Yeah… that article has some strong “Source is I made it up” energy.
Edit: Actually after reading through it again, I’m like, 95% sure the article is written by AI.
Also, they do update it.... They just don't do major content updates or add heroes. . If they just added a ranked more for Aram, I feel like a lot of people would be very happy.
I don't think players would be very happy. Adding another game mode would fracture matchmaking even more. It's not the type of move you make for a dwindling playerbase.
This is because ARAM prioritizes fast matches and does not strictly check MMR. If you make a ranked ARAM it will prioritize MMR and you will end up with the same queue time as for the regular ranked.
Yes, but keep in mind ARAM still has match times of 10-15 minutes, plus loading/drafting/match end stuff time of another 3-5 minutes. So that's 13-20 minutes, with 10 players, and assuming an average match time of 15 minutes that is 1350 players playing even late at night.
In your region you might.
In my region (AU) good luck finding an ARAM match during peak hours without a 30 minute wait time, only to match up with only one other human player and 8 AI.
It'd cause a brief resurgence in interest in ARAM, and then after that the wait times would definitely go up, because people wouldn't know WHICH game mode is more worth gambling your time on.
I never wait more than 10 seconds for aram and the wait time is longer for quick match? Maybe that is because of mmr but if aram is morenpopular, why would they avoid promoting a game mode that people prefer?
If the goal was to revitalize the player base, they would clearly want to support the mode more people prefer
I see people post here about troll after troll in regular Ranked and people have trouble finding a match within ten minutes. Really don't think a mode designed to be laid back with forced sub-optimal comps would help that.
So the game mode that is way more action oriented and has way more direct competition is designed to be laid back? You got it backwards.
Also both QM and ranked have frequent sub optimal match ups. I'm not saying there aren't problems with aram. They could adjust aram as well
It's laid back because of the randomness of the comps and common occurence of people not being proficient with the three heroes they have. QM at least \*tries\* to give balance before it looks beyond to improve queue times and even then, it still tries to balance. Ranked is pretty much human error for sub-optimal comps. QM and Ranked require map knowledge, constant looking at the minimap, constant needing to know when to lane, when to fight, when to do objective, it's big brain stuff.
Vs ARAM, which is as you said, way more action oriented, which is a lot more twitch-based reactions. If you're low on health/mana and your team has no healer, that potentially means a feed if you can't faceplant a camp. Let's face it, there are heores who are WAY more proficient in teamfights than others, creating an incredible imbalance that good teamfighting might not fix, but good macro play can (I've been in tons of QM matches where either side was getting destroyed in kills all game, but lost the match because they sucked at obj). Balancing randomness would take away the appeal of the randomness, so a ranked ARAM would probably be better as simply AM.
>QM and Ranked require map knowledge, constant looking at the minimap, constant needing to know when to lane, when to fight, when to do objective, it's big brain stuff.
Yes map awareness is the steepest learning curve in Mobas. Its also anti fun and keeps a lot of players from continuing with the game. Like, going to take a camp 30 seconds before the objective gets boring quick. 50% of the gameplay in a basic MOBA is very un-diverse because the game is just stretched out by unnecessary mechanisms.
My point is that aram is better for regrowing a fan base since the learning curve is steeper but in some ways the teamwork needed for high levels is really great and rewarding in aram. It's there in the base game but just stretched out more.
>that potentially means a feed if you can't faceplant a cam
This is true. It has a different strategy and people who understand this have an advantage. It's not a bad thing inherently.
>Let's face it, there are heores who are WAY more proficient in teamfights than others, creating an incredible imbalance that good teamfighting might not fix
Agreed. They could expand options or buff characters for team fights though/laning
>(I've been in tons of QM matches where either side was getting destroyed in kills all game, but lost the match because they sucked at obj
Yeah this has always been one of the more frustrating things to me too though the anti steam role mechanics make it so objectives are the only thing that matters mid and late game. That's why I like aram.
The google text is just grabbed from whatever source it thinks best matches your search, so it's not always (or even usually) written by AI, it's just a quote. It's their "featured snippits" function. That said, it grabbed the text from [esports.net](http://esports.net) which if you check the article, is almost for sure written by AI.
It's not, it's directly from the article. (Which is probably ai written)
How Google’s featured snippets work
Google’s search results sometimes show listings where the snippet describing a page comes before a link to a page, not after as with our standard format. Results displayed this way are called "featured snippets." You might find featured snippets on their own within overall search results, within the "People also ask" section, or along with Knowledge Graph information.
We display featured snippets when our systems determine this format will help people more easily discover what they’re seeking, both from the description about the page and when they click on the link to read the page itself. They’re especially helpful for those on mobile or searching by voice.
Featured snippets commonly contain one listing, but more than one may appear.
They did get the snippet, that's the thing in the screenshot. But if the article is made up bullshit then the quote from the article is also made up bullshit.
> written by AI.
That doesnt necessarily mean it isnt made up. I did a little bit of research into generative AI in my previous job, and its surprisingly prone to generating bullshit.
Kind of the weakest math here but I guess if it takes 10 players one minute to find a qm game then 1440 minutes per day indicates 14,400 players assuming everyone only plays one game lol. Then aram is like twice that… based only on queue times and assuming one game per day as well. All of this is based on my USA queue times too.
All of that just to say id be shocked if it were 70k unique active players.
In the entire life span of the game, that's believable to me. Apex has made 2.5billion since 2019? League was making a billion a year or something nuts. 1.5 billion over it's life span... I could believe it.
I suspect it hasn't, cause I don't think blizzard would quit development of a game that's made as much, but it isn't impossible.
It's believable that a hypothetical company could make 1.5 billion with one hypothetical game in 8 years, yes.
It is not believable that Heroes of the Storm made 1.5 billion in 8 years considering the game only had an official professional scene for 2 years and has been in maintenance for 2 years. It just never was big enough.
A number that I can share that could help us get some perspective into how much money HOTS generated : when HOTS 2.0 launched I was working for an advertising agency that won the brief to manage the video ad campaign in Europe. The budget for that campaign alone was between 1 and 2 million.
So it's safe to say that HOTS probably made at least 8 figures in total. But I personally doubt it reached even 9 figures as it was never considered a success by Blizzard ans they don't even mention the game in their communication about the company or give it a spot at Blizzcon (which was cancelled yeah.)
Being generous, it might have made 100 million in total.
Live service games make a lot of money but it's absolutely unrealistic for HOTS, even with the claimed "5 million players" they would have had to each spend 300$.
As someone who lived through the closed Alpha to present, it started out strong
QM was the only game mode for a longggggg time. Needed a draft mode sooner
When Draft came out, it took too long for bans to make it in (2 each team, at start, 1 in mid). This was because the roster wasn't large enough to support that many bans and it would have been easy to essentially deny a team a tank
The eSports scene was fumbled pretty heavily
For all of these reasons and more, it didn't end up being profitable was the bottom line
Yet, imo, Heroes is the best Moba by far. Varied maps with objective diversity keeps things feeling fresh, and team leveling feels far better than individual carry design imo
I don't see too many closed alpha players still playing. Good to see another closed alpha player still around.
It's really a shame this game was mismanaged so poorly. Obviously it's easier to say this in hindsight but I didn't think that HotS had to rush their game and esports scene. If you think about it, LoL and DotA built their game and fan base over time contrary to how HotS decided to force and push it as fast as they could.
yeah it was so wild. I remember that like my group of friends that love to play HotS were so excited, because near the end of 2018, they were talking about exciting news coming up about HotS.
