My favorite moba is Heroes of the Storm but I still check out League Worlds and DotA2's The International, despite not playing either game.
StarCraft 2 is a decade old and viewership is still pretty solid for big events. Brood Wars is two decades old and they still get thousands of viewers!
That's abysmal, it's not even on par with people who watch competitive hot dog eating.
[1] https://escharts.com/tournaments/sc2/dh-sc2-masters-2022-atl...
It's a matter of perspective. If the Superbowl struggled to sell tickets, but more people than ever were playing football in parks, would that mean the sport is dying or thriving? I think that's what this article almost managed to figure out: esports isn't failing, esports in a big arena with cheerleaders and fireworks is failing, while esports in the form of streamers cobbling together a decent paycheck from youtube+twitch+patreon is surprisingly popular.
Blizzard officially sponsors the ESL Pro Tour and DreamHack SC2 Masters [2].
LoL is also older than SC2, it was released in 2009 whereas SC2 was released in 2010.
I am not going to argue that esports is dead, I don't think it is. I will argue that SC2 is dead, just looking at Twitch right now, there are only 1.2k viewers for the game as a whole. As I write this post, there are three times more people watching a single woman doing nothing but eat Jello than the entirety of people watching Starcraft 2.
[1] https://escharts.com/games/lol
[2] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/mtgs-esl-and-dreamh...
LoL might be technically older than SC2, but surely you would agree that SC2's heyday came a long time before LoL's, yes? My point isn't to compare them and say one is better than the other, but to say that SC2 is further along than LoL on the same curve. In other word's, LoL's future probably isn't "bigger than soccer" nor "totally dead", it's "chugging along with a small steady player base and a few hundred people playing it professionally, but not filling arenas", which is where SC2 has been for 5+ years.
edit: as for investment, I think Blizzard's "sponsorship" amounts to letting them use the logo. Certainly they're not paying for things like professional caster studios and advertising, like Riot does.
Not sure what you count as a heyday, but LoL was always more popular than SC2 as an eSport. LoL's first championship was in 2011 and debuted with 1.69 million viewers. The peak viewership for SC2 of all time was WCS 2018 with a peak viewership of 176k.
As for your statement about Blizzard, I think instead of guessing things further and just speculating on this subject, you should do some basic research. Your claims have all been wildly inaccurate. A simple Google search would inform you that Blizzard paid over 8 million dollars in sponsorship towards ESL Pro Tour, including 1.9 million dollars in prize money for 2020-2021 circuit and 2.4 million dollars for the 2021-2023 circuits.
The idea that Blizzard's sponsorship is nothing more than the rights for ESL to use a logo is so comically false I have to wonder if you're actually trying to discuss this in good faith or just trolling.
Look, maybe I undersold it, maybe Blizzard does chip in a non-trivial amount of prize money. But would you agree with my point, which is that Riot spends way more than Blizzard on the trappings of esports, and also that Blizzard used to spend a lot more than they do today? Who do you think pays the LoL casters, and who do you think pays the SC2 casters? And would you also agree that one day LoL's popularity will wane to SC2-like levels, and that the most likely outcome is that it will more or less resemble SC2 in the sense that it is still a real esport with real tournaments and people playing it professionally, but would constitute a "failed esport" in the sense that this article is portraying esports as failing because they don't pack arenas like regular sports?
Dota2 have all levels of competition historically Valve did "just" the big tourmanent while letting various orgs that popped out of the scene to handle them, it feels way more organic vs LoL/Riot approach of having iron grip over everything competitive
But since I'm being called out, a) I meant regular LoL events get at least 200k views; I was emphasizing how high it is compared to SC2, so pointing out that the championships got even more is not disputing that, b) I don't know how much Blizzard spends on tourney money, nor Riot or Valve; but I do follow SC2 casually, and the consensus view among the people who would know about Blizzard certainly seems to be that it has dwindled, and c) I looked, the NFL's twitch channel has 62k subscribers and hasn't streamed in months, but I didn't say "Gotcha!" because when I see something that seems way wrong I like to default to assuming that either I misunderstood or they misspoke, and in either case it hardly seems relevant to this discussion.
