14 DAY TRIAL // Video game developer Blizzard announces that at the moment more than 20 million registered gamers are playing the card-based Hearthstone, which is an impressive figure that shows double the number that was involved with the title about six months ago.
The information is quoted by Gamasutra and the video game is an important source of revenue for the company, alongside the digital versions of Diablo 3 and World of Warcraft.
The performance of Hearthstone is important because it shows how a high quality title created by a relatively small team can become a major source of money for Blizzard, which has traditionally spent a long time and plenty of resources in order to deliver high quality experiences.
Hearthstone is a free-to-play title and the company is never pressuring the player to use real world money to get in-game content or currency, but plenty of those who are engaged with the title are happy to do so either for cosmetic enhancements or to expand the limits of what they can do.
Money means cheating is also present
Hearthstone has also attracted the attention of cheaters and schemers as it grew in popularity, and recently, a player announced that he used a bot for a three-day period without Blizzard noticing, which might mean that the competitive aspect of the title might be affected in the long term.
The studio might introduce a range of new anti-cheating measures soon and take strong action against those who break the rules, but in the long term, as with World of Warcraft, it's likely that security issues might be an on-going problem.
Hearthstone will expand every year
The developers at Blizzard have already introduced a first free expansion for Hearthstone and the company says that it has plenty of ideas for new content, which will focus both on the delivery of more cards and on solo challenges that gamers can use to test their skills before jumping into competitive matches.
The studio is also concerned about balance and is at the moment looking at the cards that the community believes are overpowered in order to see how it can nerf them in order to make sure that no class is more powerful than the others.
At the moment, Blizzard is also working on the Warlords of Draenor expansion for World of Warcraft and on the launch of more updates for Diablo 3, which has just been launched on the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4.