contentsmayvary :
@alidan Diablo III was great - but the auction house spoiled it. What's the betting that was imposed by bean-counters? So now the AH is going away for the expansion, and didn't exist at all for the console version of DIII. Looks like the expansion will be great.
Also: Starcraft 2 is doing very well. You just need to look at the number of viewers it gets on twitch to see that.
And just wait and see how many people will play Hearthstone - sure, it's a niche online CCG, but it's awesome fun and extremely polished (like all Blizzard games).
Like i said, the groundwork for starcraft 2 was probably done LONG before it came out, the bones of the game, the crap that makes the game good, i firmly believe that that was done long before the game was done, hell probably before wow was even out, it would be hard to imagine them not having at the very least a small team working on that over a long term.
Diablo 3 was crap. they stream lined it to the point that you don't have choice anymore, and to make it even better, they had to almost completely redo the game just to make it not suck. The loot system in Diablo has always been a joke to me, what is some of the loot drop rates? 1 in 10 million or was it 1 in 100 million, i forget, and that dynamically changes based on how many items are in the game, the auction house showed how sick of that crap people really are, you don't get the drops to drop and are fed crap for so long that you just dont even want to kill for the loot because its a 1 in several million chance for the loot to drop.
And hearthstone, now i know full well i may come off as a prick when i say this, but the game is a money grab that is simple to create. The TCG genre is hard to break into in real life, because of how far away people are who play it and how much of a money sink they can me, and to make matters worse, there are very few good tcgs on the pc that i know of, and many of them are fan ports of magic the gathering. NOW to make a TCG is ridiculously easy to. Take this as what ever you want, but when i was in third grade through sixth, me and a friend make games like this for fun, and the only thing you really need that we was the balance testing, with that any moron can make a TCG if the can balance it, and that is something that working on an mmo for so long should have taught them in spades. the tcg is also a desperation genre that people who want in on will pay allot for even if its not good, and they know it... this is a cash grab and nothing more, will it be fun... they are competent enough to pull it off, but that isn't saying much.