Blizzard has released some fun and interesting Hearthstone statistics from 2020, including confirmation of the active player count!
- 23,539,539 - The number of active players worldwide in Hearthstone in 2020.
- Players spent 669.2 million hours in Battlegrounds.
- Demon Hunters played 489.4 million matches in all modes.
- Mozaki is the most player Duels hero and we saw a total of 61.42 million Duels matches played.
- Arena had 291.4 million matches played.
- Tavern Brawl is almost as popular as Arena with 271.2 million matches played.
It's great to finally see some data from Blizzard and Hearthstone! Read on for the post and a short infographic.
Quote From Blizzard Together, in the Year of the Phoenix, we drove back the rusted legion in Ashes of Outland, graduated with top honors from Scholomance Academy, and conquered our fears of carnival rides (and ancient horrors of unspeakable evil) when Madness at the Darkmoon Faire set in.
We kicked off the year by overhauling our Ranked system, updating card packs to include duplicate protection, and introducing Hearthstone’s first new class since launch—the Demon Hunter.
Throughout the year we hosted several in-game events, including the Felfire Festival and Masquerade Ball. We released over a dozen balance updates between our major releases, and completely revamped our progression and rewards systems.
We brought Pirates, Elementals, and the Old Gods to Battlegrounds—along with multiplayer parties and Darkmoon Prizes! We told the origin stories for Jaina, Rexxar, Garrosh, Uther, and Anduin in Hearthstone Book of Heroes. We released Hearthstone’s first Mini-Set, the Darkmoon Races, and launched Duels, a new game mode for Dungeon Run fun against other players. Finally, we hosted four community Inn-vitationals and crowned a new world champion, Kenta “glory” Sato, on the Hearthstone Masters Tour!
It’s been a journey unlike any other. In a time when we’re a little more spread out than usual, seeing Hearthstone continue to bring people together online around the world has warmed our hearts in a way we never expected. Thank you for spending the Year of the Phoenix with us!
Comments
Long live Arena!
Did anyone else notice the mathematical sleight of hand on the Battlegrounds numbers?
Just looking at the number, you think "Wow, if you added up the length of all of the battlegrounds matches, they add up to 669 million hours," but that's not accurate.
There are 8 players in every battlegrounds match. Obviously, not all 8 players stay for the entire match, but they reported it as "player hours." They are counting each person separately, so that number is inflated significantly, compared to the idea of total length of matches.
Now, I'm not saying they are dishonest or anything, because they said it's player hours - but it's still the largest possible number they could report for how much battlegrounds was played.
Yes, but its also the biggest attraction of HS for most now so its only natual they want to show the biggest number. If you want the factual stats check their quarterly actionists report.
I mean, 8 people playing in the same game is still 8 people playing the game. I'd say it's more valuable info than the amount of games run by the servers.
Yes, but nearly every other stat is "matches played ..."
And then there's battlegrounds - "Player hours spent ..."
It begs the question of why they reported battlegrounds differently from all of the other stats. It's literally the only stat that says anything about hours at all.
Things like this are never done at random - there is a deliberate reason for every single stat on that graphic and the way they reported them. I just wonder what the reason is in this case.
I would say, if anything, it's the opposite. They want to make all the games compare best to Battlegrounds, so they used matches over hours. They don't want to present an infographic that has one mode at too insane of a lead. But you also don't want to under-represent a mode like BG and make people think it is being played a lot less than it actually is
My job involves making a lot of decisions over how best to present data to maximise clarity, and I completely agree with Blizz' choice on this. I guess the first thing to establish is which is the most natural unit to use to measure the amount of stuff done in Hearthstone? Is it player hours or matches played? You can come up with arguments for both, and under different circumstances they each seem more appropriate than the other. For example, if you hop on just to do a daily quest, you maybe turn up for 3 games, irrespective of how long that takes. On another occasion you might have set aside 2 hours to play in, and the number of games in that time is actually unimportant.
In the end, I lean more towards matches played being the most natural unit because that is how the game is discretised. Also, aside from other things going on outside of the game, players don't choose to leave mid-game, even if that game crosses the end of the time they set aside to play in. So ideally, I'd put all relevant data in terms of the number of games played, and be content that converting it to player hours is quite easy with a quick estimate of the time spent per game.
Quite easy, except in BG that is. We obviously cannot treat it as 8 players from start to finish, making it a complicated matter to try to estimate the typical time per game per player. And that's before worrying about up to 6 of the players going on to start a new game while the original one continues, giving potentially 7 simultaneous games involving the players that started in 1, even before that 1 has finished. Working all of this out for BG is surely a fun endeavour for the mathematically minded among us, but for most people the number of games played in BG is really difficult to interpret despite it looking simple initially. As a result, BG falls back on hours played.
