Monetization - a proposal

Hey Folks, the hysteria over the cost of the game is still going strong on Reddit and various other platforms. While I don’t think, that the battle pass itself is a major issue, I agree that the lack of transparency and the cost of the game in general is. 

I’m personally fine with paying around 300€ a year for the game I love and spend more time on than Netflix and Spotify combined. But the many discussions got me thinking about different ways for blizzard to make money with Hearthstone. So here, for discussions sake, a economy system proposition. 

A perfect economy would imo be, were F2P complete a set before the next expansions drops. People that spend money, get a head start that is larger or smaller, depending on the money invested. With 80€/$, you should definitely unlock 95% of an expansion right away. Extra resources, these players accumulate over the 3 following months, can be invested into cosmetics of all different sorts or content of older sets.

So far, so easy. But I guess the revenue for Blizzard would be to low since once you got a stock of Resources, you can get you head start for free every following expansion. My solution: Cards of the newest expansion aren’t purchasable with gold, nor are they craftable with dust from previous expansions. The newest expansion should have a completely separate economy. This obviously requires a VERY generous system that allows F2P players to accumulate a lot of cards on the first days-weeks. And as I said, at the end of an expansion everyone should have completed the set. This system would have a couple major advantages:

- F2P can keep up with the game (even though they miss out on the fun of week one - but that’s mostly the case already)

- The focus is brought back to “collectible” card game. You slowly complete your collection through the months and don’t just buy day 1 and start saving for the next expansion again.

- People don’t have the incentive to dust old and niche cards, that might become meta in the future or relevant in other game modes.

- People are more limited in what they can play. This one is bitter sweet, I know. But it could result in a much longer lasting variety and prevent the meta from settling down to quickly... on the cost of the first month being P2W. Witch is acceptable imo, since F2P should catch up rather quickly.

- New players can slowly catch up since they don’t need to collect cards of multiple sets simultaneously. After one year at most, they should be on par with everyone else.

- A separate economy for the newest set would allow blizzard to lower the price of older expansions by a lot since people can’t take advantage of that so easily and can’t convert purchased resources into new cards.

Tl;dr: Everyone gets a full collection over time but you have to pay to access the cards early on. The additional resources you accumulate over the course of an expansion can be invested into older expansions or cosmetics but not saved for future expansions.

Disclaimer: I haven’t taken the time to think this 100% through since I doubt it having any relevance. There are certainly some flaws with such a system that I didn’t think about. The current currencies would probably need a complete overhaul.

Do you think, such a system would hurt blizzards revenue?

This is a very, very bad idea. If you cannot play cards others can play you would lose all F2P players which are necessary for games to survive.

Best thing that's possible right now is probably to do either the following, in my opinion;

- Adjust dust costs for older cards. Either they give you more dust, or they cost less to craft. I personally don't see why blizz prize their older cards so much in the first place, since they've shown little to no care about wild in general. This will not affect their bottom line since most players would be interested in current expansion, and would increase what is now termed as 'engagement' with the game.

- Make the pack opening percentages transparent, and of higher quality. This is a long shot, but the total number of cards have been increasing while the pack quality has stayed as it is since beta. Pack openings have always been exciting, but only in theory. As any person who'd preordered at least once their their life can tell, 50 odd packs will yield little more than 3 legendaries on average, and in a world where there's 20 of them + whatever amount that will be introduced with the midexpansion, that's really bad value for money.

We don't really need to collect all the cards, most cards like Griftah will never see play to save its life (and obviously I have a copy of this). But I do think there should be a mechanism to help out players that get shafted by luck. And if blizz wants to save their own fragile reputation, it would do very well to start introducing some.

Quote From Bersak

Tl;dr: Everyone gets a full collection over time but you have to pay to access the cards early on. The additional resources you accumulate over the course of an expansion can be invested into older expansions or cosmetics but not saved for future expansions.

I don't really like the premise of this change. As laid out, you're basically asserting that having a full collection is critically important to the game, and that F2P players need a rewards system/in-game economy that enables them to reach a full collection.

It's true that Blizzard could make the game more F2P friendly by changing its in-game economy and changing how packs work to reward players with larger collections sooner. But there's another route to solving the F2P problem, and it's a route we've actually seen them take several times in the past. Specifically, I'm thinking of making legendary cards less important, and providing free access to some of the build-around legendary cards when they're introduced. Some examples of this in the past include:

• For the former, we see more and more legendaries like Vectus or Sky Gen'ral Kragg or Frizz Kindleroost - legendary cards that are good in certain decks, but aren't critical to their success. You can play a quest deck without Sky Gen'ral Kragg, for instance, and still win.
• For the latter, giving away the original C'Thun, a free Uldum Quest card, each form of Galakrond, Archmage Vargoth, and Kael'thas Sunstrider - all of which are fun build-around type legendary cards (also Sathrovarr, I think?)
  
