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Comment by bigstrat2003 | Hacker News Reader

bigstrat2003·

You realize people said the exact same stuff before SC2, right? Saying it's a dead genre, nobody is going to buy it so they won't make it, etc. And yet SC2 was extremely successful. I predict SC3 would be equally successful if Blizzard can do a good job making it (which is not certain these days).

> You also can’t play RTS games on consoles.

You certainly can. See Halo Wars.

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Halo Wars sold 16.7% of Halo 3’s first week sales according to Wikipedia.

It was commercially successful but not in a mainstream mass audience kind of way.

Yes, it proved that RTS can be done on a controller (arguably, StarCraft 64 kind of sort of proved that, too), but if you’ve ever played StarCraft 2 I think you’d agree that particular style of RTS is really not possible without a keyboard and mouse. The game is almost entirely revolving around maximizing your actions per minute.

I also think the RTS genre is very much less popular today and then it was at that time.

> The game is almost entirely revolving around maximizing your actions per minute.

Maybe for top tier play, but apm wasn’t really needed for regular play.

Just to debunk this myth, it used to be possible to get to diamond with 80-100 apm (which is very easy to achieve), efficient builds, fundamental rush defense, and a-move.

Not sure about now, but it was doable for many years.

I found that StarCraft 2 multiplayer wasn’t fun at all if you weren’t nearly giving yourself an anxiety attack trying to perfectly execute a laundry list of moves as fast as possible.

I have never felt so stressed while gaming, even when we talk about fast paced online shooters.

Maybe I wasn’t using the right strategy, I dunno.

It kinda looks like Blizzard is trying to build their own Borderlands-like game which would likely be a lot more fun and mass-market friendly.

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