Avoid getting information from biased sources. Gaming communities are notoriously bad when it comes to remaining objective about topics or presenting quantitative data that can be independently verified.
>I looked, the NFL's twitch channel has 62k subscribers and hasn't streamed in months, but I didn't say "Gotcha!"
That's because NFL games aren't streamed on the NFL Twitch account, they are streamed on the following account:
https://www.twitch.tv/primevideo
Here's a source that the NFL is viewed by 10.8 million people on Twitch:
https://www.marketingdive.com/news/nfls-audience-on-twitch-l...
Relevant quote:
"Twitch received 10.8 million views for “Thursday Night Football,” for a total of 2.2 million hours viewing time, per the announcement."
Your false assertion about the NFL's Twitch channel is once again, comically false and goes to show that you simply do not understand how to properly research this topic, getting your information from biased sources and based on people's feelings instead of looking up authoritative sources that can be quantifiably verified.
I would advise that you refrain from taking that biased misinformation and spreading it further.
>in either case it hardly seems relevant to this discussion.
Then why did you bring it up? If it was never relevant, why did you decide to waste both of our time by making an issue out of it? This is what I mean about discussing things in good faith, you placed the burden on me to look up information that you sought, and then when I point it out and it turns out that the NFL is wildly popular on Twitch getting 10s of millions of views, you decide to do a 180 and declare that it's not relevant.
I brought up the NFL in response to you saying, "As I write this, there are [not many] people watching SC2 [on twitch]." I meant that casually checking Twitch can give a false impression of something's popularity. I wasn't suggesting the NFL was unpopular.
I also thought I made it pretty clear that my response to your comment about NFL viewership was that we were likely misunderstanding each other, as opposed to accusing you of being wrong. Please consider doing the same next time. This has been a very unpleasant conversation.
It's very unpleasant for me too when someone just makes uninformed statements and then places the entire burden of researching and fact checking those statements on me, as if I'm the one who's supposed to verify your claims instead of you.
There's a sort of Internet principle known as Brandolini's Law [1] that states that one reason there is so much bullshit on the Internet is that it's significantly harder for someone to refute bullshit than it is for someone to spread bullshit. That's basically how I feel about this conversation, and I am tempted to continue discussing it not because I care specifically about you, but because esports is a subject I am personally involved in and care about and so I have a vested interest in putting in the effort to avoid others from being misinformed by the bullshit you seem to continue to spread unapologitically.
That requires considering the context and interpreting ambiguous comments charitably, as suggested in the HN Guidelines: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." When you misinterpreted my comment and triumphantly declared me wrong and accused me of bad faith, well, that's the opposite of that. Anyone can misunderstand something, it happens, but you need to be willing to say, "Either that guy's crazy or I'm missing something" and default to the latter rather than the former, like I did about the NFL thing.
Also it might be worth taking a step back and considering the topic, and whether such a combative tone is appropriate for it. And while you're at it, do you even disagree with the point of my comments, as opposed to the numbers? If so, I missed the part where you said so.
That's how silly you sound right now. You made up a number and pulled it out of nowhere in order to make your argument seem more legitimate than it was, and when I pointed out that you are wrong by an entire order of magnitude along with a source you could use to better inform yourself, instead of just acknowledging you were wrong, you decided to double down on your ignorance. Now instead of discussing the actual topic at hand, you want to derail the conversation into one about etiquette, politeness, HN Guidelines and how unpleasant this conversation is for you despite the fact that no one is forcing you into it.
You certainly don't need to publicly admit you're wrong, I don't care one way or another what you personally think... but you also shouldn't attempt so desperately to save face either.
> ...by an entire order of magnitude...
I chose such a low number, ironically, to avoid a conversation like this one. When you're suggesting that a number is high (as I was), it makes sense to choose a lower bound because it makes your claim stronger. Suppose I had said that LoL events get 5M - then you could've replied, "Nuh uh, here's an event that only got 1M views!" If I had said 1M, you could've said, "Well here's one that only got 500k!" I chose the lowest number I could that would still support my point (which, again was that LoL gets a lot more viewers than SC2), to be more confident no one could argue with it.
If you respond, could you please clarify what you think my argument was? You said I made up a number to make my argument more legitimate. What argument? What could I have been arguing that would've been strengthened by suggesting LoL's viewership is lower than it really is?
