Somebody (I forget who) posted a youtube video saying “Why Sc2 Died” or something like that. I was gone for about a year and a half or 2 years but I can still find games. There’s still tournaments going on too. I definitely don’t think it’s dead. It’s a trope people keep parroting the same idea until they think it’s true.
Well, there is talk that the GSL has ended since their funding essentially collapsed. My understanding is that StarsWar was a “success”. HSC took big hits to their viewership numbers compared to the previous one. It definitely seems to be trending downward. The Esports World Cup will be a big tell. It should smash some records just due to exposure & the magnitude of funding & how it’s a nexus of everyone’s favorite players & everyone’s favorite casters. So if it does “OK” will be a good indication that sc2 esports is toast. With the level of funding, it should excell. One way I plan to measure is to correlate twitch average viewers per game with their total viewership during the world cup. This will filter-out the impact of the cup itself to measure whether people are tuning in for sc2 itself of the big event in general. It will also show how sc2 performs compared to other games with the theory that if it scores too low compared to the “big earners” then that’s indicative of dying esports. So we’ll see.
I hope the casters are doing some practice duo-casting with their likely partners as well as prepping some good game jokes for their standup comedy. Because that’s exactly what made tastosis so popular. People were tuning in for what was essentially a comedy routine as much as they were tuning in for the gsl itself.
That’s what happens when the prize pools dry up, the proleague scene gets stale, the game gets put into maintenance mode and the balance gets handed off to people who, frankly, have huge conflicts of interest going on with effectively no accountability a corporate employee would have.
IPs that get abandon usually dry up and the fact that we can’t have custom assets like we did in Warcraft 3 means that Arcade won’t be a long lived or popular. Especially since MOBAs became their own games.