We were wrong to ship the platform too early, before we could properly guarantee that we won’t screw up game experiences. Things like stability, performance optimization and quality of life issues are not “nice to have” that can be fixed later - they’re a must. It makes a lot of sense, as the users know much better than you what they really need, what’s broken and needs fixing and what is actually just fine.īut Overwolf is an open platform, not a mobile app or a website. There is an ever-present “move fast and break things” mentality, and the rule of thumb says “first ship, then fix based on feedback”. The startup life is filled with “hustle” and “fake it till you make it”. We should have done better (and there’s no real way to sugarcoat it) To make things worse, we at Overwolf did a poor job at communicating the differences between the platform (Overwolf), the apps on it (HearthArena), and what we as a platform can and cannot fix. Some apps had poor quality and UX, with some even causing performance penalties like FPS drops or ping spikes. Building in-game apps was something they had no previous experience in, and there weren’t any “best practices” to follow. Everything was new and early, app developers were basically figuring out stuff as they moved.

The platform was still buggy and sluggish, with many platform-y features sorely missing. Yet back in 2016 Overwolf was still forming as a platform for 3rd party app developers.

And indeed, HearthArena saw major adoption from the community, logging over 3,500,000 installs to date. It was an innovative companion app, and was considered a must-have app by many Hearthstone players. In early 2016 the HearthArena app was launched on Overwolf.

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