I've been thinking about this a lot since arena's successful launch. No one can tell what the future may hold, but if we create logical assumptions, we may be able to predict possible courses of action.
Assumption 1: if mtgo is profitable enough to sustain itself, there's no reason to discontinue it.
Prediction: mtgo will continue alongside arena and continue as the online platform for eternal formats.
Likelihood: there's a very real chance that arena takes too much of standard and limited share that mtgo goes into a death spiral where so few new cards enter the market that even the old formats become untenable.
Assumption 2: arena will create a new eternal format, but won't encroach on older formats.
Prediction: mtgo will likely relieve support for the foreseeable future.
Prediction: even without trying to directly compete with mtgo's older formats, mtgo may still due to above scenario.
Likelihood: I firmly believe wizards will not encroach on mtgo formats with arena as I just don't think it will be profitable enough to do so and well fragment the player base too much on their flagship product.
Assumption 3: mtgo has a closure that is already more or less planned.
Prediction: wizards will have to do something to compensate people for mtgo. They're risk too much consumer confidence otherwise. How they decide to go about this is interesting conjecture.
Likelihood: I doubt wizards is going to purposefully close mtgo. There's too much risk without enough upside.
My thoughts:
I don't think there's any desire at all to bring even modern to arena. That would be a ton of man hours and probably not even draw that many participants. The wildcard cost would be prohibitive for most. Another issue is that modern has too many linear decks that require precision answers. As most games are bo1 on arena, a format that requires a sideboard is just not going to be popular enough to justify the programming cost.
Arena modern, on the other hand, is inevitable. I believe it will be kaladesh forward for the reasons stated above. There's no cost to implement. It gives people a decent amount of cards to buy without being completely prohibitive for f2ps. This format may splinter the player base a bit, but will be necessary for people's card to retain value.
One scenario I can foresee bringing about the mtgo death spiral is if true pod drafting becomes available on arena. If grinders can get the same competitive experience in arena for less money, they'll leave mtgo in droves. This means it'll be harder to for an event on mtgo and there'll be way less standard cards entering the pool. I don't think this feature is a definite, but I'd pin the likelihood at 70%.
The reason I don't think this feature is a done deal is because I think that quietly, even enfranchised players, actually prefer the convenience of bot drafting. Wizards has access to the'silent majority' numbers and will not risk fracturing the arena population too much. It would be especially bad if the live drafting fired very infrequently. The feature may be doomed from the start, regardless of a vocal group demanding it.
Mtgo will quietly continue until it dies in its own. I believe this will happen naturally in the next five years. The question remains, what then?
Merging accounts with arena doesn't make any sense to me. I don't see any reason why wizards would have any appetite to put in older cards as stated above. Too much pain, not enough gain. If there is a merge, the only thing I can see possibly happening is that the cards in arena will be added and the older cards will contribute to vault progress or gems. I don't see this as likely either. They'd be creating too many infinite accounts as people would scoop up as many penny cards on mtgo as they could.
As I also don't believe wizards can withstand the negative response of an uncompensated closure of mtgo, they'll have to think of something more creative. Here's a crazy idea I came up with.
Wizards allows a one time redemption of mtgo cards. They'll have to charge something (maybe .25 offer regular card, .50 for foil, with the shipping cost of a set redemption). This will allow them to make money on the closure while also sating the mtgo population to a high degree.
It will be sad for many to have nowhere supported online to play older formats, but they will have a compensation that will make up for it. I'd imagine many would find this arrangement a net positive.
There's one tricky glitch with this plan. The reserved list. They could just not include reserve list cards as eligible for redemption. They could put a caveat that reserved list cards come with a gold border. They could get around the policy by saying that these cards wouldn't be printed in a product that can be bought normally, then firmly state that the reserve list will never again see reprints under any circumstance.
This is super deep speculation now, but I could see the argument for a one time injection of reserve list cards in some form as the online means to play old formats goes away. I also believe wizards is not keen on supporting these formats officially, so they could offer this fig leaf to these communities while not increasing tournament support. It's pie in the sky, but maybe doable. I don't even think it would as that many copies of reserve list cards to the wild.
More speculation. I think after arena modern his the scene, modern will see the support legacy now sees (one gp in each region per year) and the new format will get the amount modern now sees. This will be doubly so if mtgo is shuttered.
Sorry for the way of text. I find this subject interesting.
TLDR:
There will not be any enteral formats on arena except standard plus.
Mtgo will die a natural death as the player population dwindles.