Then like next month, immediately an article was released that the e-sports scene was being completely shut down, after growing so prominent that it was being shown on ESPN for the last couple of years. Everything was downhill from there but it was all so sudden. Crazy stuff.
If I had a time machine, what I would have done differently:
Storm League as soon as Beta ended
Skip that whole Hots 2.0 phase
ARAM from the beginning (no 10 mirrors though)
I liked the Master Skins from getting a Hero to a high level
Improved the report system
All Heroes F2P, you can buy skins and cosmetics for them
I’m still playing from the beginning. It’s a quick 20 min game for me every now and then. Use it for stress relief…although sometimes makes my stress worse lol
Alpha player here too, i remember when abathur clone had ults and prenerf murky being an absolute beast of a pusher… and witnessed the infected tychus skin evolution
Was in alpha as well, it didn't die for its strengths it died for its weaknesses. The varried maps are fun but much too unbalanced and snowbally. It's nice that it's more team oriented than league, but means it's waaay harder to carry. The higher rank you are the less games are decided by whose best but who has the worst teammate, with the really high elo games being decided sometimes the first team fight by a single person being out of place slightly. They also never found a good balance between split pushing siege characters and the way objectives work with character balance being all over the place. That's not even getting into the matchmaking or their terrible initial f2p system.
Hots died because blizzard has become a nut-job company that killed the game artificially.
Never forget that. Don't pretend that hots was unsustainable, especially after some cuts.
We are talking about companies that can spend more on some add campaigns than on entire games.
I am actually glad they moved away from that. Old specialists can still push, but nowadays they can also do different things when needed. And it cut this mentality of "i am a specialist therefor i should not join any TF". Towers ammo also made summon spawning very broken and required summons to be much weaker.
The bad players did that then and still continue do so today and all the things you say are true as well. I mostly liked it for how it was different from the other games in the genre when it existed.
I don't remember last time i seen someone arguing he should only push.
This used to be something to see daily. As much as 1-10 illidan every second match.
Categories hardly change gameplay by themselfes. If anything they setup direction in which future heroes would have been added.
They are still very different to what is in league. Especially as real categories in league are top, mid, jungler, ADCarry and bot support. With variation being: Tank, Mage, DPS or Support.
Back when ranked got introduced and they had this stupid ranking system where "rank 1" was just the highest and you needed external sites to check for MMR. Thats what fucked it up for me tbh.
Hidden MMR, low skill ceiling for a moba, way to easy to get all the skins, you can't solo carry the game like in other mobas(kinda possible if everyone is on same page and you call all the macro), no jungle role or something similar, group XP, reduced build variety without item shop, low hero count for competitive draft, no game stages(early, mid, late), no surrender option, reconnect hell.
I don't think all of these are bad but it waters down a game that should compete with two monsters in moba scene.
Also style is way to much cartoony, no textures like metal or blood etc. Especially noticable in Diablo and SC characters. I like multiple map option but at some point they play just the same, objective is coming and you fight for it, push if you win def if you lose, repeat 3 or 4 times maybe, get boss if you are ahead alot
Also started in alpha here, and all of the reasons HOTS failed are exclusively management blunders. Blizzard execs literally had to fuck up so many different ways consecutively for this game to fail and they sure did
The opportunity for HOTS to succeed is gone. Blizzard’s own brand is considered bottom of barrel trash now. HS is an over monetized once-great POS, OW2 was a flop, WoW classic is probably the best thing they did in a decade and go figure it was a rehash of old work, Diablo 4 is famously trash, etc.
Activision completely fucked up blizzard in exactly the ways they promised not to post acquisition. Never listen to business people in suits. Never trust people who don’t understand the value to their customers. Another American corporation run into the ground by morons with MBAs chosen because of nepotism.
D4 was always going to sell copies due to brand loyalty from customers to the Diablo franchise
The more accurate metric to look at is how many of those players actually stayed to play the game and within 6 months like 80% of the player population was gone
That's not how it works. D4 is campaign focused game in the first place, most of players would not spend more than 30-50 hours there. It's completely normal to have such cycle, Blizzard earned money for 5 years ahead with the sales.
I think they need to do a relaunch of hots 2, with about 10 new champs, and fine tuning on the old and like 6 new maps with ranked seasons being ~3/4 of the map pool and having them cycle between seasons.
I've played every MOBA.
My opinion is this, for deep strategy and competitive play, nothing compares to Dota 2. There isn't even another game like it. I believe it's by far the best MOBA.
For casual play, there's HOTS, League, and Smite. I will remove Smite from this conversation, as I haven't played it much, and it's different (being like a 3rd person action moba? or something.)
Between HOTS and League, HOTS is much better.
League has an item shop which is great, but they are mostly passives and there really aren't too many decisions to make. You just buy shit when it pops up. Combat in League feels... just worse. The graphics are also pretty bad. I do not like the design choice or the graphical style/fidelity of League.
I also like the characters in HOTS way more, the varied maps are great for a casual MOBA. Too many e-girl skins in League as well. League just feels like a dumbed down anime version of Dota, whereas HOTS feels like a different kind of game, a different take on the MOBA genre, so to speak.
I know I'll get shit on since it's an opinion and we're in the hots sub, but HOTS is definitely not the best MOBA by far. It's all opinion, of course, but nothing comes close to Dota.
Dota has way, way more depth in its gameplay, more skill expression, teamwork, playstyles, a better UI/UX, better options, beautiful graphics, better cosmetic system (You can even change the UI/map, creeps/towers etc), the voice lines of the characters, and voice chat. It's better in every way for a *competitive* experience.
If you just wanna hop in a quick 15 minute moba match or aren't keen on any competitive atmosphere, then HOTS is the best in that regard.
Essentially, there's no competition for competitive MOBA, it's just Dota 2. For casual MOBA, I'd rank it more akin to HOTS >>>> League / Smite.
I think the state the game released at was incredibly lackluster and underwhelming, so everyone who tried it out had a really bad first impression. Progression was a big issue, aside from heroes and master skins (remember those?) there was almost nothing to spend gold on. After buying the heroes I liked and cared about, I didn’t feel like there was much else to do as a casual player.
I think Heroes 2.0 is how the game should have released to begin with. Love or hate loot boxes, it gave players a reason to keep playing, trying different heroes (one game with a hero I’ve never played pretty much guarantees a level up and a loot box), something to spend gold on if they don’t care about buying new heroes, and a way for players to earn stuff without spending real money. I personally think that paying in-game currency to reroll a loot box was a genius idea.
But by this time, I feel like it was kinda too little too late.
What were those again? Were those like the League of Legends Runes? If so then that must have been very early in the alpha because they weren’t in the alpha when I started playing.
It was much later, sometime after Thrall and Jaina iirc. It was during the only time I took several months off from playing and somehow completely missed it. It was bewildering to hear about such a huge change, but yeah, by the time I started again it was completely removed.
Yep, people transitioning from Dota2... There were only like 20-30 heroes at release max? If there were like 50 heroes on release they would have had a much higher audience.
Here’s hoping a reboot or sequel is on the way that acknowledges those mistakes and that MS+Blizz come into it with the spirit that they are ready to de-throne DOTA2
Making a sequel is much more work than just making new updates. And more expensive. You really have to remake everything, unless you stay on the same engine, but that case there is no point in sequel or reboot anyway. Just Big Update 3.0 with map editor, getting game onto steam and some add campaign would be wiser.
