Pxtl, rok temu

Let’s be honest. It’s not about the 5v5. It’s not about the CC. It’s not about the balance changes. It’s not about the cancelled single player.

It’s about the free stuff. Blizzard took away the free stuff, and everybody’s angry about it. Now you have to pay for a decent amount of cosmetics, and getting a new hero requires a grind (a big grind for current-season hero, small grind for past ones) unless you want to pay.

There are two viable business models for service-based games (and running servers and paying moderators is service, that’s why they’re called servers):

1. Sell a game and then support it right up until everybody’s already bought the game, then sell the sequel and repeat. Otherwise how do you fund development when nobody is paying you anymore?
2. Sell a game and then harass your players into giving you recurring payments.
3. don’t make the game a service. The game is a product and not a service, the service is the bare minimum to keep the master server up. Players run dedicated servers, make the expansions through modding, etc. This is how it used to be for everything before Xbox Live.

I get that it’s disappointing, but when you get angry about not getting enough post-release content you’re asking for 1 or 2. And the industry has pretty much moved away from type 3 – I can’t think of a modern popular game that isn’t a decades-old institution like Minecraft Java that fit into that category.