There'll be some compensation on closure.
Spec: it will improve some kind of physical redemption.
They could put a caveat that reserved list cards come with a gold border.
They've already stated that gold-bordered cards violate the reserve list. Not the actual, written terms of it (which don't actually matter in any real way), but the vague "spirit" of it that also prevents things like printing more Reverberate-like cards in the future.
If they went the physical compensation route they'd almost certainly just send people a bunch of Standard crap or some Arena codes or something and it wouldn't be anywhere near good enough for all but the most casual of MTGO players. While certain people on this forum might be content to sit back and collect free Standard product without doing anything, I'd be pretty pissed since I never cared about that sort of thing.
Assumption 3: mtgo has a closure that is already more or less planned.
Prediction: wizards will have to do something to compensate people for mtgo. They're risk too much consumer confidence otherwise. How they decide to go about this is interesting conjecture.
Likelihood: I doubt wizards is going to purposefully close mtgo. There's too much risk without enough upside.
I don't think they are obligated to compensate if they shut down MTGO. I don't play MTGO so I'm unaware of its redemption policy, but I think they would try to convince you to migrate to Arena if/when an end date was given with some codes. Digital products are a weird thing since you pay-to-play, like if you were to play the physical game, but you retain nothing if the game just ends. Think of all the smartphone games people play. If the developer stops updating and no longer works on your phone, you lose out on any purchases you made. You are not made whole when digital products go under, that is the crux of digital versus physical games IMO. All the paper decks or board games will still be playable on my kitchen table in 25 years.
The big problem with fusing MTGO and Arena is that there is a lot of money tied up in the MTGO economy. The larger bot chains are essentially fully fledged businesses, with thousands of dollars' worth of tickets and product moving relatively briskly around the economy each day, and Wizards doesn't want to rock the boat too hard when it comes to the online economy because tanking it would destroy faith in digital Magic. Even something simple like set redemption changes can cause bad things to happen to the online economy, and merging two games together like that would likely wind up doing more harm than good.
What I'd personally like to see them do is have Arena as a game mode for MTGO rather than being its own thing. Can either get the full Magic experience online through regular MTGO play, or you can play the Arena mode for funsies without there being prizes involved.
I acknowledge that any more like this would be a breaking of the reserve list. I don't think it's likely, just spitballing.
Assumption 3: mtgo has a closure that is already more or less planned.
Prediction: wizards will have to do something to compensate people for mtgo. They're risk too much consumer confidence otherwise. How they decide to go about this is interesting conjecture.
Likelihood: I doubt wizards is going to purposefully close mtgo. There's too much risk without enough upside.
I don't think they are obligated to compensate if they shut down MTGO. I don't play MTGO so I'm unaware of its redemption policy, but I think they would try to convince you to migrate to Arena if/when an end date was given with some codes. Digital products are a weird thing since you pay-to-play, like if you were to play the physical game, but you retain nothing if the game just ends. Think of all the smartphone games people play. If the developer stops updating and no longer works on your phone, you lose out on any purchases you made. You are not made whole when digital products go under, that is the crux of digital versus physical games IMO. All the paper decks or board games will still be playable on my kitchen table in 25 years.
They are definitely not obliged to compensate. The reason I think they will is because they now have a popular digital platform and if they abandon another one so haphazardly, they will cause distrust among their new user base. The card redemption idea is a way to make people 'happy' they invested in a previous product, is good PR, and would likely be revenue positive or at least neutral.
I acknowledge that any more like this would be a breaking of the reserve list. I don't think it's likely, just spitballing.
Unlike with the reserve list, there isn't a significant legal barrier to them shutting down MTGO, so you should consider that their likely course of action would just be to try and promote their other business interests no matter how tone-deaf "we're shutting down one program but go play this other program we totally won't shut down" would be (corporations don't think their stances through in the rare cases they actually stand for anything at all, and ultimately only care about profit, so you get things like that). Probably with an EA-like "pride and accomplishment" announcement if they ever do it.
I acknowledge that any more like this would be a breaking of the reserve list. I don't think it's likely, just spitballing.
Unlike with the reserve list, there isn't a significant legal barrier to them shutting down MTGO, so you should consider that their likely course of action would just be to try and promote their other business interests no matter how tone-deaf "we're shutting down one program but go play this other program we totally won't shut down" would be (corporations don't think their stances through in the rare cases they actually stand for anything at all, and ultimately only care about profit, so you get things like that). Probably with an EA-like "pride and accomplishment" announcement if they ever do it.
