Mobile MOBAs are everywhere! One of the next games on the docket, Ace of Arenas has just gone in a soft-launch in the Asia-Pacific region, including New Zealand. The game is interestingly played with a virtual joystick for moving, but then you have all your attacks, abilities, and targeting accessible from your right thumb. It feels pretty good, but I’m also tolerant of virtual joysticks. Still, it’s different from other games.
The game lets you play in 1v1, 2v2, and 3v3 matches, including offline against bots, if that’s your taste. You can buy both skins and heroes with your winnings and real money, of course. This isn’t necessarily going to be a quick game, though the maps are very much simplified, especially in 1v1 games where you have pretty much just the one lane. I’m not sure how people are going to take to this one, as MOBAs are always a tough formula to mess with to make work on mobile. But I’m fascinated to see just how this genre could work. Check out the forum thread for other players of the game.
Bah humbug, we all know the future of gaming is the Sega Dreamcast!
My guess is that paying on your phone (using google play store savings or iTunes money/ gift cards) is a lot more convenient and favored over having to give out your credit card information just to buy some packs in a game. Personally, I enjoy alternating between PC and mobile for hearthstone but the iPhone release was how I was introduced to the game - absolutely love it!
One thing I would love to see though to compare this data with is the amount of active monthly users from platform to platform, so that then we can really know whether this is due to players wanting more convenient ways to pay and play, or perhaps just a much larger boom in mobile users and a decrease in PC ones. (Although I doubt the latter is the case)
There's a difference here between current trends ("making money") and overall profits (money made). It will still take some time before mobile profits surpass the PC game. Still, anything that might encourage Blizzard to continue developing for mobile is okay with me.
Is this purchase value of Blizzard's cut? In other words, does this take into account the fact that Apple take a great big cut of every IAP?
Im sure it does
How was the mobile version making so much money even before 2014? Judging from that graph, they were making ~2.5m around July 2013.
You're reading the graph wrong. That's around about February. Still about a month before it came out, but not as bad as July 2013
February 2014 that is.
Ah, so the "2014" label on the bottom indicates the middle of the year. Gotcha.
I'd have been surprised if it wasn't making more money on mobile.
Exactly this. Mobile being that much more accessible to a lot of people, especially for this type of game.
I purposefully made all my purchases through iOS, because that's my preferred platform for the game so I wanted to vote with my wallet.
Never spent a cent. Have at least 1 of every card barring Legends. Have most the Legends I really want (crafting) but there's a lot I'd still like. Playing for a year and a half. Great game. They deserve the money. I've reached Legend rank, never having to pay. I can compete at the highest level without paying a cent. IMO that makes a great FTP game.
Were you able to buy both single player expansions with in-game currency? That's a lot of gold!
A ridiculously impressive amount of grinding.
You call it impressive, I call it sad.
It's not grinding if it's fun!
Don't let internet curmudgeons get you down. :)
Yup. I'd just save all my gold from dailys once I hear about an announcement. Basically average about 200 gold every three days. I use gold on arena runs otherwise and usually 6-12 wins there. Get a lot of gold & dust from those runs... Been playing since It came out on Mac so, been playing longer than most. I'm lucky where when I'm waiting for things to come in to me at work I can play video games on my phone. Tech job, on call. So I play a lot of Hearthstone at work ;)
I had Hearthstone on my Mac, then deleted it after the iPad version came out. I found the iPad version, with touchscreen controls, was much more comfortable, convenient, and natural to play. It actually felt like I was playing cards. And being able to use my iTunes account to purchase packs and expansions made playing exclusively on IOS a no-brainer.
Why play exclusively? No real need to delete it on your Mac...