I think you misunderstood. Microsoft can borrow on public markets by issuing debt. I doubt any bank would make a loan against a game. Bank lending does not work like that. The firm issues debt directly to the market based on their credit rating. Google “debt capital markets” for what I am describing.
They do not need to make a massive return, but simply their cost of capital. If StarCraft 3 were made, I guarantee that at least a million people each in the US ,EU and Korea would buy it. StarCraft need not be bigger than Dota2, it only needs to cover costs plus a modest return.
“They do not need to make a massive return” - do you think investors are going to think that way? The only people who are going to throw money at an RTS project regardless of the return are RTS fans. But if you had RTS fans, you’d be able to sell existing RTS products and make bank already. If you want investors, you need not only a high return but a higher return than the alternatives.
If you are going to take on debt to finance a project that has low returns, and you did this with limited manpower despite better options, wouldn’t that break fiduciary duty? They have a duty to the investors to make as much money as possible. How do you propose that an RTS project is the best possible use of company resources?
These kinds of questions are the exact kinds of questions that will come up and “we don’t need a massive return” won’t exactly make the sale I am afraid. When talking to businessmen about money, the only thing they care about are dollar bills. They see dollar bills when they sleep. They have dollar bills in their day dreams. They kiss their wife goodbye in the morning to go and get the dollar bills. They’ve got dollar bills burned into their retinas from staring at them for so long. A practical RTS project isn’t one where you shrug and say “well, let’s hope we break even after taking on a boatload of debt.”
It’s like a short sell strategy to be honest. You’re taking on guaranteed losses in the hopes you make back more in the long run. Unlike a short-sell, the success isn’t completely random and is correlated with the skill of the people running the project.
Do you think investors are going to look at sc2’s success and think this is predictive of a good RTS project in the future?
See, now we’re getting to difficult questions. It only gets harder from here. Also, this is a moot argument because Microsoft has more money than God so if they like RTS they will throw money at it eventually. It’s just a matter of how high it is on the priority list and I’d argue it’s pretty low. I suspect they are limited by labor more than by money.
On this point specifically. Korea hated sc2 so much they went back to broodwar, a game straight out of the 90’s. That would be like people hating Mario so much they go back to playing Super Mario Bros from 1988.
Blizzard designers panicked when this happened, for obvious reasons, and they redesigned SC2’s economy to have long multitasking games like broodwar, and that was the final nail in sc2’s coffin. They tried to get back customers by short selling the design of SC2. They changed an existing and functional game model to a new and unknown model to get customers back who had already purchased the game and, even if they returned, wouldn’t buy anything. Now every game is “clickclickclick look at me I spam click so fast so now I win” and then people say blizzard should take on debt to make another clickclickclick game and it’s just like uh what.
Study the psychology of gamers and it’s obvious the extreme emphasis on mechanics is SC2’s biggest flaw by a large margin. I don’t think it will ever succeed unless it is fundamentally changed into a new kind of game. It doesn’t have to be a clone of Dota but that also doesn’t mean it has to be 600 apm required just to be able to play the game. Dota / league simplify unit control down to a single character attacking down a single lane of the map. The enemies are mostly predictable since they are NPCs. The only unpredictable characters are the other players and there’s only a few of them. SC2 could learn a few things from this design by using siege and forget units to simplify complicated maps down to lanes. You strategically take control over zones and now it’s extremely costly to dislodge so that means you don’t have to micromanage it anymore. Terran has been designed VERY well in that regard and that’s the reason why bronze league players love terran. Terran has design features that reduce multitasking.
If SC2’s economy were redesigned around 1-3 base plays, and with a heavier emphasis on zone control, I think it could be a huge financial success. The issue they have is that professional sc2 has created a branding issue. Everyone assumes rts = apm spam. That’s the real hurdle. It’s not hard to rework game design to simplify multitasking. It’s gonna be very hard to convince players, who are busy playing other games, that their past impressions of RTS are wrong.
This branding issue impacts more than just SC2 by the way. Why do you think other RTS games are failing. Does anyone remember GreyGoo? Nobody – exactly. The entire industry has a branding issue created by the complexity of unit control & multitasking requirements of starcraft-style RTS games. A game requiring 600 apm and 5 army hotkeys and 7 location hotkeys is obviously not going to sell well in India, Africa, rural parts of China. But, that’s where all the customers are. The ultimate RTS is one that an rice farmer in rural China can play on an $100 usd arm board running inside a shoebox. The complexity of unit control means RTS will always be popular in urban European & Asian countries & the complexity of the game simulation, likewise, means you have to run an expensive PC to be able to play.
Again, you don’t have to make it so that the game is so ez pz that a dog can slobber on the keyboard and get grandmaster. But if you cut the complexity of the keyboard and mouse interactions by 10%, you’d probably double the number of people interested in the game.