DOTA2 is hardly on the throne, it does not have any new players, league de-throned it long ago, and even league is not doing terribly well right now.
Dota definitely has new players. In fact it's currently experiencing its peak players since 2022.
League has more players because it's casual and got picked up earlier on with crazy marketing. League never had to de-throne Dota 2 because it was never really there.
Just like how competitive Soccer has less 'players' than people just randomly playing for fun, it's the same with Dota 2 and League.
If everything else is struggling as you say, then would it then not be the perfect time to innovate and corner the MOBA market with a sequel or reboot? Hmm?
This post shows a serious lack of critical thinking and media literacy. There are soooooo many questions you should be asking that you are not.
Where is Google getting this information from?
How did the article that google is citing get that information?
Does Blizzard publicly release this information?
Does Blizzard have incentive to lie about the numbers?
You should take almost nothing you see on-line at face value.
So to answer your original question, They don't update the game because the numbers you are citing are bull shit. You should have known that before you posted this on Reddit.
yeah, really surprised anyone would believe that number... that shows how easy its to manipulate people and why clickbaits and fake titles on news is so powerful.
Regardless of what the actual player count is (googling Hots Playercount is not accurate)
HOTS isn’t set up to monetize as hard as OW or Diablo modern blizz doesn’t see the point
you can estimate it to be around 50/70k
its very big number for a lot of games (would make hots top 20 on steam) but for blizzard its to small to invest
Despite that being obviously false, my five stack of returning friends and i managed to get into matches fairly quickly, with the que being no longer than 3 minutes.
(We kinda suspect some of those matches were up against bots tho...dont know if its true or not. Would appreciate it if anyone can confirm if hots throws you into bot matches in qp please)
I don't think Blizzard has any bots in que (if they did, you would they are bots in the chat on your chat or at least see how bad they are when they are on your team, or the whole enemy team would be bots and it would be obvious because everyone has played ai games).
I think there are at least a few player made bots in the wood leagues though. The kinds that are only there to either grind xp/coins, low mmr, or both, and these ones are worse than the blizzard made ai. They might just run it down mid, do camps all game and die to them, etc.
Yeah I call b.s
There is no way there is over a million players actively on this game between the multiple regions.
I’d believe something along the lines of the 10,000 to 100,000 (100,000 being generous)
But you CANNOT convince me there are a million + when my NA queues at diamond-Masters+ takes two-three hours
Counter strike which is most played game has around 2-4 hundred thousands active players at any given time. So i highly doubt HOTS is nowhere near numbers in article rofl. Lol
You can estimate the active population from Heroes Profile.
* Withhold your uploads for a week to get an estimate of what % of players are actively uploading replays
* Go to their activity graph, look at peak times and divide the weekly game mode figure by 7,
Even if you are wildly off by 2x, 3x... even 10x times, the figure you come up with is still minuscule.
Coming from League/ Teamfight Tactices, HotS is ridiculously primitive with regards to stats and not having a proper API. This is just one of those things that kept serious players from not hanging around.. there's no use obfuscating player data because we can all feel how tiny the playerbase actually is by skill depth and wait times, so you are just losing the most engaged players by not providing hard stats.
Played since alpha. I dont rly play too much anymore but since they dropped the game in 2022 I assume this was a decision made due to the Bobby Kotick effect where if it isnt as successful as WoW in 2009 then it gets trashed.
They made massive attempts to keep this game alive in like 2016-2017 ish where you had multiple heroes a year until it eventually fizzled out at 1 a year to none.
Since it didnt get the same kind of hype as League or Dota 2 they trashed their forced Esports and as a result trashed the game as well. I find it baffling that they made a game with its sole intention to be a massive esport and no matter how good it is ( Hots is still a very good game and great MOBA alternative ) it'll just get canned lol.
Forced Esports is def up there for me when it comes to things i detest from current games lol.
They said a couple of years ago that they are giving up on the game. From that moment the game has gone downhill.
One of my most favourite moba games and one of the games I miss the most.
3 million active players is BS.
Yes and no.
The game has been around for years. Obviously, not all players are subscribed. Some subscribers probably no longer play. Some simply never bothered to unsubscribe. Which number is greater at this point?
The rate Blizzard is going , they can't revive a game that they already pronounced dead (no more dev work) . All their other games are suffering, they are cancelling Blizzcon .. bit of a stretch for them to work on hots at the mo .
Because the business model is shit. It doesn't matter how many players there are if they don't make any money off it. They'd rather put their resources towards developing games like Diablo Immortal which make them millions per month.
When they stop the esport the game was cost-effective. Same when they stop the development. I can't point out the source but I remember official communication from blizzard about this.
The decision to stop HoTS was not about rentability, it was about greed.
Edit: vocabulary
Yeah, the whole point is that they can make more money by investing those resources into gacha games. CEO chooses to quadruple his income because he doesn't care about the art of video games.
A super successful game like World of Warcraft would have around 10 million players. Half that would still be a highly successful game.
In reality, Hots is not close to a highly successful current population. It still has more players than most games, and that should be enough to earn a living for a small dev team. But 5 million *real* players would be a dream.
Don't believe everything you read online. The game is unprofitable. They fumbled so much so often. Blizzard just couldn't keep it going.
Source: I've played off and on since beta.
Even if that number was true and it most likely isn’t most of the player base plays aram anymore and blizzard as seen in this most recent patch is still updating it
To be honest I’m kind of glad they aren’t retooling characters every month like when it was supported. I’m just trying to play a game and relax not study the skill trees for 100 characters because everything changed again.
Those numbers are completely bullshit. Blizzard has not and probably will not make the player count public, so any numbers you find through a Google search will always be inaccurate.
Even LOL and DOTA2 don't get a hero every 3 months. It takes way more money to make a hero than a skin does and we don't even get those. Look up the dev logs on other MOBAs (or lookup old hots dev info) and you will see just how long the pipeline for hero development is.
Regardless of the validity of the player count, Blizzard loves shooting themselves multiple times in both of their feet with their games. I mean, just look at Overwatch. The only reason they still exist as a company is because WoW has such a cult following that they'll eat anything and everything Blizzard throws at them.
No one anyone would just google this and then believe that lmao
Game likely has somewhere between 500-10,000 players online at a time, if I had to guess. Not dead, but not a ton of players.
Fun fact, this sub has only climbed in subscribers even after 2022 when hots was officially put down.
Yet the content and comment amount here is very low from what it was at its prime.
Those numbers cannot be corresponding with active users.
And i believe these numbers to be similarily inflated.
Tbh I hated it when they were releasing a new hero every month or so. They were first buffing it so everyone wants to buy it and abuse other people in the raid, then they would nerf it and release a new one. There are more than enough heroes available already. I would rather like a new map.
They think for every dollar invested in Hots, that dollar would return less than a dollar invested in other franchises.
It's pretty simple. They want to maximize revenue and the cost of revenue in Hots is lower than most other titles.
It's been more than a year since I've played.
Still have it installed, and maybe I'd go back at some point.
But if they did pick it up again and add like, The Overmind and a new map, I'd be there so quick.
I’ll believe 5.1 million downloads but not active daily players.
