Building the Blizzard Home

Picture courtesy of PublicDomainPictures

When I first saw the name for Blizzards newly announced digital card game; Hearthstone, I found it incredibly fitting.

Blizzard is building a community and it is doing it by setting up an entire universe for its fans. World of Warcraft is the world, Starcraft takes care of space and Diablo has religion covered. All that was needed was a home for all of us that make up the Blizzard community and now we will have Hearthstone for that.

Hearthstone creates a nice relaxing place for all of us who wants to be part of the community, but who doesn't have hours upon hours each day to pour into the other Blizzard games. (at least not on an ongoing basis).

Because lets face it, even if you are a casual player, WoW, Diablo and Starcraft demands a good deal of time investment in order to be able to enjoy them fully.

The main complaint I see from the "WoW is dying" crew is that they only log in to the game to chat with their friends, and now their friends have stopped playing. Maybe Hearthstone will help here as I Blizzard will tie it into the Battle.net chat and allow players to poke people in other games and challenge them for a match of Hearthstone.

In essence Hearthstone is a simple concept, but in reality I believe it to be ingenious. Not only will it most likely earn Blizzard tons of money through the Blizz store, it also gives them a new game to cross-reward in.
Buy the collectors edition of WoW/SCII/D3 expansion and get a free Hearthsone card pack? It will happen and people will love it!.

Furthemore launching a nice little game like this helps keep gamers on the Blizzard platform and that ties right back into forming the community.

What is next for Battle.net? I don't know, but I could imagine we will see more personalized spaces for our profiles. Maybe even a mini game where we can collect rewards ingame that we can decorate our Battle.net profiles with. Collect a legendary weapon in WoW and mount it on your Battle.net Profile wall. Clear a demon infested house in D3 to recover an antique rocking chair. Defeat a wave of Zerglings in a side mission in SCII to collect rare seeds from a stranded spaceship. The seeds can be planted in your Battle.net profile garden and other members of the community can come and help you water and nurture them.

Did the latter sound a little too much like farmville? Maybe so, but I can't wait to see if we will we get a "house" on Battle.net to put our Hearthstone in.

For now though, I am just super excited about the prospect of playing Hearthstone!