In many ways, StarCraft gave rise to esports as we know it.
In terms of the sheer number of participants, the amount of coverage, and the prizes at stake, StarCraft used to be one of the biggest video games on the planet.
Back in the day, it felt like StarCraft would be the on top of the esports world forever. But now? Well, it’s difficult to feel like it really matters anymore.
So, where did it all go wrong? What toppled the king of esports?
Written by: Alina Sotula (@ASotula)
Edited by: Connor Dunn (@ConnorDunn_)
Hosted by: Daniel Rosen (@Daniel_Rosen)
Footage courtesy of:
Music used under license from Associated Production Music LLC (”APM”).
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34 comments
i think you missed the biggest part in the downfall with the issues of match fixing and life…
Starcraft will live forever!
It's almost like Blizzard has just been terrible for the last decade? Almost as if another company with influence has pushed them to make poor decisions….
Starcraft failed because lol is easier to play. 1v1 you take all the blame, 5v5 you can hide behind your teammates and blame them. Plus 5v5, you get to play with your friends, this stronger social aspect.
Devs who don't understand that to have a game be a viable esports candidate, IT MUST BE FAIR, should just not try to make them.
They could've released Heart of the Swarm for public play, but kept the status quo in esports by keeping Wings of Liberty in the pro scene.
Then adjusted when feedback stated it needed to be adjusted, and ASAP, not waiting for the next damn expansion… That would've given them a chance.
I don't even remember when I stopped watching SC2, but AlphaStar brought me back to check on some matches for a bit.
While i do agree with a lot of the critiques on how blizzard handled sc2, i feel like they came to the wrong conclusion on how much either factor effected the game. Fact of the matter is that there is nothing they could do to keep starcraft in the spotlight. It was destined to die simply by being an RTS.
l'll be the first to tell you as a hardcore C&C fan that RTS games as a genre are dead and buried, the new generation of gamers like to play MOBA's and FPS games. This is not a directional change, a large portion of the former generation just grew out of games and that's why you don't see RTS's have the popularity they once did, it's not like the people who loved RTS's just forgot about them, they just aren't in the community anymore.
There will be a time when MOBA's and traditional cs-esque FPS's fall out of favor. The new generation will play something completely different and all these current multi-billion Esport games will die, then we'll have the same "blame the company" dialogue that TSE just gave us in this video, but with league of legends instead.
Riot is a trash company, not in the sense that they don't know how to run a business, but that they constantly make changes to league that are extremely polarizing and encourage degenerate playstyles, while completely eliminating others for no reason, changing the game just to change it, never considering the consequences. I'm sure everyone has heard about the 20 champion viability rotation that we have every season. My point is that there are games being horribly mismanaged which still do great, just because their genre of game is trending. Just look at BR's. PUBG was a horrible buggy mess for the entire time it was relevant and still brought in numbers.
I can't for BR's to die BTW, watching paint dry is more interesting than playing different rehashes of the exact same basic ass no-effort gamemode that i would expect to find as a tertiary addition (like gungame) to a yearly COD release.
1:14
Good ol' Tibia… Alive and well ?
I thought they were gonna sneak in the Ryu vs Faker clip again
I think part of the downfall of Starcraft was how long it took for blizzard to make changes to the game. Where as a game like League of Legends gets a new balance patch every two weeks things like the swarm host were problematic for what seemed like an eternity.
I love SC so much
sc2 is actually still in a pretty good state. The free to play thing really made a big difference for the playerbase and game design and balance wise it's in the best state it's ever been in. There's just not as much hype around the game cause it doesn't compare to csgo or lol but the game is still doing great.
the fact every game BAR FORTNITE AND WOW ever made is 1000x better than starcraft
This video literally didn't cover the biggest reason why sc2 died, which is that Matchfixing killed korean starcraft and korea has always been the core for the starcraft progaming scene. We literally had SC2 getting played on national television 4 times a week right before people went to watch baseball. Looking over this fact just shows how little you dig into these videos.
First real video game I ever owned was Starcraft Broodwar, since a Korean exchange student my family had gave it as a gift. Those were the days, 10 year old me doing my first zerg swarm. Truly is nostalgic thinking back.
It took too long for blizzard to listen to the veterans at the beta phase. They had just been acquired by activision, so maybe that had something to do with it.
I'll tell you why it failed, notice me senpai! I put a lot of EffOrt in writing this
We knew there was something wrong with the game, even though we couldn't quite describe what it was, but at the end, we just wanted to believe everything would be alright. On the bright side, it has been a great experiment on the game development side. If starcraft 3 is made with what we learned from the failures of the second game, it could be truly amazing.
