Interesting video. I think SC2 is a great game, but being a great game alone is not enough to make a game have long term success. There is a lot more to it then just that like marketing, brand recognition, company reputation and a good legal department. So my question. What do you guys think are the reasons for why this game is not dead yet? Though I guess it depends on what you define as dead.
I think that despite the fact most casual rts players moved to moba games there is still a niche market for controlling large armies and traditional RTS. Despite the games insane learning curve and inability to get new players to join due to this fact it has retained a decent sized portion of its original player base due to the fact its aged quite well and nothing better has come along. Despite WC3 feeling like a better designed game even with a reforge which was an utter failure it feels dated compared to SC2 despite being over 10 years old. Simply put it has a niche part of the market and no one has made a higher quality game in the last decade as MOBA games are more popular and there seems to be more money to be made in that domain. I think that’s both a function of their casual laid back nature and replay value feeling higher with a large choice of heroes to make each game feel different for the players.
Let’s say me and my friends* make a clone of StarCraft2 that runs good enough with no game-breaking bugs and crashes, have typical unity game graphic, as well some balance changes and removal/redesign of most annoying SC2 mechanics.
Would you play it?
Why not?
That’s why.
*we are good enough to pull that of - at least from a technical standpoint
Playing Warcraft after Starcraft feels like listening to regular song after you get used to its nightcore remix: everything feels soooo sloooow and booooring.
MOBA’s are just multiplayer Diablo clones.
Starcraft 2 is a real rts.
because after all this time from its birth, there has not been another great rts. warcraft, starcraft has been kicking it around for a long time, and yet there has not been another rts out there to even come close to it. This is one of the biggest factors of why its still not dead. the other factor is that blizzard itself has had a major fan base since the day that warcraft first came out and has only grown ever since, moving with each game they put out. the fact that starcraft itself was a game based on the AvPvM world with a twist made it that much more fun when it came out, giving it even more of a fan base than its predecessor warcraft.
I agree on the slow part which is part of why I liked it so much more. It feels like your armies are fighting you have time to micro each unit you cant lose a game for lagging out for 2 seconds or losing focus it was much more enjoyable. I’m sure some people enjoy the fast paced nature of sc2 certainly after getting used to it but there is a reason games like moba have 10s of millions of daily players as opposed to 30-50k and I think a big part of it is the pacing of sc2 is simply too fast. Now I don’t think this games ever slowing down its too late now but when friends wont return to play a single game because “I don’t want to sweat over my keyboard dude I want to relax while I game” and my children take to games like cs go and wc3 with no issue and enjoy them I’m not really surprised. Win or lose the game just isn’t as fun it feels like a job. If they ever make another AAA true RTS I hope they learn from the mistakes of sc2. When your focus is on skill cap and esports and balance you get a game only a small niche of players want to engage with when you make a games first goal to be fun and enjoyable and accessible to everyone everything else falls in place easily.
This game will never again draw in any sizeable number of new players. That isn’t to say the few who have played for awhile cant enjoy what it is the fact of the matter is even in wc3 and sc1 zero clutter no rush 15 and dota were more popular than the regular game. I think a lot of this has to do with the steep learning curve of sc2 and to some extent the large hero pools in moba games making each match feel different adding replay value. While most the people still playing this game are more concerned with balance patches that doesn’t address the core issue with getting new players into the game. Despite these flaws I still play wc3 and sc2 because they are high quality games and nothing since sc2 dropped has had that AAA rts feel that I have played. Unfortunately if more people like moba and shooters and survival style games there is not a lot of real incentive for developers to attempt to make such an RTS game outside of their own passion for the genre. That being said the reason my personal playtime in wow wc3 cs go dota and many other games is so much higher than my total play time in sc2 is quite simple its not as fun. unsurprisingly the most enjoyable modes this game has are the side modes and team games that its not even balanced for.
No its ded gaem. I read it on the forums in 2012 so it was real.
A lot of this is just weak arguments at best. I think most people (excluding the brain dead folks who shout dead game into the void all day in chats/comments section) who are on the “dead game” side are aware a lot of things are still ongoing. Obviously there are games being played daily. Esports are still ongoing. Some YouTube channels are still making content regularly.
People like this guy are going off a very obvious copium definition of dead game, where they don’t consider a game dead until the servers literally shut off and there are exactly 0 players playing the game. Obviously when you go off a ridiculous definition like that, almost all games ever made throughout human history are not dead games. I’ll give some counterpoints as to why this game is “dead” though. Not that anyone cares, because you guessed it!
Starcraft 2 population:
I want to know where he got his numbers from. I’m betting it’s from rankedftw based on the green color. He’s obviously cherrypicking here. Going off the same website, there are clear highs and lows in population numbers. You will see spikes here and there. This guy chose a high number. I can easily find a population number within the same year, maybe even the same month, where the number is at 100,000 rather than 300,000.
