EPTYou get the basics: That Starcraft 1 and Brood War hit Korea at a perfect time as the country was improving its internet and PC Bangs were on the rise, and Starcraft II struggled because of Blizzard's fight with KeSPA.
Past that, it's really just the big takeaway from the book: When World of Warcraft came out and started making unfathomable amounts of money with that nice monthly subscription model, it became a lot harder for other Blizzard games to get attention -- if you've played a sports game in the last decade and seen the Franchise Mode get ignored for the card-trading multiplayer mode, you know the vibe.
The expectations for HoTS and Legacy were "modest," and while the games exceeded them, "many of the company's leaders [were] regretful that they had committed to releasing three games."
I will say it's a very good book overall, at least if you're interested in inside-baseball stuff about how big video game companies used to work vs. how they work today.
I'd say that it's a bit of a bummer how everything shook out -- it would have been great if SC2 was "perfect" at launch, when the marketing push was the biggest, but I'm not sure if that's a realistic goal for a game with designs of being a deep esport like SC2.
As it is, the game peaked in terms of Campaign story with HoTS, which is probably when the game was at its best in terms of competition with KeSPA teams finally coming over, but the fight with KeSPA kept it from being huge in the WoL days, and matchfixing/all the other things that led to the fall of KeSPA really hurt it before Legacy came out and it really got to its best from a competitive standpoint gameplay wise (although I still do miss the drama of an old-school proxy 2-rax).