  • This shows something of a missed opportunity for Darkmoon Faire - Blizzard probably should have made everyone's first reward legendary an Old God, or better yet just given everyone an Old God legendary in addition to the rewards track.
  • This is one of the best ways to approach the economy, because people feel better about playing and paying in when they are ensured they'll get one or two build-arounds they can try out (ideally, neutral build-arounds).

This strikes me as a much better way to adjust the economy, because it makes building a budget deck easier and it doesn't call for a major shift to in-game economies, which would probably mean compensating existing players (and however they decide to do that inevitably ends with a lot of people feeling angry about whatever the new system ends up being).

Whenever you open a pack you don't get specific cards you get dust. Which you can use to craft the cards you want. No more shitty cards in expansions just there for pack filler that no one will craft, no more shitty legendaries like moorabi that people get shafted with if they have shit luck, no more legendaries and epics for classes people don't play that are worth 1/4th of their value. everyone wins and the system barely changes. To top it off i think they should make it either dusting cards gives 1/2 value or a 1/3 of value.

Imagine having full dust refund value on cards. That would leave only completionists to actually need to buy packs and such, and it'd be the best thing possible for new players or f2p. Exchaning what you have for whatever deck you want to try is awesome.

Unfortunately this doesn't make blizzard any money, except from cosmetics and other similarly useless stuff. New players would still need a head start somehow too, but i guess they are not the target anyway.

Your proposal is unfortunately not that good as people already pointed out above. My thoughts on HS monetization:

• HS monetization is bad, really bad; the game is simply too expensive
• High price point is not only hurting the playerbase but also not optimal for Blizzard's revenue
• A high price point can actually hurt your revenues; in business there is an "optimal price" which maximizes revenue; raising your price beyond this point actually decreases your revenue and profits; I am convinced HS is beyond that price
• If you are looking for real world evidence that lower prices can be better for all just look at LoL which brought in a whopping USD 1.5 billion in 2019 and has a far less greedy monetization system

My proposal would have been to simply halve the prices, although for this it might be too late now. This should have happened a year ago latest. I am convinced that reducing the prices at an earlier point would have been lucrative for Blizzard too. Of course not in the short-term but in the long-term.

That said I am well aware that this will not happen. They will continue to milk HS even if this will kill the game and hurt their long-term profits. Why? Because Blizzard like many other companies in Corporate America and elsewhere is short-term oriented. Management is incentivized this way. Just take Bobby Kotick as an example. The bulk of his annual salary comes from stock options, this information is public as Blizzard is listed on the stock exchange. In other words he cashes in when the stock price increases which means he is incentivized to value short-term profitability over long-term profitability.

The fix is very simple:

Put back the old system with the battle pass ON TOP of it so quests give you gold AND exp, also add gold/exp/classic packs to easy one time achievements to quick start new players with tonnes of packs (giving new players ways to actually play the game IKR?).

and so arena/duels don't feel as bad let people gain exp there as well (currently you can't).

On top of that if they were feeling a bit more generous make the pack value in general more exciting by lowering the chance of a 40 dust pack.. also another change that could be done is to decrease the ratio of dusting cards to 1/3 from 1 to 4 (and 1 to 8 in commons) so they don't feel as awful.

Another change they could help new players with is using the class levels to give meaningful rewards past level 10 it's currently capped on 60 and give terrible rewards.

That would make the game FAR more accessible, and would make sense with the increasing cost of the game.

Blizzard would still gain a lot of money with tournaments,cosmetics/preorders, FOMO bundles/adventures.. etc.

You don't need to justify Blizzard current aspirations for gaining in the HS economy if the players are happy they will buy whatever they offer anyway.IDK why they feel the need to make people miserable so they feel the need to spend money in the game, it worked of course but that's very short term at this stage, they got their mobile e-store score down by 1 and something stars.. now HS is last place in some scores that's very bad for them.. cause if a player sees the store he would probably go for the top ones which as I have see are Gwent and LoR.

Can we start with some simple ideas to fix the system? 

1. If you pay for the mega-bundle ($80) then you should get to choose your Golden Legendary.  If you then have a poor pack opening, you can at least feel better that you got the 1 card you really wanted. 

2.  The regular bundle (~$50) should have you select your legendary via the Discover mechanic (3 Random Legendaries).  You paid money so you should at least be able to escape the worst options. 

3.  Get the Battlegrounds Pass away from the mega bundle.  Believe it or not there are players like myself that do not like battlegrounds.  We do not like paying for something we will not use!  Blizzard needs to find a better way to monetize that mode.

Yes, the game is still too expensive.  My solutions won't even come close to fixing everything but at least they will lessen the pain.  I'm very disappointed in Blizzard and there general lack of creativity with the monetization of this game.