What caused positive spikes? Free to play is one of them. Obviously this is going to bring activity to the game. The game is going from $60 to being literally free. It doesn’t take a genius to know that’s a last ditch effort to breathing life into a game. The second one is when the COVID stuff happened in 2020. People are stuck home. They play games. Neither of these things mean the game is alive and thriving. It just means people were bored.
My claim is that the numbers are stagnant. I think it’s becoming increasingly clear that the games played is approaching similar to before the game went free to play, if not worse. He goes on to show some other RTS games that I think have never done well to begin with. Almost every gamer in the early 2010s knew about Starcraft. Almost no one knows either of the two games he mentioned. Such a dumb comparison to make. Of course those other two games have small numbers. They were never good to begin with. Starcraft had a peak era where it was in the running for best game of all time at the moment. Then it crashed. Hard. Just a silly comparison.
He also makes the claim about casual play (i.e. not ladder). Casual play is stagnant if not slowly dying as well. They screwed over arcade games a while back. I’ve made a post about this in the past. There’s hardly anyone left developing new games. You can make some poor argument about ooOoo but Tya. Come on. Anyone who plays arcade games knows. The lobby has been filled with just about the same games for the past 4 years. Campaign is obviously the same forever. Co-op has been the same since around Mengsk release. EVERY bit of casual play is stuck. And co-op was the largest part of SC2 by far even when it was released! That’s how bad things were. Casual play on EVERY front has always been treated poorly in this game, and it has only gotten worse. SC2 has never catered to the more casual side of the player base. It’s the fans that have been carrying it.
The esports scene:
Have they renewed the main contracts? I think they are supposed to dry out in 2023 or 2024. If they managed to pull that off, good for them. Did he mention the fact that this is all community run now? The esports scene is obviously drying out. They are just pumping around the same amount of money into it to keep things going. If anything, this is a testament to the loyal fanbase that keeps the game going. In other senses, it’s obvious nothing new is happening. Those young competitors he mentioned have still been playing the game for years. They are facing off pros who were once 16-early 20s and are now hitting close to 30 if not already there. Some of the other top players are still fairly young, but there are many older pro players. They are obviously not at peak performance anymore. I’m curious about how things will play out 5-10 years from now.
The only surprising point here is the balance updates, which are pretty bad overall, but that’s nothing new. Honestly, I didn’t think the game could get worse after it was LITERALLY announced “dead” in 2020, but here we are. I guess he forgot to mention that article too, huh? The one where they announced that they would stop developing the game and might only put in small changes.
He also brings up a chart of age groups. 25-34 is the majority. I think it’s hilarious he brings this up because I would say that’s more proof the game is dying. The gaming population is aging. There’s not that many young viewers left! 51.1% at the 25-34. 29.5% at 35-44. Jeez! Have you seen Japan’s population? An aging population is by no means a good sign for a game, but this guy’s taking it as something fortunate. The only good side to this is that the older people are sticking around. Once again, stagnant game.
Social media:
Yeah, YouTube. Great. Basically the same names for many years now. And go ahead and cherrypick the most popular ones while you’re at it. Lowko has been one of the most popular content creators in forever. Talk about the pros that have quit. Talk about the content creators who have quit. Many have, and I would bet much more so than the rise of new content creators or promising pro players.
Look at Twitch views. Look at other platforms. Twitch views are no longer at its glory days. Twitch used to be centered around Starcraft. Now? Just look at it. It’s sad. None of the gaming news channels talk about this game anymore either. Content creators from other games don’t talk about the game either. It’s all gone. Talking about this game doesn’t bring in anymore interest unless it’s about how trash Blizzard has become or how it’s a dead game.
I could go on all day. It’s really about seeing eye to eye when it comes down to it. I’m never going to agree with him. He will never agree with me. It just comes down to the fundamentals: he’s going off the definition that a game is never dead until it hits literally 0 players. I’m going off the fact that overall interest in this game has crashed, the fact that the company itself announced they will not be developing the game anymore, etc. etc. There is a mountain of evidence to suggest this game is melting and only a mound to support the claim that the game is thriving to the present day. He’s looking at the mound. I see the mountain.
It is dead to me.
Hardly anyone plays 1v1, teams is a ghost town of masters vs bronze, archon is dead, smurfing/hacking is unpunishable, and the game hasn’t been balanced for over 2 years at this point.
It’s clear that somewhere in 2018-2019, they just threw their hands up or pulled every employee off of the game. Whoever they left added gimicks and fancy tricks instead of strategy, while nerfing all the fun stuff we used to have.
I miss all the proxy terran plays that Maru became infamous for, the crazy 7 min gateway pushes protoss used to have (scarlette used this once to win a championship), and the strong casters that made zerg late game fearsome.