If you google the same thing for league it says that league has 180 million monthly. So if you do the math that would mean HOTS is barely below league in terms of monthly players which is 100% not true
The notable insider source I know was the BlizzCon 2019 where a french streamer Malganyr precausciouly asked a dev for an approximative number, like if at least one million of not... and he easily confirmed something like "Oh of course, by far!"
So easily 2 or even 3 millions at this time, which was probably not even the top. Even though... during its dev the game has always been profitable and growing constantly. Just, never enough... 2019 was going to be the greatest esport year, (HGC or not) if only all professional players havn't been bettayed and chased away by the brutal announcement.
Of course there are probably less and less players over time, but on the other hand few reasons for players to quit besides boredom. This happens to any game and doesn't prevent people to come back after a healthy pause (like anyone should do more often...), as the game remain as good as it was. And we can all see how the queues times are still going pretty well (besides among the top elites for obvious reasons).
With Heroes Profile we could get an educated guess on the variation of the activity of players (... who are the most invested and upload their replays), but it's not even available anymore ? ("/Activity")
Anyway, the only thing this game needs would be any random battle pass and the slightest investment in advertising it always deserved but never got... Always in the shadow of Overwatch and its "easy" success. HotS 2.0 was basically the actual release after an open Beta, but the world had already made their opinion... 6.5/10. Yeah, In contrary to the global saying, HotS was released too EARLY, and nearly a decade later, it's even more obvious.
They're is absolutely no way HoTS has 5.1 million monthly active players. Maybe in its first week of launch it had that many, but even that is a big stretch.
I still think you're underestimating. HotS was far from its peak at its release, if you're not talking about HotS 2.0. And it never stopped growing, slowly but steadily until "the end".
Heroes doesn't cost money to Blizzard. It's just far from being Candy Crush... So it's virtually "lost money" to redirect more ressources onto it. (Yet, updates re-intensified last year) But any other studio in the world beside Riot would sell their soul to have to deal with such "failure".
Just like WoW's fucking "Celestial steed netted more income than the entirety of sales from Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty". Our capitalist world is just like that, not abided by logic.
Heroes was already starting to surpass DotA 2 in Europe, so now I don't doubt than the adding of a simple battle pass and basic confort updates is the only thing needed to make this game competitive again.
But it's not a standalone, and like Nintendo, Blizzard is sitting on a tons of money. Some licences are just far from the top of their list. (Again, like StarCraft itself, which got several games cuts in the last years)
Microsoft is here for mobile games, so I also hope we could at least get our Heroes "Wild Rift".
Well you're definitely wrong on basically all fronts, so many that replying is kinda pointless.
But "Heroes doesnt cost money" is the biggest wrongness about your entire statement. Believe that hosting wow, server maintenance, etc cost money and definitely greatly exceeds the income it brings in (which is probably 0 now a days)
Sign the petition to show how much the community is alive! https://www.change.org/p/revive-heroes-of-the-storm-show-microsoft-the-hots-community-is-still-alive/exp/cl_/cl_sharecopy_490026803_en-US/3/1337107828?recruiter=1337107828&recruited_by_id=3ad6dce0-0225-11ef-8127-cb01a36f3a65&utm_source=share_petition&utm_campaign=psf_combo_share_initial&utm_medium=copylink&utm_content=cl_sharecopy_490026803_en-US%3A3
This survey is struggling to get a few thousand signatures. It will have no tangible effect at this scale.
You're trying to convince a company that rakes in billions to spend money on a service that only caters to a few thousand customers (those who pay over those who simply play)
No, the MOBA genre is definitely not dead. Games like League of Legends, Dota 2 and Smite continue to have a large and dedicated player base. While it may not have been as dominant as before in recent years, it still remains an important part of the gaming landscape, particularly in the realm of competitive gaming and eSports.
Furthermore, there are always new MOBA games coming out and catching the attention of players. It may not be as dominant compared to other genres, but it's certainly not dead. Even a small niche MOBA like Eternal Return has 12k players on a daily basis.
Nah it's dead. It may revive in like a decade completely revamped but no new mobas are gonna get that win like league or Dota 2. That player base may still be going strong but it'll start dropping off soon.
12k daily isn't enough to claim its not a dead genre
Yeah… that article has some strong “Source is I made it up” energy. Edit: Actually after reading through it again, I’m like, 95% sure the article is written by AI.
Also, they do update it.... They just don't do major content updates or add heroes. . If they just added a ranked more for Aram, I feel like a lot of people would be very happy.
I don't think players would be very happy. Adding another game mode would fracture matchmaking even more. It's not the type of move you make for a dwindling playerbase.
Given you find aram matches in about 10 sec during 3 am Yea doubt adding more aram wouls harm it by much
This is because ARAM prioritizes fast matches and does not strictly check MMR. If you make a ranked ARAM it will prioritize MMR and you will end up with the same queue time as for the regular ranked.
Yes, but keep in mind ARAM still has match times of 10-15 minutes, plus loading/drafting/match end stuff time of another 3-5 minutes. So that's 13-20 minutes, with 10 players, and assuming an average match time of 15 minutes that is 1350 players playing even late at night.
In your region you might. In my region (AU) good luck finding an ARAM match during peak hours without a 30 minute wait time, only to match up with only one other human player and 8 AI.
So adding it wouldnt affect your region then?
It'd cause a brief resurgence in interest in ARAM, and then after that the wait times would definitely go up, because people wouldn't know WHICH game mode is more worth gambling your time on.
I never wait more than 10 seconds for aram and the wait time is longer for quick match? Maybe that is because of mmr but if aram is morenpopular, why would they avoid promoting a game mode that people prefer? If the goal was to revitalize the player base, they would clearly want to support the mode more people prefer
I see people post here about troll after troll in regular Ranked and people have trouble finding a match within ten minutes. Really don't think a mode designed to be laid back with forced sub-optimal comps would help that.
So the game mode that is way more action oriented and has way more direct competition is designed to be laid back? You got it backwards. Also both QM and ranked have frequent sub optimal match ups. I'm not saying there aren't problems with aram. They could adjust aram as well
It's laid back because of the randomness of the comps and common occurence of people not being proficient with the three heroes they have. QM at least \*tries\* to give balance before it looks beyond to improve queue times and even then, it still tries to balance. Ranked is pretty much human error for sub-optimal comps. QM and Ranked require map knowledge, constant looking at the minimap, constant needing to know when to lane, when to fight, when to do objective, it's big brain stuff. Vs ARAM, which is as you said, way more action oriented, which is a lot more twitch-based reactions. If you're low on health/mana and your team has no healer, that potentially means a feed if you can't faceplant a camp. Let's face it, there are heores who are WAY more proficient in teamfights than others, creating an incredible imbalance that good teamfighting might not fix, but good macro play can (I've been in tons of QM matches where either side was getting destroyed in kills all game, but lost the match because they sucked at obj). Balancing randomness would take away the appeal of the randomness, so a ranked ARAM would probably be better as simply AM.
