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https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/blizzard/22833558/heroes-of-the-storm-news
Blizzard has announced that they are cancelling HGC and heroes of the dorm. So Heroes esports scene is basically dead.
Personally, i would be worried for SC2 esports. With all the negative news about how Blizzard management is changing to be more corporate and fixated on more profits than making good games, surely they must be looking at SC2 as well.
Over in the solar thread, we have people saying that there needs to be more support in developing the scene in korea. I would be glad if they will still sponsor GSL next season as i can't imagine that it makes any financial sense for them to invest even more money in it.
How about WCS? I would think that heroes would have been making more or at least similar money to SC2 with players buying skins and loot boxes and hgc still got cancelled.
SC2 was always the pet of Mike Morhime and now he's gone, and with what happened to hgc, i am seriously worried.
*Updated with tweets from Maynarde*
I wouldn't take that as confirmation until i see official plans for wcs 2019. And like some have mentioned before SC2 might have had its best year in a while but is it good enough for the higher ups?
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This is very troubling, from what I've seen Blizzard had a policy to maintain high level production for its esports no matter the size of it's scene. With that gone, we should be really glad that sc2 had a such good year in 2018 because I don't think wcs would continue if that change happened after 2016/2017. If we still get wcs in 2019 you could argue that Serral literally saved the game lol.
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Well, HotS was basically 100% funded by Blizzard, I mean they even had to pay salaries to players and teams... while WCS and GSL are heavily funded by Blizzard, all the other content (HSC, Kungfu and chinese cups, BSTV, Qlash, and a long etc) plus teams, proplayers, etc. are not. They are funded by sponsors and the community <3
They had to compete with Dota2 and LoL... SC2 has pretty much no competition in it's nitche. Also, SC2 viewership has grown like a solid 30%-40% in the past year...
Most important, SC2 in IEM 2019, as well as GSL qualifiers are confirmed.
What I mean is that SC2 and HotS situations are (were) very different from a business perspective aka investment-return (which is what matters the most for Activision-Blizzard right now)
Personally I do think WCS 2019 is gonna follow the same structure as in 2018, same stops, same prizes, etc. Ideally they would put a little bit of the HotS money into a "Code A" both in WCS and GSL circuits, even if it's online to save costs. But since this would be too good to be true , I'm happy with our current situation.
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Hopefully SC2 can dodge Activision(blizzard)'s recent cutting costs policy but tbh I wouldn't be at all surprised if their support for the scene will shrink for next year and after.
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Starcraft 2 is in a pretty unique position in the blizzard universe. When you see people on forums trash talking blizzard, they mention every game they have EXCEPT Starcraft. Most people don't think about the game very much, but Starcraft is a very well respected game, and people tend to separate it from the rest of Blizzard. In my opinion, SC2 is seen as a well respected franchise that takes an immense amount of skill but otherwise flies under the radar because it's pretty much the opposite of inducing outrage from a community. The game is what it is.
The reason I bring that up is because there have been no events that have bled our community in a long time. We're not bleeding users, we're not top post on reddit of people raging at this game. We had a very successful year and our game is on a great upswing right now. Blizzard may be going through a really hard time (Their stock has dropped from in the 80s in October down below 50 today), but you can't look at the trend of SC2 growing and getting more and more eyeballs and attention and love and think Blizzard would pull the plug on it.
Honestly, in a couple years if this trend persists, SC2 may be one of Blizzards flagship games again. I know there's a lot of reasons to be uncertain of the future, but I'm very optimistic that SC2 is going to be better than ever in the coming years. We had really damn good numbers for Starcraft this year, more people than ever are playing things like Co-Op, the Warchest is doing very well from what I've read, and 2019 is already confirmed to continue.
I was a really big player of Heroes for a long time, but the past 1.5 years or so I've played less and less - Before, I'd play 5-6 hours a day every day with my friends. Now, I play maybe 2 or 3 games with one friend before we get frustrated and stop playing. The game just isn't fun anymore and people stopped playing. queue times are insanely long. If you don't play hots, you may not understand. We were having insane queue times for complete stomps one way or the other - there just weren't enough players to give even games anymore. Starcraft 2 you can hit find match and get a game in under 1 minute and its a damn even game 99% of the time. This realistically had to happen to hots because it just didn't hit its mark :/
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Well if SC2 e-sport gets cancelled, we know that Blizzard is dead and has been replaced by Activison.
