Popular opinion on Blizzard’s card-battler Hearthstone has drifted back and forth over the years.
When the game was first announced in 2013, Many of Blizzard’s traditional fans were skeptical about the game’s accessible edge, free-to-play business model and the developers aggressive positioning of it as a potential esport. In time, Hearthstone won those same fans over again and again. Before long, the game became something of a posterchild for what traditional AAA developers could bring to mobile gaming space.
However, for all that popularity opinion around the game has waxed and waned, the fundamentally frustrating economics of Hearthstone haven’t changed all that much.
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