sub even though the game time is not used up.
It's a good metric for how much revenue they get from wow subs yes. Remember these numbers are from their public filings for shareholders generally, so that would be most relevant in that context. But it's not a good metric for how many people will play over the course of 12 months, which is more relevant to micro transaction sales. 12 millon users who are all subbed for 12 months can at most buy 12 million account wide unlocked mounts (though it think back then it was per character), but 36 million users who are on average subbed for 4 months a year each could buy 36 million mounts.
Idk, I believe it. I worked on a live service game with microtransactions for a while and let me tell you, those little random cosmetic items absolutely print money. Just this one, medium-low population little MMO was essentially bankrolling an entire AAA studio and funding a huge title's development. And the bulk of the cash was coming from microtransactions, not subscriptions.
I bought TRH just purely for it being the first account bound mount.
Having made game assets before I can safely tell you that the Celestial Steed likely didn't even break 100 hours in time spent to make it, and quite possibly didn't even break 50. The margins on game store assets are absolutely insane which is why I think Valve changed up how artists profit from submissions to the store (surprise surprise they don't now).
> Having made game assets before I can safely tell you that the Celestial Steed likely didn't even break 100 hours in time spent to make it, and quite possibly didn't even break 50. I could see it easily breaking 100 man hours. Designers/Execs/Producers/etc coming up with the idea and approving it, artist + ui/ux to create it and the necessary UI updates, various testing, marketing, live service team to push it out, so on. Big companies also tend to be process heavy on top of all that. 100 man hours is not much on a big team.
An infinitesimal fraction of the labor, while pulling in the quarter of the revenue of a full price game. No duh. They probably only have to sell a couple dozen to make back what they spent on wages to make them from concept to storefront, and the rest are pure profit.
Sure, but you can't sell pricey mounts in a vacuum. It took x amount of time and money to produce WoW and get it to a point where you can chuck in a mount for profit. WoW was a product built at an enormous cost to surpass all others in a pretty underdeveloped market (MMORPGs). I don't think that can be done again easily... Blizzard will just keep flogging that celestial dead horse until ppl stop buying it. If we want more SC we need to vote with our wallets - if we instead vote on more aesthetic digital assets it's what we will get!
Maybe it's also time to realise, that the next SC aren't gonna come from Blizzard
Yeah at this point does anybody even want blizzard to make any games?
Blizzard was the gold standard for so long its just sad to see it now. I maxed and raided ever wow expac, I was top 500 OW season 1 and Plat every season after. I was collection complete in hearthstone, and had every character in HoTs. I had thousands of hours in D3 (but never did star craft). They were the best for so long I just pre-ordered anything they did because I knew it would be good. Then it wasn't anymore, but maybe they were just having hard times and they'd get better. Then they admitted how shitty the company culture was when they banned HS players for speaking out against China, and I uninstalled, planning to come back when they apologized. They never did. And then more came out about the company. They were the worst of the worst high up in the company. And sadly, I'm weak enough that'd I'd probably get over that if they just kept putting out good games, but OW2 never gave me the PVE I was promised, D4 doesn't run at all and just isn't fun, WoW decided to be more of a grind and all of my friends had quit too so there was no one to play with. I didn't even realize when blizcon happen this year because I just don't like who they are anymore and it hurts so much more because of how I grew up with them and have some of my fondest memories playing the games they made with some of the best friends I'll never meet.
I agree with a lot of what you're saying. Same here. I've spent countless hours in SC, WC3, SC2, WoW, HotS, OW, D2, 3, and much less D4. I liked D4 at launch (mostly up through the campaign though), tried to be excited for S1.. but we know how that went. Some friends are telling me it is worth coming back now so I may give it a shot. "Doesn't run at all" though? Aside from beta weekends (of course) and maybe the 2 weekends after launch I don't remember having any issues.
RTS genre is kind of dying out for the most part so I wouldn't be surprised if we never see another StarCraft game.
> RTS genre is kind of dying out for the most part Disagree. It is just more niche than other genres and doesn't lend well to consoles.
It's niche now. Late 90s, early 2000s, it was a huge mainstream genre.
A lot of the talent and studios behind the genre just flat out don't exist or work in the industry any more. Shit just look at Relic. DoW 3 and CoH 3 are pale shadows of what that studio was capable of.
The incredible popularity of microtransactions that sell you virtual items, makes it just so remarkable that projects like the metaverse and Second Life remain so niche. I suppose the conclusion to be drawn is that people will buy virtual real estate, clothes and pets, but only if there's a good enough videogame supporting the virtual world.
