HearthStone or how Blizzard expands its gaming experience

During the last 22 to 24 of March it was celebrated the PAX EAST 2013, an event of gaming culture and community that annually hosts the city of Boston. And it year Blizzard, the famous video games company, had announced that it went to present a new and different game to what we are used to or what they had been able to see before.  Blizzard just said there would be no further expansion or sequel to the different franchises that already have.

Finally and after a lot of rumors the new game was revealed: HearthStones, a new online strategy game of collectible cards that expands the Warcraft universe. The game aims to be a casual game but that involves a great strategy breaking with the traditional format of Blizzard. It is inspirited in old card games like Magic the Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh or Jyhad but with the graphics and epic quality which we are accustomed to the company.

 

The game will be “Free to Play” mode and you can use up to 9 heroes that correspond to nine World of Warcraft classes, will have 300 different cards available and are able to earn and buy packs of 5 cards that will open online at a special interface. There will also be five letter grades: common (white), rare (blue), epic (purple) or Legendary (orange) and have the possibility that anyone can improve and become the golden version of it. Cards that have duplicate may be disenchanted and have a very comprehensive tool for making new ones from these plus a full deck creator online, with many functions to control generic letters and special from every hero. It may compete 1 vs 1 online through battle.net matches well made ​​play against the program. The Hearthstone beta is planned for this summer and is said to be released before year end.

With this new format Blizzard looking to expand their gaming experience and also enter the world of tablets that are currently experiencing expansion as the game is perfect to suit tactile platforms. After books, physical card games, table games, television advertisements and the announcement of a movie, even now Blizzard wide transmedia experience in the world ofWarcraft doing this accessible from a variety of points.

 

The video game company continues to base its transmedia strategy on two pillars, first a continuous expansion and improvement of its games, as we see with the constant expansions of its franchises, and second to maintain an active community of players thanks to its multiple forums and group pages of news and information as Wowhead.

With 10.5 million subscribers, World of Warcraft is the game online with the largest user registry and keeps the Guinness Record for the most popular MMORPG. It also has one of the most active player communities inside and outside the game and create a steady stream of comments on the official Blizzard forums and fan sites where players create their own guidelines for all aspects of the game and kept informed of the latest news, comments from Blizzard employees and all rumors about new content for the game. You could even consider that World of Warcarft has a crowdsourcing community as they are the users who create many contained in this great collective culture.

Blizzard continues with this new game with the expansion of the convergence culture, like Henry Jenkins says, understood as the free flow of content across multiple media platforms and which depend greatly on the active participation of consumers. We don´t have to understand the convergence only as a technological process, it represents also a cultural change because it encourages consumers to find new information and make connections among dispersed media content.

I´m sure that Blizzard has created this game firstly thinking to play with tablets and that get a great success like its others games. All the game community already waiting anxiously.

 Alejandro Godoy Calvo