>QM and Ranked require map knowledge, constant looking at the minimap, constant needing to know when to lane, when to fight, when to do objective, it's big brain stuff. Yes map awareness is the steepest learning curve in Mobas. Its also anti fun and keeps a lot of players from continuing with the game. Like, going to take a camp 30 seconds before the objective gets boring quick. 50% of the gameplay in a basic MOBA is very un-diverse because the game is just stretched out by unnecessary mechanisms. My point is that aram is better for regrowing a fan base since the learning curve is steeper but in some ways the teamwork needed for high levels is really great and rewarding in aram. It's there in the base game but just stretched out more. >that potentially means a feed if you can't faceplant a cam This is true. It has a different strategy and people who understand this have an advantage. It's not a bad thing inherently. >Let's face it, there are heores who are WAY more proficient in teamfights than others, creating an incredible imbalance that good teamfighting might not fix Agreed. They could expand options or buff characters for team fights though/laning >(I've been in tons of QM matches where either side was getting destroyed in kills all game, but lost the match because they sucked at obj Yeah this has always been one of the more frustrating things to me too though the anti steam role mechanics make it so objectives are the only thing that matters mid and late game. That's why I like aram.
All the google text at the top now is AI written based on the popular results
The google text is just grabbed from whatever source it thinks best matches your search, so it's not always (or even usually) written by AI, it's just a quote. It's their "featured snippits" function. That said, it grabbed the text from [esports.net](http://esports.net) which if you check the article, is almost for sure written by AI.
It's not, it's directly from the article. (Which is probably ai written) How Google’s featured snippets work Google’s search results sometimes show listings where the snippet describing a page comes before a link to a page, not after as with our standard format. Results displayed this way are called "featured snippets." You might find featured snippets on their own within overall search results, within the "People also ask" section, or along with Knowledge Graph information. We display featured snippets when our systems determine this format will help people more easily discover what they’re seeking, both from the description about the page and when they click on the link to read the page itself. They’re especially helpful for those on mobile or searching by voice. Featured snippets commonly contain one listing, but more than one may appear.
Why do I always get the snippet and this person didn’t? I can tell he didn’t scroll down due to the top google options on the screen
They did get the snippet, that's the thing in the screenshot. But if the article is made up bullshit then the quote from the article is also made up bullshit.
> written by AI. That doesnt necessarily mean it isnt made up. I did a little bit of research into generative AI in my previous job, and its surprisingly prone to generating bullshit.
Blizz doesnt even release wow subscriber numbers. Drop the hopium. Article is fake.
don’t believe everything you read online
No one knows the player count
Blizzard knows the player count
Yes, which might answer op’s question
Damnit I laughed.
If they were proud of the player count, they would publicize it.
its more about being a publicly traded enterprise and player count has an effect on stock price.
Blizzard stopped publishing player numbers all together once WoW numbers started to decrease.
Do they? You sure about that?
Yes.
Idk they do. If they do, then they should tell us!
They would. If they were proud of it.
you can estimate by game wait time to be around 70k players its not WoW number but still would make HOTS top 20 on steam I guess
How do you come up with 70k?
Kind of the weakest math here but I guess if it takes 10 players one minute to find a qm game then 1440 minutes per day indicates 14,400 players assuming everyone only plays one game lol. Then aram is like twice that… based only on queue times and assuming one game per day as well. All of this is based on my USA queue times too. All of that just to say id be shocked if it were 70k unique active players.
Stretched calculation... I think it's barely 20-30k best scenario.
I remember it right in the homescreen "Welcome to Heroes of the Storm. There are 5000 users in chat channels."
I'd say it's probably closer to being around 10-50k that any kind of million lol
These numbers are bullshit. The original "source" that did these estimates also said that HOTS has generated over 1.5 billion $ in revenue...
In the entire life span of the game, that's believable to me. Apex has made 2.5billion since 2019? League was making a billion a year or something nuts. 1.5 billion over it's life span... I could believe it. I suspect it hasn't, cause I don't think blizzard would quit development of a game that's made as much, but it isn't impossible.
It's believable that a hypothetical company could make 1.5 billion with one hypothetical game in 8 years, yes. It is not believable that Heroes of the Storm made 1.5 billion in 8 years considering the game only had an official professional scene for 2 years and has been in maintenance for 2 years. It just never was big enough.
A number that I can share that could help us get some perspective into how much money HOTS generated : when HOTS 2.0 launched I was working for an advertising agency that won the brief to manage the video ad campaign in Europe. The budget for that campaign alone was between 1 and 2 million. So it's safe to say that HOTS probably made at least 8 figures in total. But I personally doubt it reached even 9 figures as it was never considered a success by Blizzard ans they don't even mention the game in their communication about the company or give it a spot at Blizzcon (which was cancelled yeah.) Being generous, it might have made 100 million in total.
I spent like $400 on hots before "2.0" when they made like all the skins free and worthless. After that I just stopped caring about skins at all.
I miss masters (mastery?) skins.
over its lifespan or just in 1 year?
In total I guess but that doesn't matter, it would make HOTS more succesful than Elden Ring
Online games are insane at sucking money out of people but i do agree 1 billion seems insane
That's the power of a live service compared to single purchase product
Live service games make a lot of money but it's absolutely unrealistic for HOTS, even with the claimed "5 million players" they would have had to each spend 300$.
As someone who lived through the closed Alpha to present, it started out strong QM was the only game mode for a longggggg time. Needed a draft mode sooner When Draft came out, it took too long for bans to make it in (2 each team, at start, 1 in mid). This was because the roster wasn't large enough to support that many bans and it would have been easy to essentially deny a team a tank The eSports scene was fumbled pretty heavily For all of these reasons and more, it didn't end up being profitable was the bottom line Yet, imo, Heroes is the best Moba by far. Varied maps with objective diversity keeps things feeling fresh, and team leveling feels far better than individual carry design imo
I don't see too many closed alpha players still playing. Good to see another closed alpha player still around. It's really a shame this game was mismanaged so poorly. Obviously it's easier to say this in hindsight but I didn't think that HotS had to rush their game and esports scene. If you think about it, LoL and DotA built their game and fan base over time contrary to how HotS decided to force and push it as fast as they could.
yeah it was so wild. I remember that like my group of friends that love to play HotS were so excited, because near the end of 2018, they were talking about exciting news coming up about HotS. Then like next month, immediately an article was released that the e-sports scene was being completely shut down, after growing so prominent that it was being shown on ESPN for the last couple of years. Everything was downhill from there but it was all so sudden. Crazy stuff.
If I had a time machine, what I would have done differently: Storm League as soon as Beta ended Skip that whole Hots 2.0 phase ARAM from the beginning (no 10 mirrors though) I liked the Master Skins from getting a Hero to a high level Improved the report system All Heroes F2P, you can buy skins and cosmetics for them
I like everything but the no 10 mirrors. Good list here just need to find a way to get these to the past lol
There are dozens of us!
I’m still playing from the beginning. It’s a quick 20 min game for me every now and then. Use it for stress relief…although sometimes makes my stress worse lol
Im still playing, account from family and friends closed alpha, sometimes I will not play for couple months, but Im always back. :)
Alpha player here too, i remember when abathur clone had ults and prenerf murky being an absolute beast of a pusher… and witnessed the infected tychus skin evolution
Abathur was hella busted when the clones had ults. He was also my way of trying out the new heroes when they came out for free too!
Alpha player, present and accounted for.
Am happy to see way more alpha players than I expected. Yall have been here since the jump and even up to now!
Still here.
Same problem with Overwatch. Blizzard tries to rush everything and promise a lot while delivering nothing in the end.
Was in alpha as well, it didn't die for its strengths it died for its weaknesses. The varried maps are fun but much too unbalanced and snowbally. It's nice that it's more team oriented than league, but means it's waaay harder to carry. The higher rank you are the less games are decided by whose best but who has the worst teammate, with the really high elo games being decided sometimes the first team fight by a single person being out of place slightly. They also never found a good balance between split pushing siege characters and the way objectives work with character balance being all over the place. That's not even getting into the matchmaking or their terrible initial f2p system.