Don't invent numbers or facts to mislead people into thinking you know more about this topic than you do. If you don't want to discuss specific numbers, then don't state specific numbers, say that "More people do X than Y" without trying to get specific about how many people do either.
When you invent facts to justify your position, you mislead people who don't otherwise know any better and misrepresent yourself as being more of a knowledgeable authority on a subject than you really are. This is how misinformation gets spread.
Finally, when someone calls you out on incorrect facts, instead of playing the victim card and getting all defensive about it, own up to the mistake and use it as an opportunity to learn something new. As humiliating as it seems right now, I assure you not even one week from now you'll forget all about this bickering between us. The worst thing that can happen is you decide to continue believing incorrect facts all because you were too embarrassed to admit you were wrong about something that can be independently verified.
This is how we end up with people believing all kinds of wrong and harmful ideas, because they're just too proud or embarrassed to simply admit they got something wrong.
I've said all I care to about this topic, you can have the last word and all the best to in the future.
No. It was a fleeting thought in a casual conversation about video games, not a wikipedia entry. Read more charitably. Assume good faith. And maybe consider not arguing with someone unless you understand their point well enough to be confident you disagree with it.
> I've said all I care to about this topic, you can have the last word[s]
Nerf Zerg!
I'm reporting what I see in the channel counter. Since I'm still subscribed to some major SC2 channels I see the numbers even when I don't watch myself.
Tp me this is far from "dead", but I don't care about tens of thousands of viewers and lots of commercial activity. Just look at what this kind of "success" did for soccer. Maybe a bit more would be better, mostly for the Korean casts by the Tastosis duo, which unfortunately disappeared from Twitch and one has to go and watch it deliberately.
The other one I watch is Back2Warcraft (my only WCIII channel, so I name it directly instead of the game - but it's the biggest one anyway). 1k regularly, a few times that for the bigger events. Even the casters could not ignore the disaster that WC III Reforged was, and in quite a few ways still is.
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edit - Not a competition with lots of people, but he has 10+ "X to grand master" videos where he runs absurd builds to see if he can make them work.
I think for most people, viewership of 5-10k is absolutely abysmal, basically dead. You can get 5k people to watch almost anything, including people eating copious amounts of junk food.
GSL tournament streamed a few days ago and posted on youtube has ~100k views.
Personally, I sometimes catch some GSL broadcasts live or later on youtube, but SC2 outside of that context is basically dead to me. I haven't played ladder since the few months after the original release.
https://www.youtube.com/@afreecatvesports432/videos
The average viewership is 20k, with a peak of 32k.
Also for reference the last Superbowl was watched by 100M viewers.
Getting precise numbers for marquee sporting events is difficult, especially outside of the major US sports leagues, but the Super Bowl is on the shortlist for most-viewed single sporting event. Comparing only among US sports leagues, the Super Bowl has more viewers than the final game of the next several leagues combined--the next largest finals seems to have somewhere around 20M viewers.
By contrast, the smallest of the "big" US sports leagues can only manage around 5 million viewers for its final games.
The cost of in-game rewards is in most cases marginally zero in software.
It’s not until super recently that other brands have been going into esports advertising. Those newer brands, sure I can see them being lured by high viewer counts. But as an example, you can see the sponsors list in this page for the World Cyber Games 2005 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Cyber_Games_2005
Samsung, Intel, Razer, etc.
Do they? I played (completely casually) till 2013, and stopped watching after the 2014 championship. I didn’t understand it anymore. Too many new champions, meta changes that I didn’t keep up with. Patches that changed the behavior. I have a hard time seeing how inactive players keep being interested.
I grew up watching a lot of regular sports but also playing some games. Same deal, once I became busy and decided to stop keeping up with meta changes, champ changes, etc I stopped watching. But I had younger friends who had more time who kept hyping these events so I felt pressured to watch. Then their younger friends would hype up the events and watch. I also have some actual streamers in my friend group so they socially pressure me to watch as well. I've finally gotten old enough that most of my friends have largely stopped watching eSports for fun. Funny enough I still watch regular sports because the meta really doesn't change that much at all.