Hearthstone Update: Looking Ahead

Well met, Hearthstone community.

Nathan Lyons-Smith here, following up on last week’s promise to give you more visibility on our strategy for Hearthstone.

As someone who’s been playing Hearthstone since the Beta days, I’m passionate about making sure this game we all love keeps thriving. As the Executive Producer, it’s also my job to look after the game’s health, our incredible team, and our equally incredible community.

We are doing meaningful research and development for the future of Hearthstone to ensure that the Tavern will be a home for you for another decade and beyond. While we are not ready to share any information about this work yet—and will not be for a while—I want you to know that we are committed to Hearthstone as we know it today, and that this work is happening alongside what I will detail below.

We made some changes over the past 18 months that were not what you’ve come to expect from Hearthstone. We didn’t do a good job communicating our strategy around those changes. I apologize for that. Going forward, it is my goal to be more open. We should proactively share changes we are making with our community, alongside context around why we’re making these changes. I will start addressing that now.

Fun, Focus, and Fearless

Our strategy for Hearthstone is based around three words: Fun, Focus, and Fearless.

Hearthstone delivers a special kind of fun; the ah-ha moments and the puzzle-y combat, alongside the game’s unique look and feel.  We strive every day to provide tools that inspire you to experience the game your way, so that Hearthstone can offer you your own brand of fun.

Constructed, Battlegrounds, and Arena are the modes that our community plays the most, and where you see us making the largest updates—like you saw with Battlegrounds Duos earlier this year. Focusing on these modes allows us to make more meaningful improvements to areas that impact the vast majority of our community.

We want to be fearless in the pursuit of discovering more fun experiences and strive to move beyond the status quo to do so. We saw one such opportunity in Arena. Over the last eight months, the Arena community has been energized by some small-yet-impactful design changes. Early access to expansion cards, new draft rules, and curated card pools have had a profound impact on the game mode. This has worked out great – the popularity of Arena has shot way up, and so we want to do more. We are now working on a substantial and very cool update for Arena, and we are aiming to release it at the beginning of next year.

Taking bold and focused steps are the kinds of decisions our team are committed to. We appreciate your passion for Hearthstone, and we won't always be perfect, but our promise is that we will listen and react as quickly as possible. We will keep an eye on what isn’t working as well as we would like, while also doubling down and pushing further when we find something great.

Making space for innovation in personalization

When we decided not to make a board for Perils in Paradise, we should have let you know earlier. Moving forward, we will ensure that you get early visibility on changes like this and give you more information on what we’re working on instead.

We are still planning to release one new board per year, but we also have some ambitious ideas that we know will be a significant undertaking. Pulling back from three static game boards per year to one allows us to begin work  on the coolest possible dynamic stuff - like a system to choose your favorite boards, and pets(!). We’ve also heard so much positive feedback about C’Thun and so are working on some truly groundbreaking new hero skins. It’s TOO SOON to go into more detail about what’s coming, but we will fast-track putting all existing Hearthstone boards into the Standard format board rotation.

We also surveyed a large group of you to ask what cosmetics would be most interesting. The responses were predominantly around further personalization of the playspace, and this feedback reinforced our desire to innovate and challenge what we have always done.

Thank you for the feedback

Hearthstone is here to stay. While it has evolved and adapted over the past 10 years, one thing that hasn’t changed is the fact that there is an amazing team behind it, with as much passion and energy as ever. We have a fantastic upcoming slate of cards and themes, exploring new stories that can be told within Azeroth and beyond, as well as events and features that we hope will surprise and delight you all.

Many members of the team (myself included) lurk in the Hearthstone communities because we’re huge fans of the game AND because we want your feedback. We have a shared passion and love for this game and want it to be the best it can be so we can enjoy it together. As a team, we frequently talk about what we are seeing and hearing from you, and we need to make this more of a two-way conversation. With that in mind, I commit to checking in here with you again before the end of the year to keep you updated with any further strategy changes.

Until then, we hope you’re enjoying Perils in Paradise and exploring new fun with the Tourists. We’ll see you in the Tavern!

-Nathan