Hearthstone Helped Popularize Loot Boxes, Then Weathered The Backlash
Hearthstone is celebrating its 10-year anniversary today, March 11, 2024. Below, we look back at how it helped pave the way for the common adoption of loot boxes, and maintained them as the industry came under heavy legal scrutiny.
When Hearthstone was announced in 2014, its approach to virtualizing the CCG experience seemed fair, even user-friendly. Just like a real-life paper CCG, you could pay for randomized card packs, have fun ripping them open and discovering your new finds, and then they’d be nicely organized into a collection. You could even trash duplicates for “arcane dust,” a resource that lets you craft new cards. It wasn’t a great exchange rate, but it felt fair enough as an alternative to opening a full-fledged trading marketplace–which Blizzard had good reason to avoid. What Blizzard couldn’t have predicted was how its CCG-inspired monetization strategy would soon help to define an industry trend–a trend that the public eventually grew to hate, even as Hearthstone largely stayed the course.
In 2014, randomized packs of items were far from the norm. Team Fortress 2 had blazed a trail with randomized crates starting in 2010, but other companies were slow to adopt the practice. EA had introduced Ultimate Team in some of its sports franchises, and franchises like Counter-Strike and Battlefield had started implementing sales items like “battlepacks.” But for the most part, downloadable content for games was a mix of cosmetic items, DLC expansions, skins, and other baubles. The idea of a repeatable transaction that grants you a randomized set of items was not commonplace. Hearthstone helped to change that.