Blizzard loses money on every Hearthstone player who switches from PC to mobile devices.
In 2015, Hearthstone’s mobile revenues turned out to be more than those that went to the authors from the PC version of the game. This became possible thanks to the mass migration of PC users to mobile.
Such a situation, according to Gamasutra, has become a problem for Blizzard. The fact is that if a player on a PC, for example, spent $50, then the company earned $48.75 on it ($1.25 was taken by payment services like PayPal). In the case of this player switching from PC to mobile, the company began to receive from him not $48, but $35 because of the 30% commission of the stores.
In other words, in the case of a hypothetical transition of all PC players to smartphones and tablets – with Hearthstone, the American company will potentially earn less than if it did not release the game on a mobile platform.
Here, of course, the question is moot, since it is not entirely clear how much increase in the player base Blizzard received when the game was released on the App Store and Google Play, but at the moment the graph presented below cannot but strain the game developers.
A source: gamasutra.com