Okay imagine if a company carted their doo doo RTS up and down Sand Hill Road to every firm that does games funding for a couple years making everyone pay attention to it. While doing this they make intense claims that their game is completely representative of competitive RTS, which they say is a very narrow subset of the genre that is completely incomparable to everything else. Additionally they make it known that said genre is waxing and 'needs to come back'. And of course while making these claims they are sure to push that only a certain set of people can truly make the 'spiritual sequel' next gen game, both in terms of social permission and in possessing a very special set of capabilities. Through every presentation they make sure to feverously put forth that what they are doing represents the genre as a whole and its only possible future and that even if investors don't come on board then they should still be sure to pay attention to the game because all hopes of the genre's future lay on it and the investors will want to get on board soon.

Then the game bombs into the fucking ground after release. With everyone watching.

Yea I'm just using my imagination but if there was a company like they would probably do a ton of damage. If I was an investment firm person I'd probably be citing a catastrophe like that for the rest of my career and I would make sure to not get involved in funding anything like that game.

I also can imagine if there was a company like that they could also do some damage by freezing any problem solving in the StarCraft community for 4 years while everyone waited for the company which was pretending to have the answers. Ah gosh then meanwhile what if it turns out the company is a bunch of rank amateurs who spend half their time teaching themselves Unreal from fucking Udemy courses. That would suck!

Or like what if a company did multiple fundraising campaigns at scale which siphoned giant amounts of financial resources off from the culture they said they were going to serve. That would be bad.

Or like what if the people from that company tried to pitch a new RTS internally at Blizzard and failed but knew they were going to try to start another company so they set up StarCraft to fail by installing a non-StarCraft playing oaf to run things— in effect destabilizing their main competitor for the foreseeable future. That one would definitely fuck up StarCraft.

Oh gosh what if this company incubated a toxically positive community like one of those NFT ones and all these people who thought they were doing the right thing buzzed around fucking up the culture and the discourse. That might be bad. Or what if the game the new company made was such an abhorrent parody of the genre that it deeply demoralized people about the possibilities of future RTS games and their ability to experience joy from them.

Damn any of these things could be really bad individually, I hope no one does all of them at once!

Anyways this is why its nice that Uncapped just quietly made Battle Aces, pushed it out to people a few weeks after announcing it while running their business politely and responsibly. Conversely, as I've imagined here, there are many things a company could do to damage things if they only cared about themselves and their own success. And I didn't even use my full imagination in order to keep this short— believe it or not!