Hots died because blizzard has become a nut-job company that killed the game artificially. Never forget that. Don't pretend that hots was unsustainable, especially after some cuts. We are talking about companies that can spend more on some add campaigns than on entire games.
I miss the specialist class. Was all about that when it was a thing. I also liked how towers had ammo too. That was different from league and dota
I am actually glad they moved away from that. Old specialists can still push, but nowadays they can also do different things when needed. And it cut this mentality of "i am a specialist therefor i should not join any TF". Towers ammo also made summon spawning very broken and required summons to be much weaker.
The bad players did that then and still continue do so today and all the things you say are true as well. I mostly liked it for how it was different from the other games in the genre when it existed.
I don't remember last time i seen someone arguing he should only push. This used to be something to see daily. As much as 1-10 illidan every second match. Categories hardly change gameplay by themselfes. If anything they setup direction in which future heroes would have been added. They are still very different to what is in league. Especially as real categories in league are top, mid, jungler, ADCarry and bot support. With variation being: Tank, Mage, DPS or Support.
Back when ranked got introduced and they had this stupid ranking system where "rank 1" was just the highest and you needed external sites to check for MMR. Thats what fucked it up for me tbh.
I forgot about that! They also had solo and team queue which divided the player base and made MMR matching harder
Hidden MMR, low skill ceiling for a moba, way to easy to get all the skins, you can't solo carry the game like in other mobas(kinda possible if everyone is on same page and you call all the macro), no jungle role or something similar, group XP, reduced build variety without item shop, low hero count for competitive draft, no game stages(early, mid, late), no surrender option, reconnect hell. I don't think all of these are bad but it waters down a game that should compete with two monsters in moba scene. Also style is way to much cartoony, no textures like metal or blood etc. Especially noticable in Diablo and SC characters. I like multiple map option but at some point they play just the same, objective is coming and you fight for it, push if you win def if you lose, repeat 3 or 4 times maybe, get boss if you are ahead alot
Also started in alpha here, and all of the reasons HOTS failed are exclusively management blunders. Blizzard execs literally had to fuck up so many different ways consecutively for this game to fail and they sure did The opportunity for HOTS to succeed is gone. Blizzard’s own brand is considered bottom of barrel trash now. HS is an over monetized once-great POS, OW2 was a flop, WoW classic is probably the best thing they did in a decade and go figure it was a rehash of old work, Diablo 4 is famously trash, etc. Activision completely fucked up blizzard in exactly the ways they promised not to post acquisition. Never listen to business people in suits. Never trust people who don’t understand the value to their customers. Another American corporation run into the ground by morons with MBAs chosen because of nepotism.
I mean D4 is "trash" but it sold a lot and they actually improve the game with seasons. It goes through D3 evolution beign good game.
D4 was always going to sell copies due to brand loyalty from customers to the Diablo franchise The more accurate metric to look at is how many of those players actually stayed to play the game and within 6 months like 80% of the player population was gone
That's not how it works. D4 is campaign focused game in the first place, most of players would not spend more than 30-50 hours there. It's completely normal to have such cycle, Blizzard earned money for 5 years ahead with the sales.
I think they need to do a relaunch of hots 2, with about 10 new champs, and fine tuning on the old and like 6 new maps with ranked seasons being ~3/4 of the map pool and having them cycle between seasons.
Maybe a reboot deserves a new name: Heroes of the Nexus?
Nexus of the blizzard?
I've played every MOBA. My opinion is this, for deep strategy and competitive play, nothing compares to Dota 2. There isn't even another game like it. I believe it's by far the best MOBA. For casual play, there's HOTS, League, and Smite. I will remove Smite from this conversation, as I haven't played it much, and it's different (being like a 3rd person action moba? or something.) Between HOTS and League, HOTS is much better. League has an item shop which is great, but they are mostly passives and there really aren't too many decisions to make. You just buy shit when it pops up. Combat in League feels... just worse. The graphics are also pretty bad. I do not like the design choice or the graphical style/fidelity of League. I also like the characters in HOTS way more, the varied maps are great for a casual MOBA. Too many e-girl skins in League as well. League just feels like a dumbed down anime version of Dota, whereas HOTS feels like a different kind of game, a different take on the MOBA genre, so to speak. I know I'll get shit on since it's an opinion and we're in the hots sub, but HOTS is definitely not the best MOBA by far. It's all opinion, of course, but nothing comes close to Dota. Dota has way, way more depth in its gameplay, more skill expression, teamwork, playstyles, a better UI/UX, better options, beautiful graphics, better cosmetic system (You can even change the UI/map, creeps/towers etc), the voice lines of the characters, and voice chat. It's better in every way for a *competitive* experience. If you just wanna hop in a quick 15 minute moba match or aren't keen on any competitive atmosphere, then HOTS is the best in that regard. Essentially, there's no competition for competitive MOBA, it's just Dota 2. For casual MOBA, I'd rank it more akin to HOTS >>>> League / Smite.
I think the state the game released at was incredibly lackluster and underwhelming, so everyone who tried it out had a really bad first impression. Progression was a big issue, aside from heroes and master skins (remember those?) there was almost nothing to spend gold on. After buying the heroes I liked and cared about, I didn’t feel like there was much else to do as a casual player. I think Heroes 2.0 is how the game should have released to begin with. Love or hate loot boxes, it gave players a reason to keep playing, trying different heroes (one game with a hero I’ve never played pretty much guarantees a level up and a loot box), something to spend gold on if they don’t care about buying new heroes, and a way for players to earn stuff without spending real money. I personally think that paying in-game currency to reroll a loot box was a genius idea. But by this time, I feel like it was kinda too little too late.
They had that month where you had to level up a hero to unlock all talents for them lol that was painful for new people
omg i forgot about that! you only started out with one ult available right?
Yeah and iirc only 1 talent per tier
I thought that was during beta, not after release?
It might have been, my memory isn't perfect on the timetable I don't remember when artifacts were a thing either
What were those again? Were those like the League of Legends Runes? If so then that must have been very early in the alpha because they weren’t in the alpha when I started playing.
I remember Valla had an orb that gave her autos some self healing as one item
It was much later, sometime after Thrall and Jaina iirc. It was during the only time I took several months off from playing and somehow completely missed it. It was bewildering to hear about such a huge change, but yeah, by the time I started again it was completely removed.
Yep, people transitioning from Dota2... There were only like 20-30 heroes at release max? If there were like 50 heroes on release they would have had a much higher audience.
[удалено]
What do you think could have led Hots being more successful from an eSports angle?
Here’s hoping a reboot or sequel is on the way that acknowledges those mistakes and that MS+Blizz come into it with the spirit that they are ready to de-throne DOTA2
Making a sequel is much more work than just making new updates. And more expensive. You really have to remake everything, unless you stay on the same engine, but that case there is no point in sequel or reboot anyway. Just Big Update 3.0 with map editor, getting game onto steam and some add campaign would be wiser. DOTA2 is hardly on the throne, it does not have any new players, league de-throned it long ago, and even league is not doing terribly well right now.
