With only 6 scant days of notice, Blizzard has announced their newest Adventure for Hearthstone - League of Explorers.
What are Hearthstone Adventures?
Hearthstone Adventures add content to the popular card game. 40+ boss fights (think puzzles), new themed cards, 5 legendary cards, new gameboards and new card mechanics.
Adventures are divided into parts, or "wing", and each part is purchasable with real-money or through discounted combo deals. Individual wings are also purchasable with in-game currency for a fixed rate of 700 gold (roughly 1-2 weeks of play).
A Brief History
With the April 15th release of Hearthstone for mobile phones, the player base increased a whopping 50%!
We're currently sitting at 40 million players, but I somehow still manage to run up against the same folks in ranked (sorry Ootguy). /box
Hearthstones' first Adventure, Naxxramas, was announced and launched in the summer of 2014. We F2P gamers had weeks to save up the requisite 3500 gold to unlock all of its wings. No in-game bonuses were offered for the cash peeps, though they did receive discounts for bundles.
Similarly, real money preorders for Hearthstones' most recent adventure, Blackrock Mountain, began in March of this year. With this preorder, players unlocked a special lava and stone cardback. The content dropped a month later, in April, and I was staggered by the number of players I saw with the preorder cardback during that month. It felt as if I were looking at a lava backed deck every other match. Preorder sales numbers were never released, but we can assume that it was profitable because of Blizzard's change in their methodology with their newest Adventure, League of Explorers.
Today
With less than a week of notice for League of Explorers, players who regularly spend their gold on card packs and arena entries will be enticed to instead spend real-money for the new wings just to keep up with the meta. Well played, Blizz.
As a F2P player, this irks me... though I feel guilty for my frustration. I do enjoy the game and play it frequently, so why shouldn't I contribute to a product I enjoy? It's definitely worth it... mayhaps I'm just
Despite my saltiness here, I still believe Hearthstone has the best F2P model to date. It's still far enough away from P2W to keep me playing.
I expect this new, shorter notice for content drops will be financially more lucrative for Blizz. We should plan for it going forward. F2P folks will need a healthy amount of gold on hand come July 2015, and if you're open to buying the content, keep that extra $20 stashed in a sock somewhere.
TL;DR
You got 6 days to come up with 700 gold yo.
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