Starbow - Page 283

On April 04 2014 02:51 MasterOfPuppets wrote:


I think you make some valid points, but some of the things you say are also a bit naive when it comes to why games get big. I think it's worth addressing that, although bear in mind I won't make any suggestions or statements in general as to what StarBow should/could do in order to become big, whether or not it can even become big in the first place etc. That is not the purpose of my post and I don't know your intentions as a playerbase / the intentions of the devs.

You say SC2 didn't become big by itself. True. In fact, quite the opposite is the case. SC2 was not small, and became big, it was birthed big, grew for a short while, then gradually began to decline for various reasons (which I'll discuss just a tad bit later). So why was it big from the very outset? I can think of at least three reasons.

1. Blizzard's reputation back then was much more pristine, only tarnished perhaps in the eyes of the most hardcore of WoW players (who were feeling that new expansions weren't quite up to par). But for the rest of us, for many RTS fans and most likely Diablo players as well, Blizzard was a company that had made nothing but fantastic games. That is why people had been looking forward to SC2 ever since its announcement way, way back.

2. Demand for RTS. Despite the fact that Brood War and Warcraft 3 were pretty bloody huge as "esports", RTS as a genre has been on the decline for a very long time now when compared with the entirety of the PC gaming market. This has to do with more people getting into gaming, and games becoming more casual in attempts to appeal to a lower and lower common denominator. When SC2 came out, there were lots of people who were just aching to see what this new RTS game would entail, and also people who had never played an RTS before but were captivated by the notion and the hype.

RTS games tend to be a lot more complex than most gamers nowadays tend to bother with, and that's not even counting the notions that competitive player are familiar with, like micro tricks beyond just "select spellcaster; use spell" , good macro, good timing (or indeed the idea of timing in and of itself) etc. Sad as it sounds, that's the reality, most RTS games tend to involve far more decision making than most games (except for other Strategy genres), and to top it all off you have to make them on the fly, in real time. For us who are more old school or at least competitive in nature, that's fine, we can learn build orders and grind out games until we develop good gamesense, but most gamers these days would find it very difficult to know when to do anything, and what to do in a given situation. The reason BW and WC3 lasted for as long as they did as played - not just watched - games has a lot to do with custom maps. You could play with friends, and you could enjoy something that is not only fresh and interesting compared to the base game (or perhaps, more laid-back and casual fun if we're talking about stuff like BGH) but also much more limited in scope.

3. Marketing. Blizzard spent an enormous amount of money and effort hyping SC2 up and keeping it going, most of all targeting the aforementioned demographic, people who had not played BW/WC3 or abandoned them long before, people who weren't super hardcore RTS players. In other words, most of the market. And us, the BW diehards, did most of the pre-beta release work for them, since most of us were extremely hyped for it (I know I was ^^), and through the power of the internet we did a lot (knowingly or not) to promote it. SC2 was a resounding success in terms of sales I'd say, but it's worth noting that most people only bought it for the singleplayer campaign. This has to do with point #2, if you've not guessed. And as we should well know by now, despite this huge initial success and a staggering growth in the "esports" / viewership area, the multiplayer playerbase has been on the decline for most of the game's lifespan. Whether it has to do with people getting bored, perceived balance issues, perceived game design issues or the absolutely garbage custom games system, many people stopped caring.

In terms of DotA, no, it most certainly did not become big overnight. In fact, that's the thing that most people overlook when they talk about DotA 2. The original DotA has for the longest time had a huge playerbase between China and Eastern Europe. Quite literally hundreds of thousands, if not millions of players. Why is that exactly? Well, it was a fun custom map that you could play if you owned WarCraft 3, which is already a huge bonus since WarCraft 3 was quite big. Compared to WarCraft 3, it was easier to get into, easier to understand, and more fun to play casually (again, fewer decisions to make and more intuitive decisions overall). On top of that, WarCraft 3 ran well and was extremely easy to *ahem* obtain for free and get going, much like other big games of that age (Counter-Strike, Brood War ). So all DotA 2 really did was make it a standalone game on a new, shiny engine, polish it up a bit for newer potential players and announce it to people who weren't aware of its existence, without fucking with the actual game too much. It certainly also helps that VALVe are a huge name, perhaps more reputable and trust-worthy than Blizzard as of late, and Steam has gotten very big indeed.

Hype can only bring you attention. Attention helps, there is no doubt about that whatsoever. But how you convert attention into a stable playerbase is a different thing entirely. Many of us think the reason SC2 failed to maintain so many of its initial players is because of SC2 as a particular game. Starbow is an attempt to remedy that by making the game more challenging and interesting at the same time. It's a very valiant attempt indeed, but at the end of the day it comes from the perspective of the hardcore, the competitive... the minority, sadly. Again, I have no intention of discussing how well Starbow is doing/can do/will do, or what you should do for X to happen. But it seems to me that what we're experiencing with SC2 and Starbow is not so much a symptom of the games themselves, but of the RTS genre as a whole in relation to the current gaming market, or the unified gaming community if we were to assume such a thing exists.

I think you understand what I'm trying to get at here. It's the market, it's what gaming is, what gaming has become, not so much how good this game or that is. Hell, if you want to look at the broader picture, you can even say it's what entertainment in general has become, between music, film, "reality TV" and even websites and the Internet (look at how popular Reddit and Reddit culture are, etc.)

So, to conclude my rambling I personally don't think it's feasible to push a complex, competitive-oriented game anymore, unless you have a staggering amount of support behind you, both monetary and fan-wise, and even if you do succeed, there's a good likelihood of it petering out fairly fast. But again, I don't intend to make any predictions about Starbow or indeed pretend that that is what you want to have happen. But I felt like, since you've opened this discussion, a bit more perspective was needed. Hopefully you don't feel like reading this was a waste of your time. ^^

I'll just end with saying that I respect Starbow as a project and I hope you are happy with it as well. Whether being happy means simply having a good game to play, or managing to capture a wider audience, I wish you best of luck and best of success, and if there's any more high profile tournaments with Korean pros in them I'll definitely tune in for that. ^^

On April 07 2014 07:04 The_Red_Viper wrote:

I don't agree with your first sentence at all, but that isn't really the point here.
It doesn't matter if game is complex or anything, the whole point is that a game needs to be accessible.
You can be the worst lol player of all time and still get some kills/assists and feel that you had some sort of success.
The same isn't true for the rts games we speak of, either you win or you lose, nobody thinks "yeah i killed 10 marines there".
You just can't start playing a rts game and don't know the hotkeys for example, this issue is nonexistant in mobas.

I am not sure why you would think that, lol and dota aren't complicated on the basic lvl where 90% of all people play, i mean we talk about the average gamer here no?

On April 07 2014 09:01 WolfintheSheep wrote:
Complexity is never a reason for success.

It's either fun or it's not. And if it's fun it has players. And if it has enough players, then it's successful.

Complexity is just a single factor, and a rather arbitrary one at that.

On April 08 2014 13:18 GGzerG wrote:


What ? Have you ever tried to play BroodWar at a relatively high level at all?

On April 08 2014 13:18 GGzerG wrote:


What ? Have you ever tried to play BroodWar at a relatively high level at all?