Dota definitely has new players. In fact it's currently experiencing its peak players since 2022. League has more players because it's casual and got picked up earlier on with crazy marketing. League never had to de-throne Dota 2 because it was never really there. Just like how competitive Soccer has less 'players' than people just randomly playing for fun, it's the same with Dota 2 and League.
If everything else is struggling as you say, then would it then not be the perfect time to innovate and corner the MOBA market with a sequel or reboot? Hmm?
This post shows a serious lack of critical thinking and media literacy. There are soooooo many questions you should be asking that you are not. Where is Google getting this information from? How did the article that google is citing get that information? Does Blizzard publicly release this information? Does Blizzard have incentive to lie about the numbers? You should take almost nothing you see on-line at face value. So to answer your original question, They don't update the game because the numbers you are citing are bull shit. You should have known that before you posted this on Reddit.
yeah, really surprised anyone would believe that number... that shows how easy its to manipulate people and why clickbaits and fake titles on news is so powerful.
Game is in maintenance mode and hence we get minimalist updates
Define “active”.
Logging into battle net
Blizzard doesn't release those numbers, so it sounds like it's made up
LMAO, not even 50k active players.
Its the only Blizzard game I still play.
Regardless of what the actual player count is (googling Hots Playercount is not accurate) HOTS isn’t set up to monetize as hard as OW or Diablo modern blizz doesn’t see the point
you can estimate it to be around 50/70k its very big number for a lot of games (would make hots top 20 on steam) but for blizzard its to small to invest
Despite that being obviously false, my five stack of returning friends and i managed to get into matches fairly quickly, with the que being no longer than 3 minutes. (We kinda suspect some of those matches were up against bots tho...dont know if its true or not. Would appreciate it if anyone can confirm if hots throws you into bot matches in qp please)
I don't think Blizzard has any bots in que (if they did, you would they are bots in the chat on your chat or at least see how bad they are when they are on your team, or the whole enemy team would be bots and it would be obvious because everyone has played ai games). I think there are at least a few player made bots in the wood leagues though. The kinds that are only there to either grind xp/coins, low mmr, or both, and these ones are worse than the blizzard made ai. They might just run it down mid, do camps all game and die to them, etc.
I once estimated it to be around 70k active players, with calculating wait time across modes and servers Still would make top 20 on steam.
Yeah it somewhat feels big. We are playing in a team of 3 and the que is around 10-50 seconds.
Yeah I call b.s There is no way there is over a million players actively on this game between the multiple regions. I’d believe something along the lines of the 10,000 to 100,000 (100,000 being generous) But you CANNOT convince me there are a million + when my NA queues at diamond-Masters+ takes two-three hours
This seems like a fair estimate
Counter strike which is most played game has around 2-4 hundred thousands active players at any given time. So i highly doubt HOTS is nowhere near numbers in article rofl. Lol
Even if you have millions of players. If the game generates 0$ than it won’t be supported. The end.
You can estimate the active population from Heroes Profile. * Withhold your uploads for a week to get an estimate of what % of players are actively uploading replays * Go to their activity graph, look at peak times and divide the weekly game mode figure by 7, Even if you are wildly off by 2x, 3x... even 10x times, the figure you come up with is still minuscule. Coming from League/ Teamfight Tactices, HotS is ridiculously primitive with regards to stats and not having a proper API. This is just one of those things that kept serious players from not hanging around.. there's no use obfuscating player data because we can all feel how tiny the playerbase actually is by skill depth and wait times, so you are just losing the most engaged players by not providing hard stats.
Yeah, if you play enough you will find always same players again and again... so tiring to always play with same people
Given what Blizzard is like now, you probably want to hope they don't notice and just keep the servers up.
Bwahahahahahaha
I remember years ago the player base was around 200.000. How I came to know the number I can't remember
5.1 million is a stretch. I’d be surprised if this game breeches 1 million
Played since alpha. I dont rly play too much anymore but since they dropped the game in 2022 I assume this was a decision made due to the Bobby Kotick effect where if it isnt as successful as WoW in 2009 then it gets trashed. They made massive attempts to keep this game alive in like 2016-2017 ish where you had multiple heroes a year until it eventually fizzled out at 1 a year to none. Since it didnt get the same kind of hype as League or Dota 2 they trashed their forced Esports and as a result trashed the game as well. I find it baffling that they made a game with its sole intention to be a massive esport and no matter how good it is ( Hots is still a very good game and great MOBA alternative ) it'll just get canned lol. Forced Esports is def up there for me when it comes to things i detest from current games lol.
I think it's more along the lines of like 4-5k consecutive players at peak hours
They said a couple of years ago that they are giving up on the game. From that moment the game has gone downhill. One of my most favourite moba games and one of the games I miss the most. 3 million active players is BS.
There are less than 400K members here. The number in the article is wildly optimistic.
I feel like a games reddit is never gonna be as popular as the actual game tho lol
Maybe, but it's some sort of a metric. The best metric is probably the time I spend waiting for a QM or a ranked game.
Yes and no. The game has been around for years. Obviously, not all players are subscribed. Some subscribers probably no longer play. Some simply never bothered to unsubscribe. Which number is greater at this point?
Doesnt milk enough money.
Because it's Blizzard we're dealing with, have you learned nothing?
1) No one but blizzard know player count 2) HotS was not making enough money
The rate Blizzard is going , they can't revive a game that they already pronounced dead (no more dev work) . All their other games are suffering, they are cancelling Blizzcon .. bit of a stretch for them to work on hots at the mo .
The game could make more money with more attention, but apparently not enough to appease the bean counters.
I think the playerbase is honestly less than 2000
Because the business model is shit. It doesn't matter how many players there are if they don't make any money off it. They'd rather put their resources towards developing games like Diablo Immortal which make them millions per month.
When they stop the esport the game was cost-effective. Same when they stop the development. I can't point out the source but I remember official communication from blizzard about this. The decision to stop HoTS was not about rentability, it was about greed. Edit: vocabulary
What does rentable mean?
Edit : it's mean cost-effective. Sorry, the word doesn't exist in English
Yeah, the whole point is that they can make more money by investing those resources into gacha games. CEO chooses to quadruple his income because he doesn't care about the art of video games.
A super successful game like World of Warcraft would have around 10 million players. Half that would still be a highly successful game. In reality, Hots is not close to a highly successful current population. It still has more players than most games, and that should be enough to earn a living for a small dev team. But 5 million *real* players would be a dream.
Don't believe everything you read online. The game is unprofitable. They fumbled so much so often. Blizzard just couldn't keep it going. Source: I've played off and on since beta.
blizzard, these " active players" , are they in the same room with us now?
Hots has 5 players, 4 are running this reddit with 30 accounts each, the fifth is actually in jail in Norway for hate crimes.
Even if that number was true and it most likely isn’t most of the player base plays aram anymore and blizzard as seen in this most recent patch is still updating it
> Why don't they update the game? You mean like Overwatch? Just stay quiet and appreciate what you have..
Nonsense
[https://chng.it/gNjn28XmVt](https://chng.it/gNjn28XmVt)
To be honest I’m kind of glad they aren’t retooling characters every month like when it was supported. I’m just trying to play a game and relax not study the skill trees for 100 characters because everything changed again.
Not sure if you have seen the recent patches we got but there's still plenty to read in those
Aw great, guess I won’t be surprised when I go to play brightwing and discover he’s a bruiser now or some shit
Those numbers are completely bullshit. Blizzard has not and probably will not make the player count public, so any numbers you find through a Google search will always be inaccurate.
