https://news.blizzard.com/en-gb/blizzard/22833558/heroes-of-the-storm-news
Just a little over a month-and-a-half after BlizzCon 2018, the company has posted a letter to the Heroes of the Storm (HotS) community to inform them of their decision to pull resources from the game (re-deploying personnel to other projects). The posting is “signed” by new president J. Allen Brack and Ray Gresko (currently a VP at Blizzard as chief development officer). Additionally, e-sports related activities for the franchise are also being cancelled including something they touted at BlizzCon, the Heroes Global Championship.
Does this come as a surprise to me? No (especially more so given the recent hints that the company has shifted to a more growth oriented approach including embracing mobile, along with the high level departures). HotS was given a really long leash as they were trying to leverage the franchise (along with several others) for Blizzard’s e-sports initiative (something the company has been pouring a lot of money into). As noted in the letter, the “cadence” of the updates will be slowing (since it was at a pretty breakneck pace when it came to how often they would release new heroes). Reading between the not so subtle lines, the game is sort of going into a maintenance mode (not full on but sort of like what D3 has been in after the release of the Necromancer DLC). Going off on a short tangent, I haven’t really written much about e-sports (including Blizzard’s push) mainly because parts of it reminds me of the dot-com era where metrics were juiced up as needed. Industry watchers have pegged e-sports to become a $1.7 billion industry by 2021 (it’s currently around half-a-billion on a world wide basis with the majority of that coming from Asia).
So there is a vested interest by those involved to see e-sports become more widely accepted where the money for tournaments aren’t being primarily footed by the game companies that create the titles that are being leveraged for that purpose. The problem is that the actual numbers including viewership and attendance tend to be juiced up (I wouldn’t trust what comes out of China for example when it comes to attendance of e-sport events because no one really knows how many of those attendees are actually legitimate or are just paid to fill a seat at a venue and cheer). During the Internet bubble, there were a lot of shenanigans when it came to reporting metrics that companies who were filing IPO’s, would file in their prospectus. One of those was page views for which there was no verifiable means used except to take what the company reported as (there was no breakdown including unique IP’s which could also be fudged using software situated at various points-of-presence or in the case of CDN’s, simply using proxies or VPN’s).
And yes, those page view numbers were a huge driver to sell the story of the potential growth opportunities in these dot-com stocks. A lot of these shenanigans have persisted over time but into more convoluted/nebulous metrics including ad impressions, ad rolls (in videos), etc. This is why there are websites today that continually cross link (ad based) to other sites all controlled by the same individual or same group of entities as a way to juice up their ad impressions (and thus revenues) via this conversion (there is still a lot of money being generated out of nowhere) along with SEO to increase their search engine results (search for “warrior forum – digital marketing forum”, read through some older threads, and see how some of this “affiliate marketing” stuff works on a massive scale since there are some who have been gaming the system since the late 90’s and are now beyond multi-millionaires just running a bunch of sites on auto-pilot). My point is that I see some of the same marketing tactics being used to push the e-sports narrative in trying to make it more mainstream.
The thing is that e-sports needs to grow more organically (as opposed to the big game companies shoving a lot of money into the tournaments and prize money into the pool) while the corporations need to begin dealing with the mouth breathers who tend to comprise most of the professional teams that are formed. Despite the numbers that are being touted, there is still a psychological stigma involved where video games are still not viewed on the same level as traditional sports. I’ve written before about how I view professional StarCraft players as being exceptionally skillful (real time decision making, mental concentration, keyboard and mouse dexterity). But I also draw the line there since I also realize that most people who may enjoy traditional competitive sports, likely won’t find watching a StarCraft match as being entertaining. Bottomline, part of it is demographic and the fact that most anyone over 40 years of age, did not consume the majority of their media mostly online.
Until that demographic changes where the much younger generation (who have different viewing habits when it comes to entertainment) becomes the majority in terms of where the money actually comes from, e-sports is going to have this stigma and acceptance issue. In the meantime though, the companies with vested interests are going to continue pushing it because they stand the most to gain in the long term.