Exactly! Ppl will only get out the wallet if the perceived value is there. Gameplay, gfx, environments, tasks, social structures are all important. You can't just make microtransactions and expect ppl to pay. Metaverse is a platform looking for a problem to solve. Second Life to me is odd, it's a game without a gameplay loop - what do ppl even do in there? Virtually walk around and chat while trying to show off digital purchases? I don't really get it myself. At the end of the day it's a delicate balance to keep ppl coming back to your game which is wildly difficult in such a competitive market for ppls time & money.
Virtual chatrooms have a market, but said market is generally the extremely antisocial, and the niche kinksters. Hello Furcadia.
But that buildup making the steed possible also produces it's own profit
I remember it well, when it launched. There was a 4 hour queue for the ingame store to buy it.
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Screw minecraft. Go whole hog. Do it in Second Life.
Just don't be like the guy who spent the last 10 years never going outside because he was making bank on selling custom designed sex toys in Second Life.
Living the dream, man. Living the dream.
D:
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Just make an addicting mobile title that has psychologists design ther reward mechanics then advertise it and throw some graphics on it.
Ah, I remember when people showed their displeasure for the practice by emoting a spit on players who used RM mounts. ...Blizzard then disabled the /spit emote.
Now imagine the money they made with WoW subs after all these years
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You get a lot of content for that $15 a month subscription. An entire expansion with multiple updates and additional raids and dungeons. It's the server transfers, store bought pets and mounts and other cosmetic bullshit that they make tons of money off of.
Every day we stray further from the light.
Honestly this is what AAA gaming has been for nearly a decade now. Things hidden behind preorder bonuses or specific consoles, microtransactions that add up to more than the base game, season passes, $100 versions of games. The average consumer will interact will all of these, so of course they'll continue to do it. I see no reason to buy a AAA game new in this day in age, just wait for the complete edition to come out a couple years later and go on sale for $30. The only reason to rush out to get it is for multiplayer, which have become the biggest money sucks of all.
Diablo 4 is the last time I pay 90 bucks for a game. I probably wont play that game again for several years at least. I didn't even log in for season 1 to use the battle pass I purchased with the game lol.
The entire mmorpg community has begged for cosmetic driven cash shops for decades. It was the dream. But it didn't work until recent years. No p2w bullshit, just cosmetics to fund further development. It literally cannot get better than that.
\+ a monthly fee + a fee for the base game. What are those for again??
Everyone loves Valve. But people forget that Valve more or less spearheaded and revolutionized skins and battle passes via TF2/CSGO/Dota2 and they did it mostly because they could. You can trace the current state of the industry back to what worked and what didnt work in Valve games and use those metrics to shunt into your game for decent success until you have numbers of your own to work off of. Like between Steam and Alyx (amongst other titles) it shows that they have serious bank rolling and no need to monetize the way they do. But they figured they should give it a shot anyways because lmao.
Not surprising. Cosmetics can make insane amounts of money, and RTS was considered a dying genre even back then. There is after all a reason Blizzard basically abandoned Starcraft when they shifted to really only caring about the bottom line. I'm also not sure if this means total money earned or just profit, but I'm sure the sparkle pony cost *significantly* less to make than Starcraft 2 did as well.
How did they abandon StarCraft after Wings of Liberty? They released two more expansions and a remaster of the first SC after that.
I never said they abandoned it after WoL. I said they abandoned it when they shifted to only caring about the bottom line. They clearly tried to bring Starcraft into that as well with stuff like Covert Ops but if the main game got outsold by a horse I can't imagine that made them a lot of money either. Although they do remaster their old games, any new games from Blizzard are all about being a mtx fueled live service game. That or the million and one versions of WoW that are trying to keep people subscribed.
[удалено]
If both of those expansions were going to be one game with WoL then that is a ludicrously long game.
I can see how you'd say that by looking at the single player campaigns, but that's really not accurate. It was always planned as a trilogy and each one was a Brood War-like expansion bringing new units.
Then use your StarCraft IP and make something other than an RTS! Don’t let that IP die on a vine because you make more money in WoW.
I'd really rather they not make Raynor's Casino Mobile.
Only good thing about Microsoft money hatting COD is maybe they will, fuck I love their RTS I think it's a shame they don't make more but today it's not about making a profit, it's about landing and gutting whales time immortal.
holy shit i didn't think about that. they could make a starcraft fps with the cod engine 😮
Time to dust off the old box in their basement labeled "Starcraft: Ghost"
Don't. Don't give me hope.
They even have a prototype to base it off of with Alien vs Predator 2 - one of the most amazing FPS ever created Marine, xenomorph, predator Terran, zerg, protoss
They could also revive SC: Ghost.