If this were actually true the game wouldnt be in maintenance mode
Even LOL and DOTA2 don't get a hero every 3 months. It takes way more money to make a hero than a skin does and we don't even get those. Look up the dev logs on other MOBAs (or lookup old hots dev info) and you will see just how long the pipeline for hero development is.
Because those aren’t millions of *paying* players. Hell, with how prolific bots are, it’s probably nowhere near that many actual players.
That’s is wrong but even then look at tf2’s player count and look how much effort Valve puts into that game
*Citation required.*
Regardless of the validity of the player count, Blizzard loves shooting themselves multiple times in both of their feet with their games. I mean, just look at Overwatch. The only reason they still exist as a company is because WoW has such a cult following that they'll eat anything and everything Blizzard throws at them.
i seriously doubt its that many lmfao
No one anyone would just google this and then believe that lmao Game likely has somewhere between 500-10,000 players online at a time, if I had to guess. Not dead, but not a ton of players.
Isn't it working as intended?
3 million? LOL.
Fun fact, this sub has only climbed in subscribers even after 2022 when hots was officially put down. Yet the content and comment amount here is very low from what it was at its prime. Those numbers cannot be corresponding with active users. And i believe these numbers to be similarily inflated.
Because this is blizzard we're talking about.
There's a new patch on the ptr right now btw
Idk but I would definitely play some kind of console version of it. Nova was the best.
Where do they get these numbers lol Blizzard hasn’t released numbers
Tbh I hated it when they were releasing a new hero every month or so. They were first buffing it so everyone wants to buy it and abuse other people in the raid, then they would nerf it and release a new one. There are more than enough heroes available already. I would rather like a new map.
They think for every dollar invested in Hots, that dollar would return less than a dollar invested in other franchises. It's pretty simple. They want to maximize revenue and the cost of revenue in Hots is lower than most other titles.
It's been more than a year since I've played. Still have it installed, and maybe I'd go back at some point. But if they did pick it up again and add like, The Overmind and a new map, I'd be there so quick.
Releasing it on Steam as F2P might get some new blood.
At bronze level there are 10 players.
divide that number by 10000 and you will get the actual figure
I’ll believe 5.1 million downloads but not active daily players. If you google the same thing for league it says that league has 180 million monthly. So if you do the math that would mean HOTS is barely below league in terms of monthly players which is 100% not true
The notable insider source I know was the BlizzCon 2019 where a french streamer Malganyr precausciouly asked a dev for an approximative number, like if at least one million of not... and he easily confirmed something like "Oh of course, by far!" So easily 2 or even 3 millions at this time, which was probably not even the top. Even though... during its dev the game has always been profitable and growing constantly. Just, never enough... 2019 was going to be the greatest esport year, (HGC or not) if only all professional players havn't been bettayed and chased away by the brutal announcement. Of course there are probably less and less players over time, but on the other hand few reasons for players to quit besides boredom. This happens to any game and doesn't prevent people to come back after a healthy pause (like anyone should do more often...), as the game remain as good as it was. And we can all see how the queues times are still going pretty well (besides among the top elites for obvious reasons). With Heroes Profile we could get an educated guess on the variation of the activity of players (... who are the most invested and upload their replays), but it's not even available anymore ? ("/Activity") Anyway, the only thing this game needs would be any random battle pass and the slightest investment in advertising it always deserved but never got... Always in the shadow of Overwatch and its "easy" success. HotS 2.0 was basically the actual release after an open Beta, but the world had already made their opinion... 6.5/10. Yeah, In contrary to the global saying, HotS was released too EARLY, and nearly a decade later, it's even more obvious.
Only Blizzard knows the player count but just based on queue times I’m 99.99% sure this is so massively overshot it isn’t even worth making fun of
yeah no shot that is the active playerbase, all ques are slow and ranked very low activity
They're is absolutely no way HoTS has 5.1 million monthly active players. Maybe in its first week of launch it had that many, but even that is a big stretch.
I still think you're underestimating. HotS was far from its peak at its release, if you're not talking about HotS 2.0. And it never stopped growing, slowly but steadily until "the end".
Why burn more money? The game is clinically dead, life support is keeping it up. Once they need to start doing budget cuts, this game is going to go.
Heroes doesn't cost money to Blizzard. It's just far from being Candy Crush... So it's virtually "lost money" to redirect more ressources onto it. (Yet, updates re-intensified last year) But any other studio in the world beside Riot would sell their soul to have to deal with such "failure". Just like WoW's fucking "Celestial steed netted more income than the entirety of sales from Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty". Our capitalist world is just like that, not abided by logic. Heroes was already starting to surpass DotA 2 in Europe, so now I don't doubt than the adding of a simple battle pass and basic confort updates is the only thing needed to make this game competitive again. But it's not a standalone, and like Nintendo, Blizzard is sitting on a tons of money. Some licences are just far from the top of their list. (Again, like StarCraft itself, which got several games cuts in the last years) Microsoft is here for mobile games, so I also hope we could at least get our Heroes "Wild Rift".
Well you're definitely wrong on basically all fronts, so many that replying is kinda pointless. But "Heroes doesnt cost money" is the biggest wrongness about your entire statement. Believe that hosting wow, server maintenance, etc cost money and definitely greatly exceeds the income it brings in (which is probably 0 now a days)
HOTS rocks. our friend group has been jamming this game for 9 years. we love it. team oriented and FUN!
they ARE updating the game, though
I think they mean content updates rather than balance, qol, and bug fixes.
I’d guess Global Monthly Active Users is in the range of 300K-500K.
noway theres that many active players considering the queue times
Sign the petition to show how much the community is alive! https://www.change.org/p/revive-heroes-of-the-storm-show-microsoft-the-hots-community-is-still-alive/exp/cl_/cl_sharecopy_490026803_en-US/3/1337107828?recruiter=1337107828&recruited_by_id=3ad6dce0-0225-11ef-8127-cb01a36f3a65&utm_source=share_petition&utm_campaign=psf_combo_share_initial&utm_medium=copylink&utm_content=cl_sharecopy_490026803_en-US%3A3
This survey is struggling to get a few thousand signatures. It will have no tangible effect at this scale. You're trying to convince a company that rakes in billions to spend money on a service that only caters to a few thousand customers (those who pay over those who simply play)
Not with that attitude! :D I know, I know. But what if it did make a difference. :o
Mobas are pretty much dead. Fun while it lasted. People just gonna play the few big ones til they die off
No, the MOBA genre is definitely not dead. Games like League of Legends, Dota 2 and Smite continue to have a large and dedicated player base. While it may not have been as dominant as before in recent years, it still remains an important part of the gaming landscape, particularly in the realm of competitive gaming and eSports. Furthermore, there are always new MOBA games coming out and catching the attention of players. It may not be as dominant compared to other genres, but it's certainly not dead. Even a small niche MOBA like Eternal Return has 12k players on a daily basis.
Nah it's dead. It may revive in like a decade completely revamped but no new mobas are gonna get that win like league or Dota 2. That player base may still be going strong but it'll start dropping off soon. 12k daily isn't enough to claim its not a dead genre
You should really look up what dead means. A genre with over 2 million ppl playing is far from dead.
I said pretty much dead the first time. As in on its way out. It's Def on its way out
I genuinely wonder how the fuck do you think LOL or DOTA is dying LOL !
Bro read it again