Why is Blizzard so thirsty for Esports when their audience is casuals?

I cannot see them getting away with Overwatch until they AT LEAST fix the hit boxes.

I forget the numbers off hand but blizzard blows away piles on money every time they hold an event, e sport, or blizzcon.
Then came along Riot, and Valve who duped their customers into not just paying to cover their events, but they make loads off of them.
I haven't paid attention to them too closely lately; the last I heard of Valve was they even cut the Dota 2 community's e sport commentators, and talking heads pay to about half of the prior years, and they gave them a percentage of how many autographs they signed on digital items.

How blizzard manages to fuck up something so simple with every possible game eludes me as well.

With SC2 they thought they would get the koreans, which was and still is a big market. Not really working out well for them.
With Heroes of the Storm they thought they could reel in the dotafags and lolfags, but it was a complete failure, too late, too casual, low depth, yet aimed at e-sports etc.
With wow they had no idea what they were doing. But I never saw them try the really competitive side. They change everything every expansion so there is no stable base nor direction in that game.
With heartstone they wanted the cardfags and it worked. This is the only one that really worked and they are making a huge profit out of a really casual game. Competitive for cardfags is a different animal so I believe it worked there financially.

I think blizzard releases 1 game and tries to milk it in every way imaginable. For them that usually amounts to make it an e-sport, even though shit like diablo or wc3 were huge without it. But e-sports is the new fad among the corporate suits both in nu-blizz and activision so it's inevitable that a big title like Overcuck will try to go into e-sports.

E-sports are casual as fuck too.

They fucked handling Brood War's popularity in Korea and having been trying to reach that same height ever since. Back before vidya was accepted by the mainstream there was suddenly an entire country filling fucking stadiums just to watch one game. At the time Blizzard had practically zero involvement with the Korean esports scene, and Korea ended up making kespa just to deal with all the popularity and cash flow it was generating. Blizzard didn't get in on the action until 10 fucking years after BW was released, and when it did they had to fight legal battles just to try to get royalties from kespa.

Basically they want another game to explode like BW did so they can get in on the ground floor and control all the cash flow and advertising themselves this time around.

Maybe because your definition of casual is "hasn't been playing online fps since 99".
Because by that definition, even esports is casual, so obviously blizz is making good marketing decisions.

I guess they saw all the money and promotion from their starcraft gamse and wanted more of that.

But they didnt realize that you cant just make a clone of TF2 and throw buckets of money at it.
The game itself needs to be good like Brood war.

This. So much this.
When the esports lineup includes shit like moba trash, cod, overcuck, and csgo, then esports is casual as fuck.

I guess a company is never satisfied with just huge game sales. Could their involvement in the SC2 scene be partially blamed for the failures there ?

>>>/reddit/

The only people that care about e-"sports" are casuals.

Blizzard will continue with its greed until they get rightfully crowned as the new EA. They deserve this slow fade into obscurity.
They hate their tech audience that values its privacy, and they expect to EVER have a shot at being the top of eSports? Please.
I can't play any Blizzard game on my Blizzard account that I maintained for over a decade. Was this because I forgot my password? Lol, no, I still remember my correct login credentials.
They want a copy of my government ID so I can play games I own a physical copy of. I cannot play single player games offline that I own a physical copy of unless I send in a copy of my government ID so they can check it against records I never provided in the first place.
Fuck Blizzard. Hurry up and die.

Casuals are the audience, the players are a minority.

Getting involved in the esports scene with SC2 wasn't what fucked it, it was their design decisions, especially their skull fuck retarded decision to remove LAN support.

BW had a community grow around it organically because you could show up at an internet cafe in korea and just start playing with friends or complete strangers immediately. With SC2 you need to make an account and then add them as friends and play a custom match and shit, which granted is not that much work to do, but it's enough of a entry barricade that people generally wouldn't be playing with each other unless they already knew each other. It's the same shit with fighting games. Being able to immediately play with someone else you may not know means new connections are formed and eventually they add up into community.

Without LAN the only people coming into the SC2 community are people who already wanted to be there, so you don't really get any growth.

That is true but going to a computer club and logging onto a different computer every time you are there undermines any security for your account.
But you did say lawsuit initially. If blizz did win one has to assume some koreans lost and they also had to pay them some sort of fees later on ?

I think the guy is advocating a system that doesnt need accounts?

Because casuals like esports.

It can be hard to believe, but it is true. Esports AND a casual scene are a sign of "easy to learn, hard to master".

Because it worked for league of legends

There is little to no creativity left in these big companies. They looked at league of legends and told their team they want league numbers and money. That's why they also had that shitty league moba ripp-off.
Reminds me of when everyone tried to copy CoD and wanted CoD numbers.

To further on this a bit more.. These tournaments in itself are for casuals. League will pull in 1m viewers for worlds and it gets all the casuals talking. Casuals are everything to these companies and for good reason. Too bad Blizzard makes shit game because all the original talent left but maybe if they dump enough money into tournaments it can go somewhere just like league.

I don't know how much money they actually got in the end but they were in a legal battle for several years and it only settled with kespa getting a contract to broadcast games long after BW's popularity was on the decline anyway.

Yeah, if you're playing a LAN match in BW you don't need any sort of account, you can just boot up the game and play instantly.

