Blizzard Entertainment Inc.’s free-to-play collectible card game has amassed more than 10 million users since its March release, setting the foundation for a potential new franchise and an emerging business model at one of the gaming industry’s most successful and influential companies.
The early tallies for “Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft” caught executives by surprise, considering the title represents several firsts for Irvine-based Blizzard, the largest software maker in OC.
“It’s exceeded our expectations in terms of how many people have picked it up,” said Jason Chayes, production director on Hearthstone, Blizzard’s first free-to-play game and its first title released on the iPad.
The game will be available on the iPhone and on Android smartphones and tablets later this year in another set of new outlets for the company.
The spinoff card game, first released on PCs and Macs, features characters from the company’s World of Warcraft franchise, by far Blizzard’s largest source of revenue.
Unlike WoW, Hearthstone players aren’t required to pay monthly subscription fees for updated content and can finish a game in 10 minutes rather than logging hours in front of a computer screen, a fairly common phenomenon in the multiplayer fantasy franchise that Blizzard ushered in a decade ago.
“We really wanted to make a game for everyone,” Chayes said. “We did not want to make it just for paying players.”
Engagement, Monetization
That strategy apparently hasn’t stopped Hearthstone’s growing legions of fans from setting up online accounts and spending real money to acquire special card packs to access new characters and add weapons or accessories, despite the fact that the add-ons can be acquired over time through traditional game play.
The game has drawn “strong engagement and monetization” across the globe, Blizzard Chief Executive Michael Morhaime told analysts in a recent conference call.
Free-to-play titles typically incorporate some e-commerce mechanism or draw revenue from in-game advertisements or sponsorships.
Hearthstone is getting top grades from players and critics alike. It’s currently the No. 1-rated game on Apple Inc. iOS devices and the No. 3 PC title, according to metacritic
.com, a San Francisco-based website that assigns numeric scores based on critics’ reviews and averages them out in the mold of rottentomatoes.com.
The game builds on the long-running success of WoW, which finished the first quarter with about 7.6 million subscribers, down about 200,000 gamers from the end of 2013. Those players pay about $40 for the game and $15 a month to play it online.
WoW remains the No. 1 multiplayer role-playing game in the world but has lost some 2.5 million subscribers in the past few years as players exhausted content or found other entertainment options.
Blizzard, despite the subscription drop, posted record sales of $462 million in the recently ended quarter, up 40% from a year ago, and operating income of $239 million, up 77%. The gains were fueled by the release of Hearthstone and “Diablo III: Reaper of Souls,” the No. 1 PC game in North America and Europe in the March quarter, with more than 2.7 million units sold.
It appears Blizzard is determined to expand its card-playing titles, a genre many of its designers and engineers gravitated toward in the 1990s as fans of the card-trading game Magic, which is based on battles between wizards and other creatures.
It took Hearthstone developers nearly 2 ½ years to release the game, which the company conceived some five years ago, according to Chayes.
Next Title
The next title is right around the corner, highlighting Blizzard’s shift toward releasing games in the pipeline faster to consumers.
The single-player adventure “The Curse of Naxxramas” is scheduled for release this summer, establishing Blizzard’s newest franchise in a long line of them.
The game is based on popular WoW raid dungeons, where gamers team up to accomplish specific missions. Players will face off in familiar battle zones and fight old pit bosses, with the ability to access new cards as they play.
The first batch of content will be free for a limited time in another new venture for Blizzard. Subsequent levels will be available through in-game currency or real money.
The new card game genre has prompted more hiring at the company’s iron-gated headquarters in Irvine. About 15 people are now dedicated to Hearthstone-related content, and the company said it plans to hire another 10 programmers and designers this year and grow the team to about 35 at build-out.
“We’re definitely very committed to Hearthstone,” Chayes said. “We’re really excited about its potential.”
The company’s other free-to-play game in development, “Heroes of the Storm,” pits
favorite characters from its Warcraft,
StarCraft and Diablo franchises against
each other in online brawls and clashing universes, drawing from two decades of Blizzard lore.
