So a bunch of games that havent materialized yet. Got it.
Stormgate is the only one that is “competition” for Starcraft, in the sense that its doing a similar thing and is definitely going to see release, but you really, really missed the point that Starcraft did not even sign up for the race. If and when SC3 happens, the absolute best thing they can do is what Blizzard has always done with their successful games, which is look at the existing market, learn what works and what doesnt, and make the better product with that information.
Are you kidding me? Sins made about 15 mil. Frost giant raised ~5 mil in crowd funding alone. Zerospace raised half a mil in crowd funding. These people aren’t dumb. They know there is market potential. There is a vacuum in the market – a demand that can’t be satisfied. They wouldn’t waste their time unless SC2 were failing. In the past, SC2 had an iron grip on the entire genre. Then they lost 90% of their player base to League and Dota. Now they occupy a market niche and even now there are competitors entering the market.
Irrespective of anything else, Sins is not in competition with SC2 because its a radically different kind of RTS than SC2 is. They can exist in harmony.
That’s not how it works. Every hour a game of sins is played is an hour that people aren’t playing sc2. The same is true for streaming and other forms of “free” advertisement. A big game stays big because of exponential growth. You get streamers playing the game, that draws in more players and more streamers and you get a big game. Streamers like Pig playing stormgate is an enormous threat to sc2’s future. The thing about exponential functions is that a slight tweak to the exponent can cause drastic market implosion.
Yeah, thats actually exactly how it works. Otherwise games being in the RTS genre is meaningless because anything and everything is in competition with SC2. Netflix? In competition. That sandwich joint down the street you hit up for lunch sometimes? Yep, in competition.
Your stance is literally an inversion of how it works. It’s basic market economics. There are X players who play Y hours and if they aren’t playing your game then they are playing someone elses. Obviously revenue correlates with hours played. Every hour lost to another game is money lost to another game. This is exponential because of social mechanics like streaming and social media. The popularity of your game increases as a function of how popular it is. If you lose a bit of popularity, you can enter a downward spiral.
What? No. Revenue correlates with hours played because when somebody is playing a game they are likely to recommend it to friends or to buy skins or variety of other revenue sources. The more people who play, the more of these purchases you get. It’s correlated. So if your hours played goes down, because people are playing another game, you are losing money to that game.
Which brings us back to, SC2 has already made all the money its going to make, because everybody who is going to buy the game has done so, and selling cosmetics gives diminishing returns since you can only use one skin set at a time, and once people find their favorite(s) then they arent going to get others.
Yeah. That’s the idea of competition, sweetie. People buy other products because the existing products aren’t satisfactory. A dollar spent on FG is a dollar lost on SC2. That’s how markets work.
I am going to the store to buy apples. I can buy brand A or brand B. If I buy brand A, brand B misses out. That’s how it works.
It’s a question of filtering through user generated content. Users are making maps & voting on them. That’s basically what reddit does so in theory you could make a similar system for SC2 map voting. It’s obviously more complicated than “make a map, vote on which map you like.” The SC2 system all ready has something similar and it’s very successful (much more successful than the 1v1 ladder), and it’s called the arcade.
Hearthstone has a variety of modes that you can play, so I’ve often thought the 1v1 ladder should have different modes. You should be able to queue ranked 1v1 on mods, for example, as well as a mode where you play on community made maps. Then the game’s success isn’t dependent on the changes working out. If nobody uses the new features, oh well.