They lucked the fuck out with Titan!Overwatch, and it has sealed the deal for Blizzard never making a decent IP ever again.

Blizzard doesn't even deserve the fanbase as big as they now have because they have created almost full generation of casual braindead players that will keep feeding this sick gaming industry more money.

Define what a casual is and then we'll tal-
Oh you never actually wanted a discussion.

Esports are cheap advertising.

It's because e-sports is where the money is and where even more is going, which is why essentially every company in the world right is trying to get their hands in on it. Companies didn't give a fuck about pro-gaming until LoL got big and it started making big money. But what these idiot jew companies don't realize is that you can't aim a game to be competitive and it become a big e-sports game, it doesn't work like that, a big competitive seen is something that happens when you make a good game after your game becomes popular because when a lot of people like something they want to see who's best at it, they want to be good at something they enjoy and not be good at something just to be good at it, but these idiot companies are too short sighted to see that.

Why are you replying to OP? They aren't responding to anybody.

Cant wait to see Heroes of the Storm 2.0

They get buttload of casuls with their fetish waifu dotafortress which is already a good amount of shekels for them, esports is just a bonus. I bet they believe they can force esports on people with advertising and fanbois as they do with games.

That was before they went into completely controlled "effective management" territory.

They want more money. Overwatch was made with esports in mind. They were successful with the casual market (every Pixar-like character look like the result of intense focus group sessions), now they want the esports crowd.

So Blizzard created the sports game scene?

And the fighting game scene? Are they responsible for EVO?

And racing games? Those too?

Blizzard is hunting whales. I guess esports shit makes Blizzard more relevant.

...

This Kespa thing seems interesting. They grew the scene and were raking in dosh. Blizz wanted in, but under ridiculous conditions. Negotiations took 3 years, but failed.
But while blizz are jews so are these Korean guys with fixed games for bets and etc.

For a while now blizzard is trying to be the next Valve with no success.
They don't seem to understand that you can't force a game to become a sport, the players and the community will decide that based so many variables that trying to quantify that is nearly impossible.
That's why smash is somehow an eSport and everything that blizzard released in these last decades isn't.

These things will still be around, where as esports will die off in like 5-10 years.

No such thing.

teamliquid.net/forum/news-archive/128517-kespa-responds-to-blizzard

Reading this conference blizz still seem like the greedier party. The gooks offered them payments for the use of their game, but they still refused and wanted audits of the koreans.
I am glad valve beat them at the dota lawsuit. Even if valve is shit too. It took them all the way to 2007 to notice korean success and suddenly they are knocking on the door and demanding cash.

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Riot pays for most of it's own tourneys.
Valve is the one that really makes bank off of it with compendiums and shit.

Both Blizzard and KeSPA are faggots for ruining what was supposed to be a legitimate community-driven competitive scene into the esports forced meme faggotry.

here's hoping that they will never ever recreate the Brood War success with whatever they aim to make with OW.

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Overwatch is the Mario Party of shooters.

Werent the best games from Blizzard from Blizzard North? Who are now no longer apart of blizzard?

Your post is the Undertale of reddit

lel this

any "non-profit" entity is likely host to some degree of money laundering

This, combined with the fact that you can't create arbitrary accounts, thereby tying in your real identity, prevents decentralized communities from rising up around the game. The SC 2 gaming platform as a whole ("Arcade") has the most heinous licensing terms, to prevent another DotA situation.

money

Stop reminding me about diablo 3
STOP IT

Seconded.

FUCK I HATE THE GAMES INDUSTRY SO MUCH STOP RAPING MY CHILDHOOD MEMORIES WHY DID THEY FUCK UP THE ART STYLE THE STORY IS SHIT DECKARD CAIN DIED FOR THIS

it really annoys me that just because overwatch is marketed as an (((e-sport))) most people think it's competitive while seeing tf2 as 'the casual one' when in practice it's pretty much the exact opposite since tf2 has a much higher skill cap

What the hell do you smoke?

riot pays miseries to their players, valve gives huge prize pools.

Because eSports is for casuals that need to play simplified casual versions of games. See all the "Waah random crits and spread" fags in tf2. Or Anyone that mentions gust bellows or the star in Smash Bros.

Because e-sports always have and always will be for casuals.

thats a shame, it has such a better flow than league of legends

The only people who like esports are casuals.

Fuck off

how would removing random crits make the game 'simplified and casual'
please elaborate

Same reason you put your first line in red text, used reddit spacing and posted some picture of a weird clown. People do gay shit for no sensible reason.

Overwatch is fun but people are in it for the waifus. If only they'd actually more new, good ones. This new Sombra is spanish super leet hacker who already looks like a futuristic humanized mlp character.

Because esports are for casuals. And fuck off with the redit spacing

this, esports is free advertising + a way for people to mentally justify wasting thousands of hours on shitty video games by pointing to people making an average salary from it.

to delude their fans into thinking the game takes skill and inflate their egos with generous ranking systems. e.g. Gold Rank in SC2 is Average this should be Bronze.

Diamond rank is the only rank that anyone cares about and even low diamond gets shitted on. The players don't suffer any delusions by thinking that they're any good. Gold rank players know that all this means is that they've finally mastered understanding of the most basic mechanics. So yeah, it technically should be classified as bronze but again don't get it twisted, gold league players know they're shit.