Base count & army size are obviously correlated with both the hardware cost and the unit control complexity. That’s why it’s obvious SC2 died the moment they redesigned the economy around 5-7 base economy. Cut down on base count until it’s 1-3 base plays 90% of the time. Reduce army sizes by emphasizing harsh outcomes if proper unit micro is not used. This means players get more reward from micro and positioning than they do from macro. Right now, it doesn’t matter if you YOLO a 200 supply army into a meatgrinder as long as your macro is good. It should be the reverse: it literally doesn’t matter how good your macro is if you don’t squeeze every ounce of value out of the micro. This will naturally reduce the size of armies because players will focus on getting value out of smaller groups of units. Smaller groups are easier to micro, and the macro cost is lower which means they focus on the micro more. They need to bring back instant fungal, for example. If you macro 100 marines, it all dies instantly to 1 fungal because macro isn’t what makes a player good – it’s micro. Winning at SC2 should be getting maximal value out of 10 marines, rather than spamming maximal APM to get 100 marines with good macro.
I think I disagree with almost every word you say. The pro leagues are not sales. Yes, Brood War is very popular, especially among a certain age profile. That is great for Twitch, but it is not relevant to sales. Even for multiplayer (which most buyers of StarCraft games do not use), the best part of StarCraft for many players is that the macro game (which is more about practice than skill) does not require first-rate gaming skills (micro).
Ultimately, the pro leagues are nice, but not essential. If anything, Blizzard’s senseless over-extension on Overwatch is what killed professional StarCraft2 support. Blizzard needs to stop silly managerial swings for the bleechers and instead engage in actual financial management. They need to reduce there costs of capital and fund every project with a proposed positive NPV. The management should be managing the games as a portfolio of assets, not the fake guru stuff that passes for management in too many gaming companies.
If any conglomerate other than Microsoft had bought them, I would feel better. The same is true with Bethesda, although Bethesda was already far better-managed than Blizzard. If Microsoft would accept that they are a utility company and lever up to fund more projects. Hell, even releasing more side games for StarCraft 2 or even Brood War (placed within the existing timelines for WoL, HotS,…) would be easy money because they know there is a core customer base that will buy them. I would say the same for Diablo. This is especially cost-efficient because all the assets are already there for art and core game mechanics.
In the end, we can argue about what would be best for pro games (although we both agree they were better before LotV), but that is not what is going to drive sales.
You mean to tell me that if I import a new type of apple, lets say a Gala apple, and half the customers try it once but go back to eating the apple they are familiar with aka Golden Delicious, that this isn’t relevant to deciding whether I ought to import a third kind of apple? Frankly that’s just delusion. Like I’ve said, sc fans are living in another dimension where up is down and left is right.
Pro leagues are not essential – what planet are you living on. Pro leagues are an inexpensive form of marketing. I guess the product is just gonna magically market itself because you say so.
Overwatch was “senseless” but investing into sc2 wouldn’t be? What. Do you even hear yourself. Overwatch is bigger and more popular than sc2. If it didn’t work out for Overwatch then it DEFINITELY won’t work out for sc. People on this website have the business sense of a brick, and ultimately that is why sc is doomed. The people who support it can’t formulate a realistic path to victory because they are stuck in la la land with the unicorns as they search for bigfoot.
Making sc a winning formula is easy. Drop the apm spam. Focus on micro and decision making. Reduce game duration. Optimize it so it can be played on a shoebox computer. Cut the game speed by 10%. Rebrand it away from the toxic visual blur that is modern esports. Crank map diversity through the roof. Add additional win cons and game modes to 1v1. You could easily double the popularity with this formula.
Finding winning formulas is easy because you identify traits and correlate traits with outcomes. The winning formula is the combination of traits with the highest correlation with the wanted outcome. People on this website assume the traits they like are winning traits merely because they, themselves, like them. It’s called egocentrism. They assume their own preferences define the world as they disregard the very obvious fact that the game that adheres to these preferences is imploding before their very eyes. “Obviously we need more of what I want to succeed! ReeEeEeEeEeEEeEEEEEEE!”
To be clear, as a grandmaster myself, I am very good at SC and like it just the way it is. What I want is not relevant. The only thing relevant is market needs and a practical formula to get there. There are loads of games in the strategy category and sc can’t appeal to their players because the multitasking is so high. You don’t have to make it so that a monkey can get gm by banging a keyboard on a wall, but if you reduce the multitasking by 10% you’d probably double the players interested. Focusing on micro instead of macro is a good way to reduce multitasking without impacting how action packed the game is. Game design needs to reward micro 75% and macro 25%. This results in smaller armies, more complex micro interactions, and higher quality micro. A consequence of this is also reduced simulation complexity which means more computers can run it and that means more players.
Also, another factor worth considering is the population decline. Soon there will be more old people than young, and population will peak with most people being old and retired. Will Grandpa Joe enjoy the visual blur of sc2? Probably not. As cognitive abilities decline, a 10% slower game will keep sc2 relevant for longer.
Are you saying Golden Delicious apples aren’t delicious. But But But upatree says marketing doesn’t impact consumer perception! Clearly they are delicious and literally made of gold!
the crisp gala apples are the best, there the perfect cruchiness and just the right amount of tart to delicious sweetness, granny smith comes in second
Yeah, another shame is, that this game has not been monetized correctly, it was one of the biggest EA sports from early beginning, and they were basically focused on just selling the copies of SC2 (which it did fenomenally and the best ever as an RTS).
But if they would’ve made it free to play at least the multiplayer, and focused also on teams and casual and just monetized in game trading and items, etc. This game would’ve made probably at least 10 times more.