4Game

First, I don't think their problem is monetization, if you have high player count numbers, you can always introduce more ways to make money, the problem is that the players are not tuning in as much as they did before.

To illustrate that, here is the Steam numbers but they should be more or less reflective of trends while undoubtedly there are multiples more people on other platforms and GOG – https://steamcharts.com/app/1284410. What this tells us is that there is general interest in Gwent as it had high numbers after launch but they have been steadily decreasing.

In business, if your revenues or other important metrics start to worsen, it means one of several things – you're not price-competitive, the quality of what you're selling has decreased or you're using worse materials, or your competitors have produced better products that are more reflective of market needs. I don't think that the price of Gwent has worsened and they still produce high-quality assets, art, etc. with regular updates. Their competitors are not doing amazing things either outside of Hearthstone Battlegrounds but they too have their own problems. So, in my view, the problem of Gwent is with the quality of the game overall but which is not linked to either assets or cadence.

So far, this in my opinion are the objective facts. Now onto analysis, what do you think causes players to not tune in as much as before? Keep in mind that this is a structural problem and is not related to any one patch or any one month. I think they have focused exclusively onto Ranked play to the detriment of both Seasonal and Draft and even Unranked (I remember when it was the default way to play) so this would explain why some people who like those modes leave when we very rarely get good and/or new Seasonals and Draft has been abandoned. However, this can't explain the continuing decline of players. This means that among the people who mostly/only play Ranked, fewer and fewer of those continue to play so the quality of their experience has worsened and I strongly suspect that they need a new ideology towards balance if they want to reverse the trend.

In my personal view, they need to expand their efforts as only focusing on Ranked means that they're self-limiting their audience to only this mode while leaving out other potential players who like Seasonal and Draft to not play their game. Also, seeing that people, backed up by data, are not happy with how the game is balanced over multiple months and years, how should they also approach this problem? Should the cards be simplified so we don't go the route of Yugioh, should the power level increase or decrease overall or should they focus efforts onto bringing as many archetypes onto the same power level which means that they mostly buff underperforming cards while not engineering future seasons as they seem to focus only on 3-4 decks per season as their favourites? What do you all think? Keep in mind that if they don't do anything, I fear CDPR will do a coup de grace like how Blizzard did with HOTS and one day we'll get a message that future support has ceased and they'll move devs onto the Witcher games so the problem has to be tackled as soon as possible.