StarCraft II Is Not Dead

There's no need for fatalism, not yet anyway

IEM Katowice 2023 came and went a few weeks back, capping off yet another season of professional StarCraft II. Watching Oliveira’s legendary run unfold on a busy Sunday afternoon, I started working on a piece wondering whether a more aggressive tuning philosophy, especially around map pools, was a good direction to head in now that the professional players’ balance council was off and running.

Little did I know - I was writing about a game that was dead!

StarCraft II Is Still Really Successful

Peering over the StarCraft II Reddit this morning, I noticed that this post was casually rocking one of the top spots on the page:

It's no secret Starcraft 2 is plummeting in playerbase and tournament size especially with the devastating recent news about tournament funding.

That doesn’t sound great!

StarCraft II features a healthy playerbase. Ladder games played per day is still substantially higher than pre-free-to-play. Age of Empires II - a game that by all accounts is doing great - has about 1/5 the 1v1s per day, and about 1/10 the concurrent games*. Age 2 also has substantially less investment in its casual content, lacking a proper cooperative mode and featuring a worse arcade and custom lobby search. I think it would be reasonable to assume that StarCraft II’s cooperative is more popular (proportionally), given that we know it’s a much larger player population than StarCraft II’s competitive base.

More broadly, the Age of Empires franchise in 2019 (pre-Age of Empires IV) sat at around 1 million monthly active players. Judging by Steam numbers, it’s since grown by around 60-80% (driven mostly by Age of Empires II). While we don’t have public MAU numbers for Age of Empires IV, we can extrapolate from concurrent users that it’s about half as popular as Age of Empires II; for the sake of argument, let’s assume it’s contributing 500-750k MAUs.

Prior to free-to-play, StarCraft II had around 2 million monthly active users. Games played per day indicates it’s still meaningfully larger than that. This means that, even with conservative estimates, and ignoring the fact that StarCraft II has been more or less abandoned for the past three years, it’s still as large as the entire Age of Empires franchise.

How many of you are going out and proclaiming that all of Age of Empires is dead?

It’s Good To Be Realistic

Look, I get it. Blizzard is not actively maintaining StarCraft II. The player population, while not plummeting, is slowly declining. Next year’s professional season features almost no funding for Korea. Even the foreign circuit is substantially slimmed down, and the world championship may not even be held at Katowice. It’s especially painful to know all of this while watching Age of Empires II nearly double in size, showing how much the RTS segment is growing and knowing how large of an opportunity Blizzard missed out on.

But I think it’s good not to catastrophize and instead think about the range of likely outcomes and, more importantly, what we as a community can do to contribute to better outcomes.

For example, I think that many people will read this piece and note that Age of Empires is doing well because Microsoft is actively supporting the franchise. But personally, I try to remember two things about that arrangement:

• Microsoft was also responsible for shutting down development of Age of Empires back in the late 2000s. It was the community that kept it going for years and years, particularly Age of Empires II via Forgotten Empires, which started as a community group.

• Microsoft is in the midst of acquiring Activision Blizzard, meaning they could give StarCraft II the same type of support they offered to Age of Empires. As I noted above, the business opportunity is just as large, if not larger.

I think it would be reasonable to see the next few years as an opportunity for the community, particularly via the newly established professional players’ council, to drive the direction of the game (however modestly we can) while waiting and hoping for renewed developer interest. I’m not here to tell you that’s definitely going to happen, but I think it’s a fatalistic to assume it’s definitely not going to happen, too.

I also think it’s worthwhile to get excited about other games. I hope Stormgate is successful; same for Immortals. I wrote just a few weeks back that Age of Empires IV is heading in a great direction, too, and might pleasantly surprise a few StarCraft II players with its fast-paced gameplay.

It’s all about probabilities and likely outcomes and doing what we can to increase the probabilities of good outcomes. Pinning all your hopes on one thing or the other is a recipe for disappointment. But giving up entirely on a game with millions of monthly active users doesn’t seem like a good idea, either.

For instance, lost in the negativity around the cuts to Korean StarCraft was the fact that ESL decided to independently fund an entire season of professional StarCraft II. That’s a big deal! Esports are traditionally a cost center allocated under a game’s marketing budget. For a tournament organizer to see it as worthwhile to independently invest in a professional circuit is a positive development. I think this is a great example of the downstream effects of COVID - tournament organizers realized you can produce a pretty high quality broadcast for extremely low-cost online tournaments. Much of the new season will happen online, and as much as I prefer to watch LANs, from a cost-benefit perspective, I get it.

Where do we go from here?

I think this is a reasonable set of next steps for any community member who’s interested in supporting StarCraft II:

• Keep supporting your favorite players and content creators, whether it’s by subscribing to them on Twitch or donating small amounts to fund the professional scene. Check out this initiative by Chickenman, for example, to promote Korean StarCraft.

• If you’re a professional player or content creator, work to make the game better. I think the most recent professional players’ balance patch was a step in the right direction. I’d love to see the council consider all three of design, balance, and the map pool together for their next effort; and I think it would be even better to plan for regular updates instead of seeing it as an ad-hoc initiative.

• Speak realistically about the game. You don’t need to hype it up as the biggest thing ever. But don’t pretend it’s dead, either. StarCraft II continues to be the most successful competitive real-time strategy game ever made. If anyone asks you for an RTS recommendation, this is still the game you should recommend.

• Leverage the lessons of StarCraft II to influence and support other RTS games. A lot of people still don’t realize how much cooperative gameplay has revolutionized the RTS formula, for instance. Don’t be that guy trying to force one game’s design vision on everything else. But this game was massively successful for a reason, and where those lessons can be applied elsewhere, try to be a helpful emissary to spread them along.

I really believe that this not the end for StarCraft II, but merely a bump in the road. Maybe I’m wrong about that, but I think it’s worthwhile to play the probabilities and work toward better outcomes across the board. And I think we as a community have a lot of leverage to make the game as good as it can be.

Until next time!
brownbear

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* Age 2’s concurrent games covers all game types that are played online; Blizzard has not publicly revealed what game types StarCraft II’s concurrent games counter tracks.