I was looking for some of the game’s stats, concurrent players base, etc.
Can’t post a direct link, but check playercounter (Google it).
Quoting a couple of paragraphs:
Over the years, Heroes of the Storm has witnessed highs and lows in its player count. With an all-time high peak of 12.5 million players and an average of 5.1 million players over the last three months, the game has established a strong presence in the MOBA genre.
- Players: 10 million active players
- Monthly active users: 3 million
- Peak concurrent players: 290,000
- Total games played: 1.5 billion
- Total time played: 1.2 billion hours
- Average game length: 20 minutes
- Most popular game mode: Quick Match
Heroes of the Storm has generated an impressive revenue of $1.5 billion since its inception. This revenue comes from in-game purchases, such as heroes, skins, mounts, and other cosmetic items.
Is any of that actually accurate?
Because, to be honest, if it is… then it blows my mind how this game can be put under the rug if it’s that popular. Now of course I don’t see things with a corporate mind, but as a mere player these stats seem to indicate a very healthy, still-loved game with a lot of players.
Yet, we’re supposed to collectively think this game is “dead”?
I am extremely skeptical of that site, for a variety of reasons. But just from the content itself, it is claiming that one of the top three tournaments in 2022 was HGC (!?), and the section on the “Top Player in HotS” has a bit of broken code.
The numbers you quoted may or may not be pulled from somewhere, but I doubt the source was anything official.
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I remember citing that page a while ago and while it is the only one with any numbers they are either suspiciously high or just suspicious in general such as quick match being the most popular which I doubt, but it is possible.
In its hayday the game was popular, but it was pulled anyways. Think it was due to not generating enough revenue for activision and/esport scene not playing out like they wanted. I am sure someone can respond with a better answer.
It is hard to say if that website is any form of ‘accurate’ due to a lack of information to how they get their data, but it’s likely that the display is outdated, so some portion of the display or coding is broken. A number of HotS-sites have fallen defunct, so it’s possible that site is another victim of people moving on to other games.
It is hard to say if ‘revenue’ is the issue for HotS (blue said "it was always profitable) as HGC was approved for another year before the call came higher-up to suddenly change that for bad PR. The approach for Blizz at that time transitioned to cost-cutting that wasn’t exclusive to just HotS. However, HotS certainly was in the limelight as a result.
The move to push for rushing a new release certainly hurt HotS the most as the team was split for getting Diablo 4 out sooner, WoW expansions, etc etc.
However, we could say HotS e-sports wasn’t ‘good enough’ as even LoL takes a loss for their major events and HotS’ design goal was based off LoL more than DotA and the suits-suitors likely don’t care about the give/take League has for eating that ‘loss’.
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I follow a rule: numbers without methodology or source = garbage.
1/3 of them are smurfs but other than that it’s pretty accurate.
A lot of these websites are auto generated or uses outdated data that would make sense 7 years ago. (Where 2017 was HotS highest peak).
HotS hasn’t reached those same numbers since forever, and those who play would scratch probably 10k at best on peaks if we consider all regions (not just one).
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Those sites are probably as accurate as similar sites that have the scoop on a celebrity’s “net worth.” Those sites are almost always inaccurate (to put it mildly), and I hope they are AI generated so at least it wasn’t the direct work of a real life human being.
This post is a troll post, please report.
That sounds about right, based on my experiences with Awesomenauts. I see repeat players a lot in the same session, but I rarely see repeat players across different days. That tells me that there is a relatively deep player pool, but not one that plays consistently.
Around the time I stopped playing Awesomenauts, that was down to about 300 consecutive players according to Steam stats and essentially no new players, and you could really tell. You would only ever run into the same thirty people depending on your rank.
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The game was put under the rug so Acti-Blizz doesn’t crumble. HotS was a sacrificial offering to the old gods. Just so they can pump more into their even bigger hits (wow, diablo, ow).
I doubt it’s that much. I expect something around 100k active monthly players worldwide max.
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Heh… should have been OW being put under the rug in favor of HOTS. It’s simply a much better game. I think HOTS is the best game they’ve made since WarCraft 3 and for me that’s where the case is closed. I just love HOTS, and want to see it succeed as a continuously supported game; not an afterthought.
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I’d say maybe 15k worldwide max. 100k is far, far too generous.
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Maybe in the 20-30k range during peak time across all game modes and/or the world. While queues can often be fast I often get that small village feeling as I will get into matches back to back repeatedly that often we start joking about not having seen each other in a while.
Nowadays on EU I don’t go more than 3 games before seeing someone with a familiar or memorable unique NAME that I have played with earlier in a time span of few days and I am talking about QM/ARAM where matchmaking is inconsistent.
my spelling check is malfunction
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The “activity” beta function on Heroes profile has an average of 200 games per hour across the past 7 days (took the sum of each hour and divided by 24)
If we take a 15 min game time, the same 10 players could play 4 games in an hour. 500 players to be concurrent for those games. If players only play an hour, that’s 12k players for a day just to meet Heroesprofile uploads.
It’s easy to toss out numbers without thinking about how many it takes to realize a small sampling of them, let alone what happens outside of our own experience. Those numbers neglect queue times, modes, length of play etc etc, it’s just bad math to show that the convenience many get for what queues they get to play require more numbers than they considered because they will not see 200 unique players in an hour.
Despite my bad math and bad assumptions, the majority of players don’t upload, so my shoddy averages and assumptions are likely still a low estimate of what the game has between players that commit to regular play, and those that only occasionally do so.
Seems like Acti-Blizz wanted to have few, but “ruler of their genre” games. Sounds cost-effective. Sadly, HotS could only become 3rd most popular of its kind, which wasn’t good enough, so they let it go 
Considering what Xen wrote as a response for you, 15k is just too low for the queues to still be fast and somewhat accurate.
There’s also a lot of people playing custom games because of NGS and other tournaments.