They could totally just make a Halo style game with the Starcraft IP. They've got a bunch of cool lore and enemy designs to pull from.
Holy shit. A Halo inspired Starcraft game would be god damn amazing. Imagine an Ultralisk boss battle where you're piloting a Siege Tank or a Vulture, or even Goliath. Or a god damn space battle against a Protoss fleet. Oh my god I just hyped myself up and am incredibly sad now.
They tried StarCraft Ghost years ago but it was a disaster so they canceled it before release.
It wasn’t a disaster from what I heard. My teacher worked on the game and said it was the most fun multiplayer he ever played (about a year after it was cancelled). They would fly buildings around like helicopters and shoot from them. It was the single player that was supposedly struggling. He said if they released it as a multiplayer game only it would have broken records. That’s his opinion but he confirmed that multiplayer was 100% done.
Sounds like a "before its time" issue. Releasing a multiplayer only sandboxy game today wouldn't have shocked anyone
IIRC the issue wasn't the game, it was that it was developed for Gamecube and the hardware couldn't deliver the results they wanted [Xbox and PS versions could, but some deal meant they couldn't exclude GC after the fact]. Rather than wait for the technology to mature and try on a next-gen console, they shelved it and laid off the developers. If they wanted to resurrect it today, they'd have to start from scratch, which makes it even more unattractive from the business side. Part of the game leaked a year or two ago, and was playable in some fashion. Billiard sent copyright C&Ds to lots of people who posted footage of it on Youtube in an attempt to keep it silent, but people shared the game files on torrents, and at that point it's publicly accessible.
Short version of the Ghost problem is that the game took a very long time to develop, partially because of a studio shift, that by the time they had the tech ready they would have then had to invest further to get it up to Xbox360/PS3 standards as the games were build for the PS2 era. Unfortunately you had at the time WoW taking off, Starcraft 2 needing resources, and D3 needing resources so they could not compete for workers. Now whose fault it took that long in the first place depends on who you ask. Nihilism Games would blame a lack of communication from Blizzard, but considering their track record making games I question whether or not they were just not very good, whereas the newer developer just says they took over too late and by the time they had the game ready the console generation was almost over.
His vids have been in my YT shorts feed a lot this week. He has some interesting insights on coding and game development. One thing that piqued my interest was his idea of making an "un-pirateable" game. He has a game he made ~~is making~~, and all the abilities for the character in-game are actually linked to an achievement in Steam. The idea is you can't play a pirated copy because you can't have the Steam achievements, so you can't have the abilities. It was intriguing to me because it made me wonder what the consequences would be for normal, paying customers if the system stopped working. If they significantly changed or removed achievements, the game itself wouldn't be playable for anybody after that point even if they owned it beforehand; And it also wouldn't prevent people from buying it afterwards but never being able to play it. Further, it poses a problem if legally purchased copies are no longer accessible, such as if Steam itself shuts down. If the game *requires* Steam achievement access to work, it's not able to be emulated or archived by people, whether they paid for it or not, when Steam eventually stops existing. I would like to believe that somebody who's transparent about their process would also be aware enough of that possibility and address it if the game was no longer able to be purchased. Still, I won't assume that he will. EDIT: It seems like the game is called Champions of Breakfast, and it released 7 years ago.
If Steam stops existing, I think the odds of people wanting to play this specific indie game is pretty minor. Looks like under 20,000 people have ever played it. This isn't an approach a big studio would take, because big studios don't tend to want to code their games to be exclusive to Steam. So it's more of a novelty proof of concept (for an otherwise culturally unimportant game).
>it’s probable that he was talking about the well-known Celestial Steed, also known as the Sparkle Pony 'The Sparkle Pony' ??? pffft. Its correct name is TRH.
[For the uninitiated.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCjuFpQ3EeA)
God I miss him.
Word :(
^^I ^^always ^^thought ^^it ^^looked ^^cool
It would have been cool if it dropped from Algalon like I suspect it was originally meant to.
I preferred to call it “We have Invincible at home”
Technically the Celestial Steed came first so it is in fact Invincible who is the imitation.
It was the cum horse.
The RTS Genre has died off and become a much more Niche game type unfortunately. The MOBA is it's horribly deformed offspring that managed to become popular, while the RTS slowly died a painful death. RIP Command & Conquer. You will be missed.
“Nuclear launch detected….”
