What's Up With Out Of Cards? [Staff Responses]

I'll address the elephant in the room. Yes, our updates regarding Hearthstone on Out of Cards are not as great as they have been in the past. There are several factors right now that are at play here:

At the start of the year, more than half the staff was let go. There are numerous reasons why certain people are no longer here. Having less people on the team has in turn harmed our coverage. Shit, having people take an assignment for an article that should go up quickly and then dick around for 4-5 hours before getting it up has harmed coverage too. I've always been someone that takes pride in the fast lane, and over the past year we've been sitting in some rough traffic.

I like to think that over the years I set us up for success by telling people what kind of content needed to be created to give us an edge. Breaking news is one thing, but the bread and butter of any site covering a card game is talking about decks, which not many were ever particularly enthusiastic about covering. The number of times people were hesitant to posting decks on our homepage because "the meta hasn't changed" or similar stupid remarks has been severely disappointing.  

On Specific Content

Tavern Brawl is a big oops. Though, these typically provide very minimal traffic anyway because the mode isn't all that interesting so it wasn't the worst thing that has happened. Not to say that was okay, because covering everything possible is still important, but a couple of slip ups with late brawl posts or the one completely missing one definitely isn't the end of the world.

Regarding us not covering the fact an expansion announcement was coming, I agree, this should have been headlined and this is really bad that we missed this or if someone did see it, no one made an article for it. It would have been some great views and organic search traffic too!

Achievement guides. Yeah. I'm not impressed by what happened with those for the last expansion. I get it, they take a lot of work to put together and Avalon did a pretty good job at it. The monetary incentive though was clearly not worth powering through them in a quick fashion.

Revenue Decline

Man, ads fucking suck. It's a rough situation because the more ads you ad to your site to boost revenue, the less people want to visit or the more people that put on adblock which then means you want to find more places to put advertisements and the vicious cycle repeats itself.

This, plus the decline of Hearthstone, the game we put the majority of our dedication to, results in poor traffic and even worse revenue. Spending a few hours on an article to make a couple of dollars doesn't exactly pay for your time. Moving into this year we had to decrease the amount of revenue share on staff for ad impressions to pay for our server costs.

Hearthstone is so beyond dead, it's actually hilarious. Card games as a whole have been on a decline - 

• Wizards of the Coast is killing their own game with too much content.
• Riot never really figured out Legends of Runeterra - oh boy did we spend a lot of time with the game. Oops.
• Blizzard has to be the worst company in gaming with how fucking garbage their communication is. They used to have an amazing community team for each one of their games. World of Warcraft has joke comms and Hearthstone, all they care about is posting a weekly meme on Twitter and giving handouts to streamers. They couldn't even be bothered to schedule a tweet for the 9th birthday of the game... but they quote tweeted someone the day before saying omg we're about to be 9. Blizzard isn't on a downward trend because of some of their employees being sexual predators (that's really bad though), but it's because they have no fucking idea what they are doing with their community.
• Marvel Snap has some good gameplay but the game is a huge whale situation. I'm unsure about its staying power tbh.

Which leads me into something people probably don't want to hear but we were going to announce it at some point anyway so here goes make that transition less jarring.

"Shutting Down" Out of Cards

But, we're not. Thonson above linked to Out of Games and previous to that, Crusader2010 pointed out about diversification. Out of Cards failed to gain any big traction because the original site our staff came from, HearthPwn, didn't shut down. We were supposed to end up with a banner at the top of the site after it was shut down and put into read-only mode which would redirect the community over to "the new site" (Out of Cards) which would have been huge. We would have immediately been able to have a budget through some ads and that would have given us solid momentum to build the site out. Instead, we've always been behind. We've had some incredible content created throughout our years that never took off (a point dapperdog made prior).

Now, we're not going anywhere but we're giving ourselves a better chance at making this all work. Nox and Nirast stopped posting on Out of Games at the start of February because it was decided that we'd be merging the two sites. It doesn't make sense for us to have two properties when having one solid one will allow us to, hopefully, gain a bit more traction on the card game side of things since we'll be able to boost our overall website impact by talking about more than just card games.

The end game right now is to rebrand Out of Cards into Out of Games. There's still stuff being figured out behind the scenes to make that actually happen, so with myself being more dedicated to that and us having fewer staff members than before, it puts us in a "fun" situation of fewer updates on the site. If I spend more time towards updates, which aren't getting much traction anyway, it further delays the move.

None of this has been a particularly fun situation. 

May 15, 2019 is when I purchased the domain name, when we decided to move away from the HearthStation beta. We're just under 2 months away from that anniversary and seeing Out of Cards as a brand, one of my favourite brand names I've been a part of, going away is quite sad.

I still want to keep Out of Cards around in some form on Out of Games because I want there to be familiarity there for people that only care about Hearthstone or only care about card games (we will have a way for people to effectively have an "Out of Cards experience" on Out of Games). We made this site to fit a niche and it's important we keep that around - it'll just be on a different domain name.

Once we get closer to moving the domain, I'm going to be doing a round of staff recruiting. There's still a lot of stuff to figure out for staff, because I want people that are all going to be on the same page and I want people that are willing to cooperate. I want to find people that want to create content unlike the big gaming sites (who all just write really bad super-SEO-driven nonsense). I want to rebuild the community aspect of the site. We've got a solid chance at making a community interested in general gaming work unlike what we were able to do with Out of Cards, and that's big because it should, in theory, only help the card game side of it.

And then if Blizzard finally kills Hearthstone, we're also not completely fucked.

I sincerely hope that the OoC community (members and experience) is kept alive in whatever shape or form, because I have had a blast since arriving on this wonderful site from the very start and I think it would be a terrible shame if this would disappear altogether.

Agreed.

It saddens me that this awesome site isn't getting the traffic is deserves but I do understand this game is almost 10 years old and things are not what they used to be.

Yeah, aging games kinda sucks. It was very difficult to gain any traction due to the age of the space plus Hearthstone as a whole doesn't give you many things to talk about. Cards, decks... that's about it. Mercenaries gave us a huge traffic boost since we were able to put a database together for it (even with its flaws) and unfortunately the mode just had zero staying power. Battlegrounds, we never really gave a huge push into but I don't think we'd have been able to do much with it anyway since we don't have a way to collect stats and Auto Chess games really need that stats push. Duels always gave us some decent traffic too though, but lack of staff members playing at a decent level harmed content potential.

i hope everything will work out ok and that out.of.everything will take off :D

Same!

What's the next big trend to chase? We had digital card games. Battle Royales. VR's ramping up. Movie games?

I don't think VR will ever really be at a point where it truly blows up. We're still primarily only seeing experiences out of it rather than full games and the cost is just so high to get into it. Sure, the Quest series from Meta/Oculus has been a great way to do budget VR, but they are quite far behind what is available on PC and Playstation. Cost will come down overtime, but you also need a lot of AAA games to push into the realm of VR to have a chance at it working out. People can't as easily play a VR title for hours on end though, and accessibility with VR is kinda trash too which further limits the interest. It's a shame because I love VR. I'd kill for a GOOD VR MMO. I'm also totally just content with VR Racing though because that be fun as hell when you got a nice wheel.

I wish I had a crystal ball to know what would be the next big thing though. Riot's MMO will definitely be up there but I don't see that bringing forth a new wave of MMOs like we saw with the FPS boom thanks to the birth of Battle Royale.