It's very complex to explain all of it here but, for example, making it so that workers only gathered 5 minerals instead of 8, changed the game in fundamental ways. Now we need more time to get the same amount of minerals. Now we need more workers to sustain a big army, even though the population limit is still 200, so we'll have smaller armies.
Because you had to focus a larger amount of workers on each base, expanding too much wasn't a good idea, whereas in brood war, you could expand and getting it running with just a few workers. That design encouraged you to expand as much as possible to take over the map. Bases and workers were traded a lot.
Starcraft 2 encouraged a more turtle-like style, which is just boring. They tried to remedy this with the last expansion by making bases have less mineral, but it wasn't as good as a solution as the first game. Sure, forcing expansion is better the turtle fights, but it's better to be encouraged to expand than to be kicked out of your base.
In brood war, counters were done by reducing the damage done, which was very uncommon in RTS games which usually relied on amplifying the damage done to the countered unit, but that's the route Starcraft 2 followed, unfortunately. That made army composition overly important and took away the value of microing, which is a paramount form of skill expression that attracts viewership. Players loved watching Brood War Pro's performing impossible micros.
Technology also made it so that units had near-perfect pathfinding, and reacted a lot better to commands. Along with some new features like unlimited selection, this indirectly increased the game speed by a lot. This should have been compensated somehow.
Suddenly, you have the ability to move an entire army at once, which moves faster than the first game, and when it gets there, all damage done by both sides is a LOT bigger. This translates into players losing entires armies really fast before they could react.
It became a really unforgiving game that will punish you hard to the smallest mistake, and that design just doesn't work for the masses. People want something easy to play, but that still has skill expression at a higher level, and that is fun. I've lost many Starcraft 2 where I felt like "damn, I just wasted a half an hour because of one mistake. This isn't worth it"
In brood war, you had time to micro your units, and because countering wasn't so mandatory, the composition was just important as microing. Even if you messed up scouting and comp, you still could show off some awesome micro and still win the game. Because of that, more comps were viable. I remember a friend that would play ZvP with mass hydras, which was insane, just because his hydra micro was unbelievable.
I could also mention that the awful pathfinding in broodwar at least added variety in moving, whereas in starcraft 2 the armies just move weird. Like some godlike entity sent them to one exact point somewhere….
We learned a lot from this game. This knowledge is invaluable and a third game could use it. Hell.. every RTS in the future could use it.
This was a pretty weak, cursory look at why the game has failed long term as an esport. Match fixing, lack of free to play elements until way too late, bad cooperation among esports organizations, and terrible marketing of the game in Korea…none of those major issues were even touched on here.
IDRA PepeHands
Life ruined everything
DO AN EPISODE ON TASTOSIS, GUYS.
STARCRAFT IS THE BEST GAME EVER!!!!!
Right when I started to be good at it…fck…
I wondet when will valve kill dota or riot kill league, would be epic
you should have a video about team fortress 2 competitive
9:10 is basically the reason for this video.
But hey, it's always nice to hate on Blizzard.
7:17 lol will always be lol
"Flash the greatest player of sc of all time"
Serral: "wait just a bit… imma get that title if i still dont have it"
Blizzard and Esports. hey we have a popular game lets make a franchise where only the wealthy team owners can make a team. how about we dont fix the games and let all the broken stuff in the game for over 3-6 months. sounds good!!. srsly blizzard comes up with some good games. but they are always doomed to destroy it.
No mention of the match fixing scandals or the rise of MOBAs that are basically what is unanimously agreed upon as the real cause for why SC2 has declined? Yes Blizzard's handling of certain aspects was a contributing factor but to not even mention the other more prominent factors is disingenuous.
Decent video. Unfortunately, I think you completely missed Blizzard's fault in cannabilising the BW scene just to pump their SC2 sales (i.e. by forcing the Korean scene to add SC2 to their leagues when SC2 was, and remains frankly, a poor substitute for BW). Blizzard also completely failed to properly support SC2 and its growth, despite shoving it down Starcraft fans' throats, in the way that companies like Valve and Riot did with their respective games. They made poor gameplay decisions (which you did touch on) and gave bare-minimum financial support for the esports scene. Very sad.
im waiting for the day you guys make an epic video about warcraft 3!
What killed SC:
– 2 Base Turtle Toss.
– Warhound Terran.
– Broodlord + Fungle + Broken infected marines.
Hell, it's about time.
for a new sc related content
This video is a great overview, but misses one key issue for Korean Starcraft. Life’s matchfixing effectively killed the Korean scene as investors who were already on the fence, pulled the plug on Proleague. Combined with the mentioned region lock (which did allow Europeans to flourish, like Serral, it was the end for Starcraft 2 in Korea. And I do agree Korea is a major nexus (pun intended) for any esport.