What might have caused the decline of StarCraft 2 numbers?

How balance patches affect StarCraft - https://youtu.be/xMWI-340DLc?si=YRZkIEuObaE3iVwW 🔷Check out Our new Project FGC Storyteller - youtube.com/@fgcstoryteller 🔷 Check out my personal channels - youtube.com/@Gaming_Essays & youtube.com/@RTSCasts Timecodes: 00:00 intro 00:40 Balance 03:20 Region lock 08:30 Monetization 11:20 RTS Decli

One thing that has changed between 2010 and 2024 is the sheer amount of stuff competing for our attention. When your choice to do something is between IRL stuff, social media, mobile games, PC games, music streaming and video streaming, I don't see it all that odd that SC2 and RTS got proportionally less popular. Coop game takes 20-25 mins. Ladder requires hundreds of hours of effort until it begins to resemble fun. Campaign missions can take 1h+ easily if you don't know what you're doing. Also, we do not have people saying what they enjoy about the game, we just generally have people who bitch and moan how much they hate playing the game and keep playing nevertheless. Bitching and moaning doesn't tend to attract excitement. Despite me hating how losing makes me feel, I still love the rhythm part of the game. Long macro games are kinda like Guitar Hero, Rocksmith or Beat Saber sort of experiences.

If swarm host issues were addressed early, a lot of their players would be retained.

Bro. I’ve been playing SC for 24 years. I’ve had friends who played die, have kids. Life changes. StarCraft numbers never went down. Life just kept happening. I’m 33 and StarCraft has and will be the biggest part of my life when I’m gone. We were young, energized, and excited for the community we all had.

Thank you for the video, very interesting! As a Brood War player I want to reply to 12:30 I personally don't think SC2 is too casual, quite the opposite in fact. I believe Brood War is in many aspects more casual. SC2 in it's design, and especially later in development with LotV feels like it is extremely streamlined and focused on optimization. The fact that it is mechanically easier to do stuff in SC2 puts even more focus on mathematical optimization of builds and timings. I'd argue that this makes SC2 less appealing to the casual gamer, since the only correct response to a well executed and optimized stategy is to have a well executed and optimized build yourself. In Brood War, you have far more room to manouver around problems due to the mechanical difficulties, different scaling of economy and variety of openings. When playing both Brood War and SC2 with friends that haven't played either, they often have a better time messing around with the game in BW. In SC2, the one who manages to do something somewhat viable tends to absolutely roll over more inexperienced players. As for high level players, it would make no sense to call SC2 more casual. Sure, you might be able to pay more attention to your army in SC2 because of streamelined macro mechanics, but it is still extremely hardcore. But for the actual casual gamers, BW as a game (!) is more welcoming.

As long as the player number decreases in SC2 are roughly equal to the player number increases in all the new RTS coming out we'll remember SC2 as the best competitive RTS of all time while being glad we have plenty to play in the future that could come close to it.

Dude the game was released 14 years ago. Are there any video games that old that don’t experience a decrease in players and popularity? If there are it’s a tiny percent of all the games out there.

I've always thought that Blizzard made a huge mistake by never making 2v2 or even 3v3 tournaments a thing. If you look at every major esport pretty much all of them have Team element to it. I get that it might not have been as competitive and balanced as 1v1 was, but they could've still tried. By having a competitive Team games scene it would make players who don't enjoy the 1v1 aspect still play the game. It's hard to take Sc2 team games seriously when there is no professional scene for it whatsoever.

And still people are playing SC2, I never have a problem matching with someone, and I’m a noob.

Dead game? more like the Golden Age. My understanding is that the community has taken over balance and maps? If so the guys who love this game will polish it and it will live forever.

look guys, the reason it just didnt do well is because most people just prefer an "EASIER" to play game. They preferred to control 1 UNIT rather than a whole army.

I can only speak for myself and my friends. We quit playing because, once all was said and done, we thought SC2 was just worse than Brood War. Even now, that I've been watching a few games of SC2 and BW after a long time of not caring about either, I find myself enjoying the BW matches more. In SC2 there are things I thought were pretty good, but overall I think we lost too much cool BW stuff. Even in small stuff, like spells and their names, BW outshines them. For example, neither the infestor or viper can compare to how cool the defiler was. His spells felt perfect for the army. Dark Swarm and Plague sound cool and powerful, compared to fungal growth or blinding cloud.

I'm still waiting for part 2 of the Terran mech series! Hopefully, Gumiho gets more mention! Glad you brought him up in his game against MMA in the previous video on maps!

SC2 is too hard to learn for new people, especially when you have really good people already playing. It's not fun if you're new to this game

It is ao frustrating the fact that the most skilled players is doomed to lose to Zerg because of balance. Looks like Blizzard is cool with justo Zerg being overpower and having all the answers. Its more of a boss fight than a competition.

As a casual player I need a mode without abilities. For people with low APM like myself its frustrating to control an army, where almost every unit needs manual control to be effective.

As a Starcraft 2 co-op content creator I have to say it's really sad that it's the most 'dead' part of Starcraft 2, despite being the biggest Blizzard's source of income from Starcraft, if not the only one because I don't think a lot of people are buying campaigns these days, maybe some Direct Strike premium content, but I know a lot of guys still buying co-op commanders. By 'dead' I mean that nothing new is getting introduced since Blizzard practically left us in 2020. The only thing was some bug fixes made by community member TangorCraft some 2 years ago & given to Blizzard just to upload. So we have to take over to get at least new weekly mutations, I made some & tested but am not a coder, so need help with that. That's the first step, 2nd step will be some changes to commanders, 3rd step probably some new maps! Anybody with programming & coding knowledge please join!

Widow mines made me quit back in the day.. still love watching it though!

Easy answer: ZERG Swarm host meta ruined most of late HotS and Zerg winning about 60% of the prize money since LotV makes it ultimately boring, with awful mirror match-up finals. The decline of sc2 in Korea after the match-fixing scandals as well as the decline of esports team-houses combined with the utter dominance of Zerg in the non-GSL format made sc2 less interesting for viewers.

Its a hard game to master... The esport scen got stolen from other bigger games, and when they tryed to make some casual modes in the game it didnt really make a big splash... Blizzard didnt teally know what to do with the ip, what direction they wanted to go. Also i feel its a huge misstake to remove units. They should have added and kept the once already in. That would give players more options and create some uniqe playstyles.