What Did Blizzard Really Say in the Looking Ahead Blog – Is Hearthstone Dying Or Not?

Blizzard’s promised answer to having no new board and no cinematic for Perils in Paradise was published yesterday, and you can read it in full here. Blizzard also promised to give us further insights into the future of Hearthstone. Did they? What did they really say?

In this article, I try to dig deeper into the meanings we can derive from their corporate-sounding blog post as well as take a look at what has been going on with Hearthstone and how the blog post explains the events over the past 18 months – after all, the blog post itself says that it addresses changes made over the past 18 months, not just the most recent ones!

What Does the Blog Post Say?

The blog post was written by Nathan Lyons-Smith, the Executive Producer and Vice President of Hearthstone. In other words, he is the top leader of the game, responsible for Hearthstone’s popularity, the resources spent on the game, and also its business results. If the post sounds corporate, I can tell you that people in these kinds of positions often really speak and think like this. But what does it all mean? Is “fun, focus, and fearless” meaningless corporate jargon or an actual guide to action? Let’s start by examining those three terms.

Fun. What is fun, anyway? In this blog post, fun has a very specific meaning: “Hearthstone delivers a special kind of fun; the ah-ha moments and the puzzle-y combat, alongside the game’s unique look and feel.” The Hearthstone fun consists of two parts, the puzzle-y combat and the look and feel of the game. The look and feel is the easy part. Blizzard’s art, animation, and effects teams have always been top-notch. No matter what complaints you hear about Blizzard games, you never hear that they have poorly made art. This look and feel is half the fun in Hearthstone! Quite literally, it is one of the two parts Hearthstone fun consists of. But what is the puzzle-y combat? The blog post does not go into more detail, but there was a recent interview with Nathan Lyons-Smith and Tyler Bielman, Hearthstone’s Game Director, where Tyler elaborated on the concept:

The board, turn over turn, is very different, as opposed to a lot of other card games, where it’s a steady state of building and building and sort of edging people out. It’s part of what makes Hearthstone exciting, this sort of explosive reset every turn that gives you a different puzzle on every turn.

Tyler uses the word puzzle to describe combat where boards are exploded every turn and you must find a new answer to the presented threat every single turn. He notes that this is unlike other card games, where advantages are built over time. In Hearthstone, things just appear out of nowhere and are blasted to smithereens just as quickly.

The blog post tells us, in a rather obscure way, that Hearthstone is about explosive turns and looking good while doing them.

Focus. If we had infinite time, we could do infinitely many things. But we don’t. Every project needs a specific scope. Scope creep kills projects. Trying to do more than you can handle results in chaos. Hearthstone has done many things in the past, but now they are more focused. Specifically, they are focused on Constructed, Battlegrounds, and Arena. We got Battlegrounds Duos this year. We have also seen the sunsetting of Duels, and Mercenaries before that, over the past 18 months, specifically the period of time Nathan says the new strategy has been in place. Note what a contrast this is compared to the time when Ben Lee was leading Hearthstone (2018-2022): Ben led the creation of Battlegrounds, Duels, and Mercenaries. Ben’s time at the helm was a time when Hearthstone wanted to build new game modes into the client. Nathan is taking Hearthstone in a different direction. No more new game modes. No more wandering off-limits. No solo adventures. Constructed, Battlegrounds, and Arena. That is the future of Hearthstone.

Fearless. You could easily associate fearless with Ben Lee or Ben Brode before him, not so much with what has been described of Nathan’s vision. Again, fearless needs to be interpreted in context. Nathan wants the team to build new things and innovate. But this innovation happens within a constricted space: Constructed, Battlegrounds, and Arena. Battlegrounds Duos is innovation. Nathan also promises a substantial update for Arena that should release early in 2025, that’s innovation. Twist is about as far as they are willing to go, a format that requires no long-term support and uses mostly the existing Constructed framework.

Fun, focus, fearless. Are these words meaningless? Not at all. They describe a specific direction for Hearthstone: explosive turns that look good, focus on Constructed, Battlegrounds, and Arena, and attempting to innovate within those three formats. You might not like it, but this is clearly the current direction.

In addition to fun, focus, and fearless, the blog post explores one more main theme: innovation in personalization. What does that even mean? In brief, it means that Blizzard wants to monetize Hearthstone more through cosmetics. They have been trying to do that a lot. It is generally considered to have been less than successful, given how they eventually made the Battlegrounds pass convey gameplay benefits (more hero choices) to boost sales.

But this time, for sure! Nathan points out that they have done extensive research and surveys to figure out how to make players pay for cosmetics, and they believe they have some good stuff coming up. The C’Thun hero skin was apparently a success, so they want to make more of those, and there is even a teaser of a possible Ragnaros Hero skin coming in the blog post with the TOO SOON refence to Ragnaros’ iconic voice line from World of Warcraft. They are also working on pets that you can add to your game board for more personalization, something we have already seen in other card games.

So, when you really think about what Nathan wrote, he told us quite a lot about where Hearthstone is headed.