Digressing though, HotS came into the MOBA world with a Blizzard spin to it. The problem is that both League of Legends and DotA 2 (which ironically grew out of a Warcraft III mod) were already very well established and additionally, have a much higher skill cap even though HotS leveraged data learned from StarCraft and StarCraft II. Because Blizzard has had a mandate to capture a wide demographic (including the ultra casual crowd), HotS had to be dumbed down. Competitive and professional players can still play it at a high skill level but the game (despite leveraging their other franchises intellectual property when it came to playable heroes), lacked its own uniqueness due to that. I think on paper, it comes across as a sound idea (get all your “all stars” together in a single game) but all it is doing is “talking” to the same Blizzard crowd that plays their various franchises (as opposed to attracting a lot of other players who aren’t necessarily huge Blizzard fans).
While I initially did “play” it, that was against the AI and sometimes with a friend and not the way it was meant to be played which is full on cooperative (thus I don’t consider the 100 hours that I played it that way, as actually really playing). After the initial novelty wore off, it just became a footnote where not even the cross promotion stuff was enough (plus I was already falling off the Blizzard train at that point). While it may come as a surprise to those within the Blizzard community (who are familiar with the various franchises), there are still many who aren’t. So these “heroes” from those franchises don’t have a lot of significance or even attachment to those folks.
The point is that as a MOBA, there was nothing exceptional about the game to draw in a larger population even though the barrier to entry was low (easy to grasp plus free-to-play). And even though Blizzard kept pouring resources into it (people time and money), it probably wasn’t translating into the revenue (skins and booster packs) they were expecting nor player growth/retention. The e-sports angle was also burning money considering the fact that Blizzard is still sponsoring most of it with respect to HotS (they can spin the eyeball numbers and actual interest whichever way but I just don’t see genuine interest across a broader demographic which would translate into actual revenues for the company (like interest in merchandising, interest from a non-captive audience who will feel compelled to go out and purchase a Blizzard game and also spend additional money on it, etc).
All of this is also making it apparent why Mike Morhaime stepped down as CEO and president. The pressure was there to show more growth (as opposed to the slow and steady approach) and he may have simply disagreed with the moves he would’ve needed to make in order to turn the ship in that direction (which for a company the size of Blizzard, can take years to happen). Even Chris Metzen admitted (after retiring from Blizzard) he was having anxiety attacks about coming up with something bigger/better. Blizzard obviously missed out on the huge mobile wave by not pursuing it starting at least 4 years ago (and even that would be considered late). The top leadership at the time were like the rest of us “dinosaurs” though; much more heavily PC gaming centric while occasionally dabbling in a mobile title or two.
The companies main bread and butter at that time was also World of Warcraft (and still is considering its business model being a buy-to-play monthly subscription with microtransactions and other paid services one) but its recurring revenues were cyclical since players would tend to drop their subs after an expansion and return with a new one. When the company rolled out Hearthstone and then Overwatch, it seemed like they were on a roll (especially with the latter considering it was a completely new IP utilizing salvaged assets from project Titan which burned through a lot of resources). But conceptualizing, creating, and designing new IP’s isn’t easy (which is why “Blizzard All Stars” ended up becoming Heroes of the Storm). But the interest that a Blizzard fan may have had with those heroes, didn’t pan out with the much bigger demographic of gamers who aren’t involved or as interested with Blizzard’s titles. Thus this “RIF” (reduction in force) headcount reduction decision.
It’s obviously not the news a fan of the game would want to hear though especially coming just a few weeks after it seemed like there were big e-sports plans for the game in 2019. The rather sudden resignation of Morhaime just prior to BlizzCon 2018 clearly did not leave enough time for Brack to get a clear picture of what he was going to be tasked with (including a decision like this). Clearly, changes are afoot at Blizzard where the once solid AAA studio is now having this tenuous relationship with portions of their player community.