It's cynical, but cynical hardly means wrong. I intuit that screwing over long-time, faithful customers, but totally promising not to do it in the future would be a bad move. I would call it short term thinking, at best. Then again, so long as we keep pumping money into the machine, we're destined to be treated this way.
Corporations think almost exclusively in the short term. I don't mean this like R&D is only designing sets a few months in advance or something, but the actual corporate decision-makers don't really give a crap about anything except the immediate. Essentially corporations feel like they're obliged to say "yeah but next year is next year and we can get our quarterly bonuses now so let's cash in whatever we can to make that happen." Not a happy thing, but it's why corporations do the things they do.
Corporations have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to maximize shareholder value. Absolutely everything else, even making good products, is only ever a means to this end.
Corporations think almost exclusively in the short term. I don't mean this like R&D is only designing sets a few months in advance or something, but the actual corporate decision-makers don't really give a crap about anything except the immediate. Essentially corporations feel like they're obliged to say "yeah but next year is next year and we can get our quarterly bonuses now so let's cash in whatever we can to make that happen." Not a happy thing, but it's why corporations do the things they do.
Corporations have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to maximize shareholder value. Absolutely everything else, even making good products, is only ever a means to this end.
This is a very accurate post. If you stay at a company long enough, you will see this. I find that if you listen to the investor earning calls, you get a little more insight on your company.
I'm sure HASBRO said to WotC that they need to grow their digital product to compete with Hearthstone and if they had full confidence in MTGO they would have dumped more money into it. I bet there were lots of discussions on the problems with MTGO to make the decision to build a new program. I just hope they actually do open it up to Mac users as well.
I'm sure HASBRO said to WotC that they need to grow their digital product to compete with Hearthstone and if they had full confidence in MTGO they would have dumped more money into it. I bet there were lots of discussions on the problems with MTGO to make the decision to build a new program. I just hope they actually do open it up to Mac users as well.
One of the most well-known problems with MTGO is they simply refuse to pay for good talent. Modern corporations view labour as a cost to be minimized by any means possible, rather than seeing skilled employees as being beneficial (there's also a very bad "good old boys" problem with Wizards keeping bad talent around but again they're hardly the only offenders). Arena benefits there because it doesn't have to support situations like "what if someone tries Panglacial Wurm shenanigans with alternate costs?" because from a programming perspective that can get rather messy. But as new sets get released, the bloat will happen.
Essentially, as long as corporations feel they can afford to take no risks and feel they can take talent for granted, Wizards (and by extension Hasbro) is going to follow suit. Basically what I'm saying here is Arena is currently the safe new corporate darling for Wizards but as it ages, it'll become a liability until they feel about it how they feel about MTGO.
Fun fact: This also extends to fan sites, since the kinds of people who "understand" Hearthstone et al. but not MTGO will try to push more Arena content, not because Arena is good or anything, but because it fits a known business model. Thankfully MTGS hasn't fallen into the trap of trying to push Arena articles, streams, and other content because of that, but I've seen some facepalm-inducing stuff off this site.
Corporations think almost exclusively in the short term. I don't mean this like R&D is only designing sets a few months in advance or something, but the actual corporate decision-makers don't really give a crap about anything except the immediate. Essentially corporations feel like they're obliged to say "yeah but next year is next year and we can get our quarterly bonuses now so let's cash in whatever we can to make that happen." Not a happy thing, but it's why corporations do the things they do.
Corporations have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to maximize shareholder value. Absolutely everything else, even making good products, is only ever a means to this end.
Actually, that's how poorly run corporations do business. Putting quarterly earnings over the long term trust and confidence in your product, and the quality of the product, is a sure path to going out of business.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
The Meaning of Life: "M-hmm. Well, it's nothing very special. Uh, try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations"
Onering's 4 simple steps that let you solve any problem with Magic's gameplay
Whether its blue players countering your spells, red players burning you out, or combo, if you have a problem with an aspect of Magic's gameplay, you can fix it!
Step 1: Identify the problem. What aspect of Magic don't you like? Step 2: Find out how others deal with the problem. How do players deal with this aspect of the game when they run into it? Step 3: Do what those players do. Step 4: No more problem. Bonus: You are now better at Magic. Enjoy those extra wins!
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Assumption 1: if mtgo is profitable enough to sustain itself, there's no reason to discontinue it.
Prediction: mtgo will continue alongside arena and continue as the online platform for eternal formats.
