I'd Love To See More Gameplay-Oriented Analytical Content in RTS

A commentary on content creation, especially in StarCraft

I’ve been making videos and writing articles for nearly nine years now. During that time, I’ve watched a lot of people try their hand at content creation, especially in the StarCraft community, and especially as casters.

I always think it’s great when people make stuff; a few years back I even pulled together some resources to make it easier to get started. And generally speaking, I feel there are a lot of opportunities in the RTS space for new creators. But, I also think there are some pitfalls, and I especially want to highlight that that don’t think the ecosystem is very good at matching opportunities with talent.

The Content Doom Loop

I think there are many types of content creators and I don’t want to overfit everyone into one box. But there’s a path, let’s say, that I think is pretty common. New creators seem especially drawn to it. It works something like this:

1. Create a thing - a video, stream, article, etc

2. Share that thing, via reach (the YouTube algorithm, your own social media, etc) and shares (Reddit, retweets, hosts from a larger streamer, etc)

3. Generate engagement, both short-term (views, likes) and long-term (follows, subscribes)

4. Repeat

The idea, roughly, is that engagement will durably increase over time - more followers → more shares → more engagement → more followers. The more you produce, the bigger you get; becoming a personality, establishing a community. Eventually, you might even hit discrete milestones, like insider access, invitations to cast premiere events, appearances on community talk shows or podcasts, etc. These further feed into the loop, generating more followers, more shares, and more engagement.

Again, not everyone takes this path. But it’s very appealing, and I’ve seen a lot of people grind at it. And I call it a doom loop because I think it guides people in the wrong direction, and leads them to make short-sighted decisions about what type of content they should make. In the case of casters, for example, I think it incentivizes people to develop into play-by-play commentators or hypecasters, a very competitive content ecosystem where it can be hard to break through.

Let me make up an example to illustrate. Let’s say Harstem plays ByuN in a tournament, and wins by following a build order where he proxies two robotics facilities and follows up with a hidden base. This is an unusual way of playing the game, and it would be impressive to beat a top player like ByuN with that playstyle.

We can all imagine the videos and streams that would come out of this - titles like “He proxied TWO ROBOS?!?!?” or “Hiding an ENTIRE BASE in the WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP??”. The thumbnail would be a picture of Harstem making a funny face, and an arrow from his face to a Robotics Facility or a Nexus. Maybe ByuN’s face would appear, too, looking aghast, with a big red X on it. The cast itself would be a procedural play-by-play with periodic hype of how insane this build is and how crazy the game gets.

We can all imagine a video like this because over the years we have all seen a million videos just like it. And I think these videos are popular because the doom loop rewards them - they’re cheap to make, they usually generate engagement, and they do well on places like Reddit. It feels good to make a video like this and get a bunch of likes and subscribes.

But I think the popularity of this type of content is a double-edged sword. It means that a lot of content creators are already competing in the same space - many of them very skilled, with existing large followings or unique value-adds like being a former pro player. It’s hard to compete with folks like that. Your video is likely to get a fraction of the views compared to what Lowko or Winter or, hell, Harstem himself is going to make. Partly this is because they’re bigger players in a winner-take-all environment, and partly because they’re just very good at what they do. All things being equal, it’s hard to meaningfully grow. And that’s thinking optimistically - your content might not get any traction at all! In a saturated ecosystem for a game with a stable-but-not-growing playerbase, there’s often just more content than there are eyeballs.

And so I think what happens is people see success here or there, because when you’re operating in a popular space, you’re bound to get some engagement. And upon seeing that, they think: I just need to work harder. Cast more games, stream more ladder, create more guides. And they work and work and work, always getting something but not quite landing the engagement that takes them to where they want to go. And eventually they burn themselves out on a treadmill that, in my opinion, few people climb off of successfully.

I mean, I don’t want to be overly pessimistic. People do break through. Harstem did it as a YouTuber, for example. Granted, he did first spend tens of thousands hours grinding to become a top-tier StarCraft player over the course of nearly a decade. Just do that, am I right? I mean, speaking personally, that sounds really hard. It’s not that surprising to me that many people don’t succeed at it.

I think about this loop anytime I see a new person casting replays from the latest tournament - or any other type of highly competitive content, like a new ladder streamer, or a new community caster on the C stream of a major tournament. And I’m especially mindful of survivorship bias when it comes to creating this kind of content. How many streamers, casters, and video makers just up and quit after working at it, sometimes for years? Quitting by itself is not inherently a failure, but in most cases (at least from my anecdotal observations), it’s not like people reached their goals and moved on to something else - they tried, they weren’t happy with where they ended up, and their stuff just sort of petered out.

So I get that there are some short-term rewards to this type of work. But I also feel that it is challenging to translate into a meaningfully large audience in the long-term, or to get you closer to tangible goals you might have with your content, like doing it as your full-time job or getting hired to cast a big event or even something as simple as finding “your niche”. It is just too competitive and too crowded of a space. And honestly, I would call giving up the happy case failure path - I’ve also seen some unfortunate edge cases, like creators getting cringey* in their thirst for insider access, or getting unreasonably mad at other creators for not retweeting them.