Having done that, it is reasonable argue for doing everything in terms of hours played to keep everything consistent, but since BG is the odd one out I'd prefer to leave the rest of them in their own natural units without BG complicating it for all game modes. This is doubly true since past year reviews discussed the number of matches played, so being consistent with BG comes at the cost of making it difficult to compare across time.
Nice to see some stats - hope they bring back player stat emails!
I thought they stopped doing this. Nice to see it back...
I never would have guessed that Arena gets more plays than Tavern Brawl. There are dedicated Arena players, sure, but most people barely touch the mode. On the other hand, almosteveryone plays a game or two in the Brawl each week, and I assumed some casual players keep coming back to it. After all, that must be why the Tavern Brawl gets top billing on the main screen while the Arena is hidden away in a secondary screen.
I guess I was wrong. But Duels’ poor showing is, sadly, predictable. Even accounting for the fact that it was introduced late in the year, it had fewer plays than the other modes. Edit: Flux points out below that with how late in the year Duels arrived, its numbers are actually very good.
Duels didn't become fun until this year, so it's no surprise to me. In 2020, it was extremely lopsided and monotonous.
Doing well in Arena or Epic Duels maximizes the value you get for your gold. That is why I play it. Playing Arena has allowed me to have a complete collection of cards of every expansion released since launch.
I guess that Tavern Brawl gets more unique players, but they don't play many games. Most weeks, I play until I get my pack and then go back to Constructed. It looks like Arena players get a lot more games in.
The Duels numbers are not so bad given that it launched late in the year, but I wonder if they are consistent over time or had a huge peak during launch. The hype certainly died down quickly: if I look at Twitch then Zalae is the only streamer I see playing Duels; the rest moved back to Constructed or Battlegrounds.
Yeah, Arena took me for a loop there. Though it is possible that Tavern Brawl is only lower is due to new brawls being a rarity and the brawls that are brought back are definitely not always the fan favourites you'd expect.
Duels released in early access on October 22, 2020. 61.4 million matches in 2 months is not bad at all! We can be certain in that time frame that Tavern Brawl only saw 44 million matches played, give or take a million or two (Total / 12 months * 2), which I know doesn't say much since you're comparing it to Tavern Brawl, but:
I don't think that Duels has to be the most popular mode out there for it to still be successful. I don't play Arena, it's still attracting lots of players though and although people may have their issues with it, it's still a positive force since it retains those players.
We're going to be getting another new mode in Hearthstone soon (not including Classic) and probably another couple after that. The players will spread out more, making some modes maybe look less successful than before, but what we need to care about the most is that Hearthstone as a platform succeeds. Not all modes will apply to all players, heck, I play Battlegrounds more than constructed now and it doesn't really bother me that it happens to be the case (I just get salty when I don't get to play for days at the start of a new expansion and then say screw it when meta is "solved").
The UI is sad though. They really need to rework how the front of the box works. I don't have any major constructive feedback on it, it's just that Hearthstone feels like its just menu after menu when you want to get into something like Battlegrounds. I'd love some shortcuts I could customize on the home, but I know they'd never do it because that's too much interface and could be confusing. At least we're getting 9 more deck slots. How will I ever scroll that far.
Oops, you’re right. I was thinking that Duels arrived with the second expansion of the year rather than the third. If it was only available for a couple months, those numbers are really good.
so they release so many stats about every mode in the game....except for ladder both standard and wild. Whats the reason behind it?
Because BGs is probably the main one now... not even joking, because there is similar stats from couple of years ago, I would assume ladder doesn't look as good in comparison. Though maybe they plan to release even more stats later and this is just first of many...
Naw, although Battlegrounds is huge, and a lot of people streaming to the big numbers now are playing it, it still isn't their main mode. If Battlegrounds shifted to the main mode of Hearthstone for engagement, we'd be seeing them jump onto more monetization for it.
Napkin Math!
Battlegrounds games are around 20 minutes on average. We have 669 million player hours - a single battlegrounds game has 8 players in it which means we're getting around 2 hours played per match. (Estimate since sometimes people drop out quick etc.)
That gives us 334 million matches played in Battlegrounds. Demon Hunters alone had more games played. Granted, DH stat also includes Tavern Brawl and Arena, but those modes are nowhere near as popular as constructed.
Battlegrounds matches played is also probably much higher than that when you consider how many players on the lower end just immediately disconnect or get knocked out super fast. Again though, Napkin math! I think it proves the point though that Constructed is currently the king when it comes to modes.
I said it wouldn't look as impressive as 2 years ago because BGs diverted interest. Not that it would have less play than BGs.
Wow, this numbers really surprised me. A friend told me yesterday "Is classic mode a good call? Can they even spread the playerbase even more?" To wich I responded "They surelly still can" but I would not have believed that many players still played.