My reaction then would be to boycott every single Activision game for the rest of my life and convince everyone I know to do the same.
But until that happens, I will continue to enjoy SC2.
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Yet I am expecting improvements for WCS next year
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Well, SC and SC2 are only few good RTS games out there that people actually play and being heard of. So they survive for now. However, SC2 and HOTS share a lot in common so there are reasons to be worried. First of all, both esports scenes are carried by Blizzard. Blizzard basically sponsors the events and the prize pools. Some partners like IEM/DreamHack and AfreecaTV do host events but I assume the money are coming from Blizzard. Compared to CSGO, Valve sponsors 1 mil prize pool twice a year and the rest of like 20+ premier events are hosted by some other organizations and have nothing to with Valve. At some point, when Blizzard has some financial troubles, they will drop the financial support to certain games and SC2 will be next.
I mean let me be brutally honest here for a second. No companies will invest a lot of money in SC2 because it is the game of the past. There is a dedicated fanbase but practically no new players will jump in the game casually nor some new players want to join the scene competitively because the prize pool is too limited. How many times I heard people I met say things like "Oh you know how to play SC2. I played it like years ago but nowadays I play blah blah blah". Gaming industry quite often is all about the hot and trending new games. SC2 is just not one of them. I love SC2 but I play it because I like it and probably the only game I'm semi-decent at. If I want to play with a lot of people, I probably will play Fortnite or something because everyone seems to play it these days.
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It doesn't mean anything.
Let me put a couple of things out there. HGC was expensive, VERY expensive. Blizzard paid for: the salaries of every qualified team in every region, staffing and production costs for league play tournaments that played year round on weekends in 3 major regions, 2 BIG LAN tournaments per year, and prize pools for all of the above.
All for a game that had a mediocre size of a playerbase and a very dismal overall viewership considering that it was competing directly for views with DOTA2 and LoL.
Now compare that with SC2 that has partnership deals, Warchests which directly support the prize pools of various tournaments, no salaried players, and a much larger and more dedicated viewership base.
It's not comparable. HGC was fun for sure, but it was ultimately completely unsustainable if you paid even the slightest bit of attention. In a lot of ways I think Overwatch league has a lot in common with it in a bad way. Overwatch League is enormous, the amount of resources that gets poured into it is insane, and yet Overwatch as a game has already hit and come down from its peak. The massive esports scene isn't causing the game's popularity to GROW. That isn't sustainable without more third party sponsorship support from outside companies.
The worst case scenario for SC2 is that the number of tournaments shrinks, The tournaments in question are all single standalone events with Blizzcon being a culmination event that uses points.That wasn't how HoTS operated. HoTS operated a single yearwide League that all was all paid for in every part by Blizzard.
I'm not worried about whether or not SC2 will have a competitive scene next year. It will have one, the only question is "how large?"
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Oh I wouldn't worry too much about SC2.
I think the game is in a pretty good state right now, viewership has been much better than the past years and we have a lot of cool personalities playing the game. I hope SC2 will be bigger next year, but that's more a wish. But it wouldn't surprise me.
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Man, when the guys on The Pylons joked about welcoming back any casters who want to come back from heroes, I really didn't expect this news to be released on the next day.
SC2 will be fine for 2019 though, not sure what happens after wc3 reforged though. No game is safe in the new Activision Blizzard. But for now sc2 has little competition as the premiere 1v1 esport and no competition in RTS.
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Really sad news, I very much enjoyed HGC. Most TV is such trash, having this to watch was fun and good spirited. Feel bad for the players.
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On December 14 2018 19:15 MockHamill wrote:
Well if SC2 e-sport gets cancelled, we know that Blizzard is dead and has been replaced by Activison.
My reaction then would be to boycott every single Activision game for the rest of my life and convince everyone I know to do the same.
But until that happens, I will continue to enjoy SC2.
