Comments on: Insider: Analyzing Hasbro’s Third-Quarter Earnings

By: youngelderdragon

youngelderdragon — Thu, 30 Oct 2014 02:34:53 +0000

shoutouts to shor from qs
cmon i thought brainstorm brewery was about non-stop shout outs

By: Daniel Quirk

Daniel Quirk — Mon, 27 Oct 2014 00:11:29 +0000

In reply to Kris Thomas. Do you just have no understanding of what Hearthstone is? It's precisely a Magic competitor. Mechanically it is very similar to the Portal expansions from Magic's early years which were meant to be less complex and introduce new players. It is the exact same genre of game as Magic except instead of costing a ton of money to play it's free if you want, it comes with a great on ramping experience and a well produced digital offering you can play anywhere. How you get the idea that it's anything like Bejeweled is beyond me or that it isn't generating tons of revenue (and more importantly, profit). That there's no paper version is essentially irrelevant.

By: Derek

Derek — Sun, 26 Oct 2014 03:27:49 +0000

Good to see that the annual growth of the game continues, ties in really well with my article this week

By: Corbin

Corbin — Thu, 23 Oct 2014 21:22:30 +0000

In reply to Kris Thomas. I'm simply using it in the sense of "players I know who used to MTGO quit and moved to Hearthstone."

By: Frank

Frank — Thu, 23 Oct 2014 18:23:50 +0000

In reply to Kris Thomas. It is definitely competition, especially in the pc market against MTGO. It has a much better interface, easier to understand for new players and is similar enough to Magic that anyone who has the played Magic before has a very low learning curve. Lots of people in the MTG community have been buzzing about Hearthstone and how its MTGO's direct competitor. Just because its free doesn't mean it can't hurt the competition. Hell the fact that it is free hurts significantly as its a free option.

By: Michael Demko

Michael Demko — Thu, 23 Oct 2014 16:53:48 +0000

Hearthstone’s ‘free-to-play’ model is very similar to MTGO’s. Yes, they give the core cards away for free, but there are Arenas to be played in, and packs to purchase and open. Granted, they don’t charge nearly as much as MTGO, but the paid collections do exist in Hearthstone. There is definitely a case for comparison between the two.

By: Phil Ulrich

Phil Ulrich — Thu, 23 Oct 2014 16:47:05 +0000

In reply to Kris Thomas.

That’s like saying world of Warcraft wasn’t affected by and has no correlation to any of the numerous free to play mmorpg’s…just because you can’t turn your hearthstone cards into paper, does that mean there aren’t people who have stopped playing mtgo and switched to hearthstone? I seem to remember lots of magic online players talking about and even writing articles about hearthstone…I suppose I don’t understand your confusion, could you explain further?

By: David Schumann

David Schumann — Thu, 23 Oct 2014 16:19:11 +0000

FYI…..and special thanks to QS’s Shor

http://seekingalpha.com/article/2576075-hasbros-has-ceo-brian-goldner-on-q3-2014-results-earnings-call-transcript?page=1

There’s your full transcript

By: Nigel Tea

Nigel Tea — Thu, 23 Oct 2014 16:04:35 +0000

FWIW Hearthstone is what got me back into magic. It is actually a ton of fun and it’s not exactly the same model as freemium games. Once you get into it, the amount of time you have to spend grinding the cards vs just spending some money to buy some packs make it worthwhile if you have any reasonable amount of income. Unless you are doing the f2p for the challenge I expect most people to spend at least 30 bucks. Hearthstone is raking in money hand over fist to the tune of half a billion+ so far. MTGO is much different and obviously a lot more complex. HS lack of depth left me wanting more which is the reason I got back into magic. I don’t want to rehash the whole HS vs MTGO argument but I think there is a real possibility HS actually benefits magic in general (maybe not MTGO?) there are a lot of people like myself that kind of left magic behind over a decade ago and had their love of card games rekindled by HS.

Also FYI earnings transcript can be found here:
http://seekingalpha.com/article/2576075-hasbros-has-ceo-brian-goldner-on-q3-2014-results-earnings-call-transcript

and audio here:
http://seekingalpha.com/article/2566005-hasbro-has-q3-2014-results-earnings-call-webcast

By: Kris Thomas

Kris Thomas — Thu, 23 Oct 2014 15:26:51 +0000

I don’t understand the comparison to Hearthstone. How is this product competition? Hearthstone is a free game that occupies your time much like Bejeweled or Farm Heroes. It is not a revenue-generating game that has a direct link to a paper version.

Am I in the Twilight Zone?