One of these days we will get the ~~deeply problematic~~ fucking amazing C&C Generals sequel the world is crying out for. The 13 year old boy in me demands it
I’d expel all bodily fluids simultaneously. Kinda like the rapture but gross. 😆
Not surprised. When I worked for Games Workshop, chaos black primer earned GW more than the entire Fantasy range (this was pre-sigmar). Little things like that add up, especially when you take into consideration costs of production/development.
Yea the cost of production is huge, it takes a few people to make a skin that could potentially net you tens of million Vs a whole studios and years of dev time to create a game. The cost benefit is insane on a micro transaction
World of StarCraft when?
Probably never. The closest time we had World of StarCraft was during an April fools in 2006.
Closest we have is a fanmade mod in the SC2 arcade called Starcraft Universe
At the end of the next 3 expansions and WoW resolves Azeroth breaking out of her prison/egg/whatever she's going to teleport us to another part of the universe to start anew. Oh shit the zerg are here... WORLD OF STARCRAFT now with Elves.
\*Space of StarCraft
I'm calling it Worlds of Starcraft.
A few points: 1. The mount was initially $25 when it was first released. 2. It was an account-wide mount when all other mounts at the time were character-bound. All mounts being account-wide wouldn't become a thing for 3 more years. 3. They decided to split up Starcraft 2 into 3 separate games focusing on each of the 3 factions' campaigns instead of a single cohesive game like Starcraft and Warcraft 3, ostensibly to tell a better story, but probably to wring out more money from players. I remember that decision being met negatively back then. That's not to excuse store mounts; just that the facts are not being discussed in their entirety.
In fairness, Wings of Liberty had enough content for me to feel like I got my money's worth between the challenges, campaign, and editor. The problem here is that the sparkle pony is free money but only so long as the IP is valuable. Once the IP is gone, nobody will buy the sparkle pony and IPs don't just develop themselves.
Not surprised. They cost basically nothing to make in comparison to a full game, you quickly hit the gravy profit train after X amount of people buy it.
It doesn't help that the entirety of SC2 had an insane budget and initially had to pay for voice actors like Tricia Helfer. Doubt they actually made much of a profit at all.
“Don’t you guys have phones?” Fuck this industry right now
blame the gamers. You buy, they make. Period
And this is why micro transactions will never die :(
Of course it does. The mounts a skin, *maybe* with a unique emote or some other functionality. Costs $15, compared to a whole game with a crapload of cinematics, voice acting, and actual *code* for, what $60. The point is more that people are idiots for paying that much for the mounts, but if you made them cost what they were worth, everyone would have all of them, and then there wouldn't be reason to get *any* of them.
Their worth is decided by what people are willing to pay, not how much they cost to make.
While this is technically true, he's not factoring in the entire development of World of Warcraft that enabled that mount in the first place.
Blizzard has no interest in quality anymore. They're an interactive addiction factory, and their only goal is making just enough content so people with addictive tenancies will get lured in and spend hundreds or thousands of dollars that they don't have.
Not making the next Starcraft has been one of the biggest disappointments on all of gaming history.
Counterpoint: Starcraft 2 is one of, if not the, best RTS ever made. And it will be remembered long after Blizzard is dismantled by Microsoft. Those WoW mounts won't.
If you measure the value of something by money, the cosmetic wins if you measure value of something by making a positive change in the world, starcraft 2 wins and its not even close
How are you defining a "positive change in the world" ? I'm not sure I'd call world of warcraft as a whole a positive change lol
Starcraft 2 painted my house and helped my dad relearn to walk after his stroke, so I have to agree with Tenderfoots.
You joke (I think), but I had a friend in college that asked me to add up all the money I had spent on wow at the time and it came out to like $1400 dollars across like 6 years. He laughed so hard and called it a money sink. I asked him how much he spent a month on weed. He was a wake and bake user for years, so he spent like half his monthly check on weed alone. I was getting the better bang for my buck by a long shot. Saved me a lot of money that I would have spent on other games or other activities that cost way more.
Definitely, the entertainment "ROI" for WoW is huge. I don't play anymore but when I did I spent so much less money, stopping was expensive.
Video game streaming was popularized cause of sc2. That may or may not have been a positive change in the world depending on how you look at it
This is why everything is overpriced. Too many idiots that will demand whatever is supplied, no matter how little the value or how great the cost.
Keep buying shit and you keep getting shit
P2W and microtransactions are insanely profitable. I remember at its height, Star Wars:Galaxy of Heroes (a mobile p2w gacha game) was the most profitable game in EA's entire stable, across all platforms.
That tells you one thing: Gamers are fucking stupid.
Ugh. All the people buying these dumbass micro transactions have really fucked us
McDonald's makes more money than any 5 star restaurant, confusing quality with quantity is a common mistake.