Creating Value

I think there’s a different way of thinking about content creation; specifically, the idea that it’s about chasing opportunities that are under-served by existing content. The creator is serving a need and doing a job for the viewer that’s not currently being performed. (Ideally, the creator is uniquely positioned to provide this value, but I don’t think that’s a requirement.) And I think this has the potential to work well because it orients content around solving user problems (value) instead of around what will generate the most short-term engagement (reach).

Be in the right place - and wait for the right time to happen.

Of course, I’m not in a place to say this is an instant formula for success - I’m still a small creator after nine years, so what do I know about growth - but I think it’s at least as likely as “the grind”, and I think it’s more enjoyable, too. And while I think there are many such opportunities in the RTS space, the one that I happen to know about is that analytical, gameplay-oriented content is not a well-served market in RTS; especially around build orders, especially around the evolution of the meta.

Time to get out that ‘ol soapbox. I feel that StarCraft II is, in many ways, a game about build orders. The intricacies of building this or skipping that or positioning a unit here or there - small, subtle things - have a large impact on how individual games play out. And because the game runs at a breathtaking pace, it can be easy to miss when you’re sitting at home watching.

Unfortunately, I feel that content across the ecosystem - from tournament broadcasts to YouTube creators to my own articles here on Substack - leaves a lot on the table in exploring this space. When StarCraft II was booming following free-to-play, I started to see nuggets here and there (I’m thinking of in-depth with NoRegreT and Artosis, for example). But I still feel it was never quite where it could have been, even at its peak. I actually think one reason Harstem’s content got so popular is because, in between making jokes and poking fun at the players he’s casting, he’s making comments about gas timings and Pylon placements and match-up theorycrafting and oh, he built an extra one of these units, here’s what that could mean. You just don’t see that very much.

To phrase it somewhat unfairly, what you do see is stuff like “ah, he’s opening Stargate”, followed by a lot of commentary on Adept micro.

Analytical, gameplay-oriented content, in my view, is part of the reason Tastosis was so successful. They often split their StarCraft II casts into play-by-play (Tasteless) and analysis (Artosis). This enabled them to go deep on build order choices or unit positioning or reactions or things like that, compared to other broadcasts; they never crowded each other out. And where they really shined was on meta development and player history. “Ah, the standard follow-up was X, but that fell out of fashion due to Y, so now you see players doing Z…” And that was really interesting!

Now, you might be wondering about my own stuff - don’t I always describe this Substack as “in-depth analytical content”? And that’s true, but I want to clarify that what I’m really looking for is for content that teases apart, explains, clarifies, and just otherwise demystifies the complexities of the gameplay and the meta. I’m looking for creators who are really involved in the meat and potatoes of high-level ladder and who then take that depth of knowledge and experience to talk about what the meta is and why it’s that way and where it might be going and how it ended up there and all of that type of thing. And while I do stuff like that on occasion - and, inspired by this article, will try to do more of it in the future - I just don’t stick with ladder grinds for long enough periods to do it regularly or at a quality bar I’m happy with.

I get that it’s not the hottest category of work. (One of the best Age of Empires IV players in the world has spent the past couple months explaining the entire meta, match-up by match-up, to the tune of only 1k viewers on YouTube). And I get that viewers are not always amenable, too. In the casting space, for example, I think commentators are often unfairly accused of not understanding the game, when the reality is that viewers are typically so out of the loop that a lot of “real” analysis would probably bore them. For example, I think if you polled the average StarCraft II viewer on even very high level build order differences, like 1-1-1 vs. 3-1-1 vs. 5-1-1 for Terran, or 1-gate or 2-gate before Nexus for Protoss, they wouldn’t be able to tell you much beyond well, more gates means more units. And if you’re not good at explaining those ideas to them, you risk them tuning out.†

What does it look like to explain the intricacies of 2-oracle vs. 3-oracle in PvZ, in a way that’s accurate, in-depth, entertaining, and accessible to the average StarCraft viewer, in less than 15 seconds? I have no idea, honestly. It sounds hard! And maybe that’s why it’s almost never done. But I feel stuff like that is an area that’s underserved in StarCraft II, and I would love to see more of it.

Personally, I’d like to put my money where my mouth is and create some content in this space for Age of Empires IV (and perhaps, eventually, Stormgate). I get that’s not exactly saying much, since Brown Bear RTS is read by, like, five people. But I believe in this idea. I think it could really turn into something!

Until next time,
brownbear

If you’d like, you can follow me on Twitter and Facebook and check out my YouTube and Twitch channels.

* I really dislike the word “cringe”, because it’s both useless and self-centered - it’s a description of how the author is reacting to a behavior instead of a direct description of the behavior itself. I use it here because Brown Bear RTS is a hip and cool weekly commentary series that is totally “in” with Gen Z, and that all the folks are talking about over on the Pickleball courts. A boomer writer might have written something like “overly deferential to developers”, a phrasing that a vaping dabber like myself would never use.

† Funny aside - one of the stranger manifestations of this on Reddit is when folks claim that region lock worsened the gameplay of Korean professionals, or that top Koreans in early Legacy were better at the game compared to foreigners in 2018-2019. I see this stuff from time to time and it baffles me. A quick look at build order efficiency and reactionary decision making will tell you that everyone consistently improved from the launch of Legacy through to today. ByuN won Blizzcon 2016 off the back of 2-1-1, which is a terrible build! I sometimes wonder whether such folks even play or watch StarCraft, or if they are simply enamored with “the idea” of being a StarCraft fan.