Nowadays, the maps are small and easy to scout to negate any proxy, the 7 min pushes are all but dead, and zerg late game is a joke that gets hard countered by ghosts or skytoss or thors… just a lot of bad decisions by the devs, and this new patch looks like trash too.
I won’t be playing anytime soon, although I’ll consider if microsoft buys them up. At least they listen to gamers, even if they are an evil corporation.
Right. Anyone that tries to make the argument that this game is alive and well is just inhaling mass amounts of copium. I know that’s a silly phrase to make, but I’m tired of expressing it in other ways. For every argument you make that the game is alive, there’s at least 3 counterarguments to make related to it.
It’ll never be “dead” to me. It’s one of the classics, and it’s been special to me since SC1 in the 90s. There will always be people playing the game for this reason. Some iteration of SC is the best RTS of all time. What is unfortunate, is that the average gamer just doesn’t like RTS anymore. There are more options now, MOBAs have taken over gamers that crave the competitiveness SC offered without the steep mechanics that go along with it. And they aren’t as lonely as poor 1v1 SC. Multiplayer SC exists, but it’s never overtaken 1v1 from a competitive standpoint.
SC suffers from huge learning curve, crazy ladder anxiety for new players, lonely nature of 1v1, repetitiveness, lack of dev support, alternatives with much lower skill floors that cover all these bases. Maybe mistakes were made along the way, but even if a perfect version of SC ever existed, it would still seem dead now for those reasons.
I don’t think this guy knows what he is talking about and/or how to properly analyze data. He is listing old figures, relying on sources that are known to be inaccurate (rankedftw), etc. As far as I can see, he makes no effort to subtract out the duplicate (smurf) accounts of which there are many. He doesn’t do any regression analysis to see if the statistics are improving or degrading over time (nor how quickly). The figures he lists seem impressive only if you take them at face value and didn’t bother to dig deeper (likely because it confirmed his bias).
If you estimate very generously, SC2 might have a playerbase of roughly 5 million players between ladder/co-op/arcade. This is a very generous assumption. Meanwhile, games like league have about 150 million active players – literally 30x as many. In all reality, the co-op and arcade can’t really be counted for SC2. The players in the arcade are playing MOBA-style mods that make the game similar to Dota/League. The number of people who play SC2 for its 1v1 multiplayer is about 230k. That means League has 130x as many players.
It’s simply a fact that the SC2 multiplayer is one of the least popular RTS flavors out there. Even within SC2, only about 5% of players play 1v1.
It’s no wonder because the game has an intense focus on mechanics. This is to such an extreme degree that strategy is almost entirely irrelevant. The game is 95% decided by how fast you click. You can’t really call SC2 an “RTS” game when it has much more emphasis on mechanics than strategy. League and Dota are more true to the RTS genre than SC2 is. Events progress so fast that there is zero capacity for strategical thinking – players simply have the correct answers memorized through muscle memory similar to playing the piano. If you have a conversation with these players, they have near-zero understanding for how and why the builds work, they just know the builds and know how to do them. SC2 is most definitely a memorization / mechanics game.
If they slowed the pace of SC2 by 5%, they’d probably double the number of people who played the 1v1 ladder.
Dead game meme is funny. Just go to nonapa to see what the activity is, it’s quite high for a 13 year old game that’s not infested w/ 13 year olds.
It depends on what do you call quite high. CS:GO, which is 10 years old has an online of ± 600k players, that’s 4 times more than the whole sc2 player base.
games that are overpopulated with 13 year olds don’t really matter IMO.
The 1v1 ladder is extremely unpopular, yes, you are right about that. I read some figures at some point which showed SC2 has 3-5 million players if you include coop and the arcade. That’s a fairly reasonable estimate based on the MMR distribution of the ladder.
Can be, for me personally the arcade games are not really a starcraft anymore. Desert Strike, Starcraft Universe, they are more like a separate games. That’s why I think that SC2 has already died. It has a group of players who still play it, but there are almost 0 new players who join it.
I don’t think it’s a great game tbh…and what I define as a “dead game” is a game that nobody plays anymore, that people have boycotted several times, with the company behind it gone bankrupt…and may as well be an offline game with the number of players left. That pretty well defines SC2 at this point.
SC2 events progress so fast that there is no time to think about anything – you simply have to react with a response that you’ve memorized previously. How fast you can do this is strongly correlated with your performance in SC2 (p=0.65). Is it reasonable for a game with little to no functional strategy to be called a “strategy” game? SC2 is primarily a game of memorization and multitasking. It is not an RTS. It is a slightly more complicated version of the piano.
Depends on what you consider dead, taking 15 minutes to find a 3v3 match for me is deadness