Most Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft players battle complete strangers over the internet. This week, Blizzard wants you to spend more time challenging your buddies.
The digital card game is celebrating an event called Friendly Feud this week. It will allow players to finish Daily Quests by playing against people in their friends list. Normally, you can only complete those quests (which award in-game gold that you can spend on new cards) by playing against strangers in Standard, Wild, Arena, or Tavern Brawl formats. Joost van Dreunen, analyst at market research firm SuperData Research, told GamesBeat that Hearthstone makes $20 million a month, and it’s the leader in the $1.2 billion digital card game segment. UEvents like this keep players engaged (and more likely to spend money).
[aditude-amp id="flyingcarpet" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":2006844,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"games,","session":"C"}']You’re normally not allowed to complete Daily Quests with friends because it’s easy to coordinate with a buddy so you can quickly burn through them. You can simply take turns beating each other if you need to win a certain number of games. This is why Blizzard is unlikely to make this a permanent feature, but it does little harm to allow players to beat quests with friends for a week, especially since the company just introduced a new recruit-a-friend feature.
Hearthstone is based on popular, physical card games like Magic: The Gathering. However, while those kinds of games encourage people to play with friends, Hearthstone’s digital, online format makes it easier to play against strangers. That’s also usually the only way to earn gold through Daily Quests. It makes Hearthstone a less social experience than its physical counterparts.