Why? if investing into esports doesn't gain them enough it's the logical business decision to stop investing into it. They are under no obligation to fund sc2 esports.
This may sound pretty harsh but if sc2 can't survive on its own without dev money then maybe it doesn't deserve to exist at its current size. Devs investing into esports is a new trend after all - back in the CS/BW days devs investing into esports was unheard of.
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Bisutopia19231 Posts
My biggest concern is where Dustin Browder goes. SC2->HOTS->New CEO?
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To me this means any Blizzard-Activision esport other than Overwatch or Call of Duty could be considered expendable. I hope I'm wrong, but I have my doubts the WCS will live beyond 2020.
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On December 15 2018 00:12 Charoisaur wrote:Show nested quote +On December 14 2018 19:15 MockHamill wrote:
Well if SC2 e-sport gets cancelled, we know that Blizzard is dead and has been replaced by Activison.
My reaction then would be to boycott every single Activision game for the rest of my life and convince everyone I know to do the same.
But until that happens, I will continue to enjoy SC2. Why? if investing into esports doesn't gain them enough it's the logical business decision to stop investing into it. They are under no obligation to fund sc2 esports. This may sound pretty harsh but if sc2 can't survive on its own without dev money then maybe it doesn't deserve to exist at its current size. Devs investing into esports is a new trend after all - back in the CS/BW days devs investing into esports was unheard of.
Your point may be legitimate but "logical business decisions" is probably not going to be high up on the concern of hardcore esports fans on the most hardcore sc2 esports site.
On point, I can't help but think that without sc2 esports the playerbase would cut tremendously. I may be wrong about that, but esports continues to inject new energy and life and hype, and pretty sure the playerbase would be at 10% one year after any decision to completely cut sc2 is made.
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Canada8989 Posts
SC2 should be good at least for next year.
It's fair to say that Heroes competitive scene was too big for it's own good. Sc2 is less bad in this extend, the cutback we got between 2013 and 2016 /17 turn out to be beneficial, if Blizz tried to keep the scene Dreamhack and IEM circuit running we may have been the one on the chopping block.
It will be interesting to see how the OW League does in the next few years. Lol, Dota and CSGO already have big infrastructure in Esport, but the way they are organize make it possible to make cutback if needed.
OW is in a very tricky situation where the franchise system make it that Blizz-Activision kind of has an obligation to put as much money as needed to make it a success. I feel like if OW league number are not up to what they wish it may hurt the whole Blizzard esport scene.
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On December 14 2018 23:44 Musicus wrote:
But for now sc2 has little competition as the premiere 1v1 esport and no competition in RTS.
BW is still there in RTS world! :-)
This sucks but, I don't think it will do anything but help SC2.
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Actually I think them deciding to cut HGC shoud mean it's more likely for them NOT to cut Sc2 as well!
Moreover, the viewership is on the rise and a good amount of big tournaments aren't directly funded by Blizzard, I guess we could feel safe(I hope I'm right).
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On December 15 2018 00:27 Pandain wrote:Show nested quote +On December 15 2018 00:12 Charoisaur wrote:On December 14 2018 19:15 MockHamill wrote:
Well if SC2 e-sport gets cancelled, we know that Blizzard is dead and has been replaced by Activison.
My reaction then would be to boycott every single Activision game for the rest of my life and convince everyone I know to do the same.
But until that happens, I will continue to enjoy SC2. Why? if investing into esports doesn't gain them enough it's the logical business decision to stop investing into it. They are under no obligation to fund sc2 esports. This may sound pretty harsh but if sc2 can't survive on its own without dev money then maybe it doesn't deserve to exist at its current size. Devs investing into esports is a new trend after all - back in the CS/BW days devs investing into esports was unheard of. Your point may be legitimate but "logical business decisions" is probably not going to be high up on the concern of hardcore esports fans on the most hardcore sc2 esports site.
Especially since ever since the Diablo Immortal announcement there's been this "FUCK BLIZZARD!" circlejerk on reddit and other parts of the internet that has reached completely irrational levels of hyperbole.
Not saying there's no reason to feel some level of frustration, but it has been blown way overboard lately.
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