The good, the bad and the ugly isn’t something that only applies to characters in spaghetti westerns, yet it also applies to game developers. The good applies to developers and corporations that genuinely care about the product. The bad applies to the companies that seem to only care  about profit and the ugly is a combination of the both.

There are many examples that are brought to mind whenever the quality of developers are brought up, one such is with the games Shadowverse and Hearthstone. Both games are free to play card games; however, the difference between them lies with the quality of the developers. Hearthstone, which I already went in depth to talk about their flaws in a previous article, was made by Blizzard. Blizzard is a company that has a lot of history, which allows for a mass of content to be studied. From various studies of the company, all of their products seem to follow a similar trail from the legendary World of Warcraft, all the way to the modern Overwatch. The games follow a wicked and ugly path of being immensely cared for until the second the golden days are over, then the product and its consumers are quickly exploited and are milked till the last cent.

Hearthstone, unfortunately, is no different from the other titles, but is receiving very sparse spots of care, which splits the community in a grotesque manner. This is where the majority wants to leave and take their chances on anything else, while the minority decides to stay in hopes of it getting better. Those who decided to leave quickly, realized how poorly they were treated by just observing other games with one in particular being Shadowverse and its developers, Cygames. The game appears to genuinely take care of its fans admitting whenever they make a mistake and apologize to people not even affected by offering paid content for free.  This is something that Blizzard could never do and when they rarely do, they keep it to an absolute minimum.

I believe that these “ugly” developers need to be called out more and if they still aren’t listening then they need to be convinced using the only language they know, money. If there is a sudden loss in dollars and everyone is up in torches and pitchforks. Afterwards, I believe that they will listen to reason and hopefully will make the changes needed to make everyone happy.