SURVEY RESULTS: Blizzards satisfaction levels took a hit after BlizzCon

According to writer Sara E. Needleman for The Wall Street Journal, Blizzard fell nearly 7% after BlizzCon. Due to the drama, we decided to survey more than 5,000 people to see how satisfied the players were with Blizzard as a game developer and their games. It turns out that Blizzard took a serious hit in satisfaction, but they’ll be okay because their players still recommend their games.

This study is conducted by manastats.com, a nonprofit organization with a goal to make game data freely available for everyone. The main goal is to inspire university students to write about gaming and enlighten players and developers. It would help us a lot if you signed up for our survey list. Because the hardest part about making these surveys is finding gamers to answer our questions, you can sign up right here (opens in a new window).

So, admittedly it was a general study to measure how satisfied people were with all games, not only Blizzard games, but it was conducted right after BlizzCon because that was the best time to measure Blizzard since all their games made news, and people either liked it or not. Each player could only rate the Blizzard game they played the most. So, let’s start:

The blue lines represent the survey results in 2018, the yellow represents survey results in 2017, and the green represents the average of all the games we measured this year. In 2017, we had valid data for only WoW and Overwatch.

Blizzard took a big hit from last year. It is worth noting as I wrote earlier that this survey was conducted after BlizzCon, and many players were disappointed. This means this only shows the state of Blizzard as of right now in November 2018, and it will look different next year.

Overwatch was the only Blizzard game performing better than average, and even though many people miss new content for Diablo 3, it is surprisingly performing better than HS and WoW. We are currently around three months after the latest WoW expansion, which seems to have missed the target a bit.

The next question was: “How satisfied are you with Blizzard as a game developer?” We were interested to see if the results varied after which Blizzard game the respondent played. So, this graph shows what, for example, a Diablo 3 player thinks about Blizzard as a developer.

If you want to know how a broken heart feels, look at Diablo 3 in the graph. Satisfaction levels are low compared with all other Blizzard games. We see again that Blizzard had a loss in satisfaction for all their games.

It is worth noting that we have two average levels in this graph. The “Blizzard average 2018” is the average of all four Blizzard games this year. Notice that it is not weighted. Every game contributed 25%. The “game average” is for ALL games in our survey.

Again, we see Overwatch in the top spot, which was the same in 2017 for both the game itself and what players thought about Blizzard as a game developer.

By running a regression analysis, we found a significant correlation between how satisfied they are with Blizzard and how satisfied they are with their games. The coefficient of determination (R squared) was high, which proved our hypothesis that if people are unhappy with Blizzard as a developer, they tend to be unhappy with the game as well and vice versa.

But gamers LOVE Blizzard games anyway.

Even though Blizzard took a hit. We also asked people if they wanted to recommend the game, and here are the answers. Overwatch topped again with 94,8% saying they would recommend the game. The biggest surprise was Diablo 3, where 87,4% wanted to recommend the game to others even though it was at the bottom of satisfaction levels. WoW and HS were around 70%–75%

From our previous study, we found that the more you enjoy a game, the more you will buy in the game (if that is an option), but the study also found that even though you disagree with the developer, you will still use the money.

So, for future studies, it could be cool to investigate that. If our satisfaction and enjoyment levels don’t matter to companies, because we still use money in the game.

Some general data about the respondents:

An interesting finding is that older people tend to be less satisfied with Blizzard, but the player base of WoW and D3 also has more older people than does Overwatch. So, it is hard to say if older people give bad ratings or if they just play games with the lowest ratings.

Another insignificant finding was that Reddit respondents was less satisfied than people from everywhere else. This needs more investigation.

More in-depth analysis with methodology will be given on manastats.com in the future, but we thought it was more important to give our findings now. This project is created through our work on manastats.com. We can only keep doing what we do because we are sponsored by two Danish companies (compware.dk and sharkgaming.dk). Again, if you think our work is cool and want to help us out by answering gaming surveys (a maximum of four a year), please join here.

We will have more posts like this one, so if you have any feedback, please tell us. Do you want more data? Less data? More graphs?