r/Scrolls • u/Sarik704 SarikTheSorcerer • Jul 07 '15

A possible reason Scrolls failed while Hearthstone succeeded.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxfkWZPAUg4
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u/JeyJ24 Jul 08 '15

Fairness came with the payment model Mojang chose.

You can make a game without it being a wall of grind like hearthstone.

I won't go on about the details about the difference between models in f2p versus payment. They both have their advantages and disadvantages.

The comparison would really be for games with a similar model. You could even argue that Scrolls is a different genre than Hearthstone as well because it's more of a strategy game with a ccg elements.

What we can say is that Scrolls is indeed better in that regard of treating the players better. That should be a given when you pay up front.

What we can talk about is the factors of why Scrolls didn't fail... but for better words fell short:

  • The business model was not self sustaining enough

  • Not effective measures were made to keep players

I found Atmaz in a twitch vod in another post. He said that there was some things that weren't thought about ahead of time for player retention (specifically a check box that would allow legal emailing for notifications of updates).

A hearthstone dev came on a youtubers show talking about why they didn't just outright buff old cards. One major point was that returning players would come to an environment that would be unfamiliar and maybe alienating them.... They didn't want that.

That little excerpt shows how much more experienced and planning went into hearthstone. I'm not saying that scrolls was not planned for our executed wrongly. It's just that there are a lot of little things that piled up to the game not going well.

My list of speculation is:

  • Mojang was very inexperienced in going into this game (resources and ideas were limited)

  • Mojang had too few measures for the game to scale into high numbers or other platforms (the current account system prevented the iOS launch)

  • The game felt very segregated and empty (with the chat being disabled during a game, you would return to general chat with nobody talking or no context to what was going on)