Looking Back

The blog post was looking ahead, but it also mentioned that this direction has actually been in place for 18 months already. So, we could also look back and see how this strategy explains what has happened.

The sunsetting of Mercenaries and Duels is obvious. Not enough players, not even for Duels, so they’re gone. Mercenaries remains in the client for now because it is a stand-alone feature that requires no support, whereas Duels was removed because it took resources to maintain it.

What about the lack of a new cinematic and a new board? You know, the very things the blog post was supposed to explain. Did it?

The blog post did not touch the cinematics subject at all, but we can try to reason why there was none this time. First of all, Nathan was positive about this new way to advertise the expansion on Twitter.

If you start to think in terms of budgets, we know that Blizzard flew the content creators participating in the video to Paris, France, for multiple days. Flight safety video instead of a cinematic was not a budget issue. It may have been new innovation, but it may also have been new innovation out of necessity. The new World of Warcraft expansion, The War Within, is coming next month. The new Diablo IV expansion is coming in October. The Cinematics team is a shared resource within Blizzard. When you have three different products coming out near the same time, which one is the easiest to leave without a cinematic? The card game expansion that happens multiple times each year, of course, and not one of the bigger releases that only come once every year or two. I fully expect Hearthstone to get more cinematics again when it is not competing for resources as much.

What about the lack of a game board? Again, there was new work for the team involved. New hero skins, new pets! Still, this appears to be a miscalculation on Blizzard’s part. Based on their research into cosmetics, they thought people would not care too much and they could cut the board to work on other cosmetics. More nefariously, they may also consider selling game boards in the future, for which they first need to wean us off the free boards. The fact that the blog post did not include any remedial action to the lack of a game board may indicate the latter. If it was simply an oversight, they could have just said sorry, and return back to the old practice. Then again, they may also see from their data that it was not in fact that big of a deal and they can just shrug it off. We won’t know for sure unless we see game boards for sale in the shop in the coming months or years.

It is not unlike Blizzard to take a long time to admit a mistake. The quest changes from earlier this year are a recent example. They remain the most mind-boggling recent action Blizzard has taken with Hearthstone. They tried to make quests three times as time-consuming and increase the rewards only a little. This was too much and players voted with their wallets. Blizzard waited a month to see if they could just shrug it off, and then improved the quests a lot when they saw that they couldn’t. I still hear from people who quit Hearthstone when the original changes hit and have not come back since. Some of them don’t even know that most of the changes were reverted. Blizzard took so long to admit their mistake that they lost players permanently, over nothing.

The most mind-boggling part about the quest changes is that they were in no way supported by the strategy Nathan described in the new blog post. Nobody asked for them, they just appeared. It is unlikely that we will ever know why. Trying to increase monetization by leaving people unable to complete their quests? Trying to increase engagement by forcing people to play more? Whatever the reason, the goals were not achieved at all.

Is Hearthstone Dying?

The blog post emphasizes, in bold font even, that “Hearthstone is here to stay.” Is it, though?

Hearthstone is ten years old. That is a long time for a game, but it is part of the card game genre. The genre is characterized by games that pop in and out in a year or two, and games that stay for a long period of time. Magic: The Gathering is 31 years old. Pokémon TCG is 27 years old. In this field, 10 years is a good start. That puts Hearthstone out of the typical quick rise and quick fall territory, and bodes well for its continued existence.

People have been concerned about budget cuts with the lack of a new cinematic and a new game board. However, there are better explanations for these omissions than a lack of funds, as explored above. That said, the Hearthstone team has been affected by Blizzard’s layoffs, first when it lost 10 people in September 2023 and again early this year when they lost people from the PR team when Blizzard cut their PR and community teams company-wide. However, none of these cuts have been major, not to the extent you would see from a product going to maintenance mode.

There are actually good reasons to be hopeful for Hearthstone’s future. Blizzard renewed their partnership with NetEase in April, and Blizzard games should return to China starting this summer. Hearthstone is one of the titles that has been confirmed to return. We don’t have a date yet, but China was a major market for Hearthstone: possibly up to a quarter of Hearthstone’s revenues came from China. This is potentially a major boost for the game.

Hearthstone indeed looks like it is here to stay. It really depends on Blizzard’s ability to make Constructed, Battlegrounds, and Arena fun to play. If the new cards are good and new decks are fun, there is nothing stopping Hearthstone from succeeding for decades to come. It may be past its more exploratory phase with new game modes, but a strong focus on its main modes can be a successful strategy. It is up to Blizzard to execute on that strategy.

Oh, and one more thing. Note how Nathan writes that they want to explore new stories “within Azeroth and beyond.” What is beyond Azeroth? The other planets in the Warcraft universe are a straightforward answer. Other Blizzard IPs would be another one. Or, he could hint at future collaborations with other IPs. Blizzard has surely noticed how successful Magic: The Gathering has been with its collaborations with other franchises, known as Universes Beyond (beyond, see), where worlds like Middle-Earth and Doctor Who have been brought into Magic. The opportunities are endless! But would Hearthstone players like them as much as MTG players?