Likelihood: there's a very real chance that arena takes too much of standard and limited share that mtgo goes into a death spiral where so few new cards enter the market that even the old formats become untenable.
Assumption 2: arena will create a new eternal format, but won't encroach on older formats.
Prediction: mtgo will likely relieve support for the foreseeable future.
Prediction: even without trying to directly compete with mtgo's older formats, mtgo may still due to above scenario.
Likelihood: I firmly believe wizards will not encroach on mtgo formats with arena as I just don't think it will be profitable enough to do so and well fragment the player base too much on their flagship product.
Assumption 3: mtgo has a closure that is already more or less planned.
Prediction: wizards will have to do something to compensate people for mtgo. They're risk too much consumer confidence otherwise. How they decide to go about this is interesting conjecture.
Likelihood: I doubt wizards is going to purposefully close mtgo. There's too much risk without enough upside.
My thoughts:
I don't think there's any desire at all to bring even modern to arena. That would be a ton of man hours and probably not even draw that many participants. The wildcard cost would be prohibitive for most. Another issue is that modern has too many linear decks that require precision answers. As most games are bo1 on arena, a format that requires a sideboard is just not going to be popular enough to justify the programming cost.
Arena modern, on the other hand, is inevitable. I believe it will be kaladesh forward for the reasons stated above. There's no cost to implement. It gives people a decent amount of cards to buy without being completely prohibitive for f2ps. This format may splinter the player base a bit, but will be necessary for people's card to retain value.
One scenario I can foresee bringing about the mtgo death spiral is if true pod drafting becomes available on arena. If grinders can get the same competitive experience in arena for less money, they'll leave mtgo in droves. This means it'll be harder to for an event on mtgo and there'll be way less standard cards entering the pool. I don't think this feature is a definite, but I'd pin the likelihood at 70%.
The reason I don't think this feature is a done deal is because I think that quietly, even enfranchised players, actually prefer the convenience of bot drafting. Wizards has access to the'silent majority' numbers and will not risk fracturing the arena population too much. It would be especially bad if the live drafting fired very infrequently. The feature may be doomed from the start, regardless of a vocal group demanding it.
Mtgo will quietly continue until it dies in its own. I believe this will happen naturally in the next five years. The question remains, what then?
Merging accounts with arena doesn't make any sense to me. I don't see any reason why wizards would have any appetite to put in older cards as stated above. Too much pain, not enough gain. If there is a merge, the only thing I can see possibly happening is that the cards in arena will be added and the older cards will contribute to vault progress or gems. I don't see this as likely either. They'd be creating too many infinite accounts as people would scoop up as many penny cards on mtgo as they could.
As I also don't believe wizards can withstand the negative response of an uncompensated closure of mtgo, they'll have to think of something more creative. Here's a crazy idea I came up with.
Wizards allows a one time redemption of mtgo cards. They'll have to charge something (maybe .25 offer regular card, .50 for foil, with the shipping cost of a set redemption). This will allow them to make money on the closure while also sating the mtgo population to a high degree.
It will be sad for many to have nowhere supported online to play older formats, but they will have a compensation that will make up for it. I'd imagine many would find this arrangement a net positive.
There's one tricky glitch with this plan. The reserved list. They could just not include reserve list cards as eligible for redemption. They could put a caveat that reserved list cards come with a gold border. They could get around the policy by saying that these cards wouldn't be printed in a product that can be bought normally, then firmly state that the reserve list will never again see reprints under any circumstance.
This is super deep speculation now, but I could see the argument for a one time injection of reserve list cards in some form as the online means to play old formats goes away. I also believe wizards is not keen on supporting these formats officially, so they could offer this fig leaf to these communities while not increasing tournament support. It's pie in the sky, but maybe doable. I don't even think it would as that many copies of reserve list cards to the wild.
More speculation. I think after arena modern his the scene, modern will see the support legacy now sees (one gp in each region per year) and the new format will get the amount modern now sees. This will be doubly so if mtgo is shuttered.
Sorry for the way of text. I find this subject interesting.
TLDR:
There will not be any enteral formats on arena except standard plus.
Mtgo will die a natural death as the player population dwindles.
There'll be some compensation on closure.
Spec: it will improve some kind of physical redemption.
They've already stated that gold-bordered cards violate the reserve list. Not the actual, written terms of it (which don't actually matter in any real way), but the vague "spirit" of it that also prevents things like printing more Reverberate-like cards in the future.
