Free-to-Play by Christopher A. Paul

Author:Christopher A. Paul [Paul, Christopher A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIT Press

the paradox of Hearthstone. You start off as a scrub, you get your ass handed to you by higher-level players with strategies you don’t understand and decks full of Legendary cards, and you want to get better at the game. But when you put in the hours it takes to get to their level, all of a sudden you find that you’re tired of your deck of Legendaries and you want to toss your keyboard out the window when you get beaten by a scrub.15

Hearthstone is different than other games, as players can readily sink hundreds of dollars into the game, yet any single match has a substantial amount of luck involved. And, eventually, players will face a game where their bad luck overcomes any advantage they may have in terms of cards and skill. Although players focus on the role of skill in the game, that is rewarded over the long run, rather than in any single game where luck can play a major role. This runs counter to the norms held by core gamers, as individual rounds of Hearthstone favor luck and spending over skill and hard work. Calixto notes, “as long as the game favors random hijinks and costs real-world money, the Hearthstone Salt Cycle will continue uninterrupted.”16 Hearthstone features a different kind of game design, but the hostility comes from running in the face of established norms in video games. Hearthstone is free-to-play with advantage spending and can be played on many different platforms, but the central issue is that the game effectively requires spending to get past a certain point of play. If players opt not to spend, they are putting themselves substantially behind those who do. However, skill is a key appeal in defending what makes Hearthstone different than more “tawdry” free-to-play games.

Between Blizzard’s reputation as an exceptional developer of premium games and the design of Hearthstone, which is set up to reward a combination of both skill and spending, Hearthstone gets talked about in a manner quite different from other free-to-play games.17 The microtransactions model largely parallels existing collectible-card games, like Magic: The Gathering, making it easier to swallow, in spite of the fact that it also parallels the loot boxes and loot crates that can evoke substantial discontent and laws banning the practice. The focus on skill is a call to traditional video games, tying the norms of Hearthstone more closely to PC and console games than free-to-play mobile titles. Beyond the discussion of deck-building or salt, the reaction to the game and how it is designed is notable. A post on Gamasutra hailed Hearthstone as a game changer for mobile devices, largely because it broke with existing conventions of mobile free-to-play games. Ed Biden argues that Hearthstone has no energy system that limits play, the cards players can buy are permanent items, the game is largely skill-based, and it features synchronous play against other players.18 Biden states that because of these differences, Hearthstone “appeals to a lot of self-designated ‘gamers’ that find other mobile games somehow below them.

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