This game is the most fun MOBA on the market and I feel sad that development on it has stopped.
Is there anything Blizzard could do to bring HotS back to life? What would the game need to become successful, from the perspective of players and business stakeholders?
I think the core game design is great. It takes all the good stuff from MOBAs and removes the unnecessary complexity. It has great heroes, maps, and game modes. But why didn’t it attract LoL and Dota players? Does it actually need to compete against LoL and Dota though, rather than trying to be a unique game?
My theory is that HotS didn’t do well because:
- At launch, it didn’t have its own identity. It tried too hard to copy LoL and Dota. Only later did it establish itself as a more fun MOBA with game modes such as ARAM.
- The graphics engine felt very slow and choppy at launch. Nowadays, on oversized CPU/GPUs it’s not so noticeable anymore, but the HotS engine is still very inefficient.
- Some suit at Activision didn’t see the game’s potential and cut budgets to boost the stock price, rather than investing more to make it better.
I always wondered why HotS wasn’t available on consoles. With Microsoft taking over ActiBlizz, wouldn’t it be possible to create a new HotS version that supports consoles? Microsoft could push it to Xbox Game Pass, do lots of marketing, and get tons of new players on board. Of course, this wouldn’t be easy to do. A new game engine would be needed, the UI would need to get redesigned, and some heroes such as Lost Vikings would probably need to get cut. But wouldn’t this have a lot of potential? There’s no real MOBA game on consoles, and I think HotS is still an amazing game and it could work well on consoles.
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Bit lengthy, but worth watching in full (in my opinion): Death of a Game: Heroes of the Storm - YouTube
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I feel like Blizzard dumped way too much money to try to grow it inorganically and it failed. I still love playing it and, honestly, they could still make more money off it by doing an occasional new hero maybe three times a year and a new map at least once a year.
I don’t think much will change, but I am hoping they do want to breathe life back into this. The community is small, but we are active and we would really like a return.
Honestly I think they should look towards a HotS sequel for all platforms. Especially given the popularity of Pokemon’s attempt at such gameplay there certainly is room in the console market. Being a new product they can optimise the engine and gameplay fixing many of the problems that held back some players from HotS. Given the massive character diversity available to Microsoft they could also expand it to other universes outside just Blizzard to make it their all character brawler.
It is fairly common in the industry when competing for E-sport titles to do this. You either need to get big or you will always remain obscure with small player base. Ultimately it failed, but so many other products also did.
What killed it was the MOBAs like PUB-G and later Fortnite. This pulled a lot of the casual and possible growth base away from traditional RTS like DotA clones towards FPS games. It could never reach its required player target and eventually development was not sustainable.
Making those is not cheap. There was a reason they had a huge development team at their prime. Every new hero had to have tens of thousands of hours of play testing, and the more heroes the more play testing needed. This is why hero releases even started to slow down while development was still active.
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Didn’t know Fortnite and PUB-G was a moba lol. They are Battle Royal’s…
Nothing. There’s no way Hots will ever come back for these 2 reasons:
1 - Actiblizz would only ever invest again in Hots if they had League of Legends number of players who spend tons and tons of money in the game, making it extremely profitable and number #1 MOBA in the market.
2 - The game won’t attract new players and even has a chance of losing even more because most people don’t want to invest their time in an online game that doesn’t have big support from the company. And if they don’t want to invest their time into it, I don’t even need to talk about investing their money…
Basically the key word here is: greedy.
Like someone said in a discord I’m in, it’s very very sad, because any small game studio would kill to have the player number hots has… 
welp time to make an indie game studio and a good moba 
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True. But soon Activision won’t be calling the shots anymore; Microsoft will. Microsoft understands gaming way better than Activision does. Microsoft has the Xbox platform which has tons of customers, so if they could make HotS run there, it might be worth investing in. LoL and Dota don’t run on consoles, so there’s potential for lots of new HotS gamers there.
People assumed Diablo could only be fun on PC, but Diablo 3 ended up being very successful on consoles. I hear it’s even more fun with a controller than mouse and keyboard. I think HotS’s controls are more complicated than Diablo’s, so it might be tricky to make it play well with controllers, but it might be doable.
I doubt Microsoft will interfere that much even after the deal goes through. But we’ll see.
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