If they went the physical compensation route they'd almost certainly just send people a bunch of Standard crap or some Arena codes or something and it wouldn't be anywhere near good enough for all but the most casual of MTGO players. While certain people on this forum might be content to sit back and collect free Standard product without doing anything, I'd be pretty pissed since I never cared about that sort of thing.
I don't think they are obligated to compensate if they shut down MTGO. I don't play MTGO so I'm unaware of its redemption policy, but I think they would try to convince you to migrate to Arena if/when an end date was given with some codes. Digital products are a weird thing since you pay-to-play, like if you were to play the physical game, but you retain nothing if the game just ends. Think of all the smartphone games people play. If the developer stops updating and no longer works on your phone, you lose out on any purchases you made. You are not made whole when digital products go under, that is the crux of digital versus physical games IMO. All the paper decks or board games will still be playable on my kitchen table in 25 years.
I acknowledge that any more like this would be a breaking of the reserve list. I don't think it's likely, just spitballing.
They are definitely not obliged to compensate. The reason I think they will is because they now have a popular digital platform and if they abandon another one so haphazardly, they will cause distrust among their new user base. The card redemption idea is a way to make people 'happy' they invested in a previous product, is good PR, and would likely be revenue positive or at least neutral.
Unlike with the reserve list, there isn't a significant legal barrier to them shutting down MTGO, so you should consider that their likely course of action would just be to try and promote their other business interests no matter how tone-deaf "we're shutting down one program but go play this other program we totally won't shut down" would be (corporations don't think their stances through in the rare cases they actually stand for anything at all, and ultimately only care about profit, so you get things like that). Probably with an EA-like "pride and accomplishment" announcement if they ever do it.
It's cynical, but cynical hardly means wrong. I intuit that screwing over long-time, faithful customers, but totally promising not to do it in the future would be a bad move. I would call it short term thinking, at best. Then again, so long as we keep pumping money into the machine, we're destined to be treated this way.
Corporations think almost exclusively in the short term. I don't mean this like R&D is only designing sets a few months in advance or something, but the actual corporate decision-makers don't really give a crap about anything except the immediate. Essentially corporations feel like they're obliged to say "yeah but next year is next year and we can get our quarterly bonuses now so let's cash in whatever we can to make that happen." Not a happy thing, but it's why corporations do the things they do.
Corporations have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to maximize shareholder value. Absolutely everything else, even making good products, is only ever a means to this end.
This is a very accurate post. If you stay at a company long enough, you will see this. I find that if you listen to the investor earning calls, you get a little more insight on your company.
I'm sure HASBRO said to WotC that they need to grow their digital product to compete with Hearthstone and if they had full confidence in MTGO they would have dumped more money into it. I bet there were lots of discussions on the problems with MTGO to make the decision to build a new program. I just hope they actually do open it up to Mac users as well.
One of the most well-known problems with MTGO is they simply refuse to pay for good talent. Modern corporations view labour as a cost to be minimized by any means possible, rather than seeing skilled employees as being beneficial (there's also a very bad "good old boys" problem with Wizards keeping bad talent around but again they're hardly the only offenders). Arena benefits there because it doesn't have to support situations like "what if someone tries Panglacial Wurm shenanigans with alternate costs?" because from a programming perspective that can get rather messy. But as new sets get released, the bloat will happen.
Essentially, as long as corporations feel they can afford to take no risks and feel they can take talent for granted, Wizards (and by extension Hasbro) is going to follow suit. Basically what I'm saying here is Arena is currently the safe new corporate darling for Wizards but as it ages, it'll become a liability until they feel about it how they feel about MTGO.
Fun fact: This also extends to fan sites, since the kinds of people who "understand" Hearthstone et al. but not MTGO will try to push more Arena content, not because Arena is good or anything, but because it fits a known business model. Thankfully MTGS hasn't fallen into the trap of trying to push Arena articles, streams, and other content because of that, but I've seen some facepalm-inducing stuff off this site.
Actually, that's how poorly run corporations do business. Putting quarterly earnings over the long term trust and confidence in your product, and the quality of the product, is a sure path to going out of business.
Onering's 4 simple steps that let you solve any problem with Magic's gameplay
Step 1: Identify the problem. What aspect of Magic don't you like? Step 2: Find out how others deal with the problem. How do players deal with this aspect of the game when they run into it? Step 3: Do what those players do. Step 4: No more problem. Bonus: You are now better at Magic. Enjoy those extra wins!