Blizzard released the 2024 End-Of-Year review. The infographic starts with bold letters which read 8.34 BILLION TOTAL PLAYED HOURS across all games and platforms for 2024. Thats 952,055 YEARS - in that time, a person could walk around the earth 1 million times!
This is unhinged. Is this why you released the grindy Anniversary event in that state? Why you keep releasing long grinds, only to nerf them two weeks later? Why you seem to keep finding ways to waste player’s time for no good reason?
What some might call incompetence, to me seems like a deliberate attempt to boost play-time-metrics. You want to impress the share-holders!
Are you making games for them or for us?
I will say this without irony. Even Warcraft I, and everything after that, was made explicitly for revenue. In fact, 99.9999% of non-indie games are made purely for that reason and that reason alone.
That pretty much goes for any company that has existed for longer than 20-30 years. Take Sega for example, which until the demise of the Dreamcast was developing masterpiece after masterpiece. When was the last first-party Sega game released that was considered “Good”? Yet they still have positive operating income in the hundreds of millions every year.
The difference has been that the leaders in development used to be people who love gaming for what it is, and not people who see it as a job and do it grudgingly.
I honestly have no interest committing as much to the game as I used to, Blizzard just does it to keep the game populated… to me it shouldn’t matter if I’m playing 1 hour a month or 24/7, they’re still getting the same amount out of me regardless. But Blizz have often gone to lengths to make grinds that result in burn out, to which I’ve had no problem taking long breaks from the game which is less money off me to them in the long term.
Honestly, at this time of the morning and with very little coffee in me I feel like a little bit of conspiracy theory…so here it goes
What if, all this game design to keep players engaged and having time played as a metric is to slowly condition us into the asian (Chinese) way of playing / paying for the game.
They pay by the minute / Hour I believe. And off course before they launch that one, they need to perfect the grindiness of the game, as well as our conditioning of it, so they can yield the upmost amount of profit from this design.
It’s because - generally speaking - engagement drives investment.
The more time you spend playing a game, the more engaged you become in it. And the more engaged you are, the more willing you become to spend more money on it.
Most games with a shop work that way.
the reason they pay for the hour is because of tight rules of chinese government to limit people time of playing video games .it has nothing to do with a business model preference .
