Count-counterpoint. Fortnite.
One metric shows Fortnite having 350 million active players as of May 2020. The market for less-competitive games is so much larger than the one for competitive games that it would be almost foolish to invest in the latter.
Rumor has it, part of that decision was driven by the fact that they hated their reputation as one of the most toxic games in esports(In a world where dota and leauge exist, to boot), and overwatch transitioning from a more friendly community to a toxic hellscape was pretty directly linked to the introduction of, and then popularity of, competitive play. At least, in their eyes, and again, according to rumor.
Point taken.
Sticking to Blizzard for a moment. The fact that all their major properties all have this cyclical player-base could be an interesting case study in just how much marketing and advertising affect what players âwantâ.
At one point in time Starcraft 2 proved that a person could make their entire career just by tournament winnings. It paved the way for esports teams in the united states to adopt the SK model of teamhouses and winnings sharings and contract arrangements. It paved the way for streaming to be a career.
Point is it was big.
Slowly and over time development and marketing resources were directed elsewhere. And the playerbase dropped accordingly.
This cycle has repeated itself with Overwatch, each new WoW expansion, Diablo, each new Starcraft 2 expansion, heck it even manifested in the remasters of their old properties.
I posit that these marketing and development pushes matter much more than any inherent playerbase or any inherenet popularity of any game type or fairness in games or whatever.
At one point blizzâs âfairestâ orthogame was easily their biggest game. Why? They manufactured the demand.
I see people say that, but I also play exclusively competitive. And 99% of my experiences, even as of today, are completely nice and wholesome. I havenât encountered anything even remotely toxic in over a year.
Itâs all anecdata. But I can definitely say that the people I interact with playing competitive Overwatch are almost uniformly pleasant and the experience is always socially positive.
The broader point is that a less competitive game will almost always draw a much larger and broader player base. Thatâs where the real money is.
No matter how âbigâ a competitive game is, you can probably make it more random and less fair, and grow the player base substantially.
I think that marketing and advertising, and to a lesser extent, developer attention, matter more than that.
Now maybe all things marketing/advertising wise being equal, perhaps youâre right a less fair game has broader appeal than a more fair one. I simply think that that difference is small. Marketing and spreading awareness trumps that in terms of size and potential money to be made.
Fortnite generated a LOT of data on that topic.
By increasing the impact of skill, they drove a lot of players away. By reducing the impact of skill, they drove a small number of competitive gamers away and attracted an entire new audience.
Youâre comparing forkknife to forkknife. Starcraftâs heyday was⌠like 12 years ago now, and thereâs not been a similarly marketed and highly polished competitive orthogame since.
I do wonder how one would do today. I imagine it could compete with forkknife with similar amounts of marketing.
Starcraft was never even close to as big, even at its peak, as the casual games that actually make everyoneâs money 
It was a different world then. (No twitch and justin.tv and blip.tv are just seeing if streaming is a service they can provide at a profit) Of course it wasnât, nothing was that big yet. Maybe weâll find out in another decade when Starcraft 3 comes out.
Yeah, so flip that on itâs head. Youâre in a pretty rare strata, what, 10% of players about?
Consider why those things might be commonly said, when most people are by definition in the other 90%. And hey, maybe things have changed since theyâve lost some 80% of their playerbase, changing the size of a community can change itâs makeup - removing problems, or distilling them down, one way or the other.
And fair cop, rumours are rumours, and shouldnât be trusted without considering the source. Thereâs no way to tell between just something people say, someone trying to give plausible deniability, or just common opinion being gussied up as wannabe fact.
Also to be fair, I did encounter a lot of toxic people when I was briefly down in bronze⌠But they disappeared as soon as I got out of that mire.
What they want is to have two separate audiences playing the same âgame.â One large set that buys cosmetics and plays coop/PvE/arcade, and a second âseriousâ set that plays competitive. They want them to be separate communities and to be able to cater to them independently.
Competitive players âruinâ the game for the majority. The majority âruinsâ the game for the competitive players. Maintaining an ecosystem that can cater to both is the holy fucking grail of games.
We actually did a draft of a panel on this topic⌠We didnât get good video, and I had a dumpy recording from my laptop just so I could reference and refine it later.
Posted on the Patreon a while back, but Iâll just share it here.
Iâm working slowly on a refined version of this talk.
To be fair, toxic shitgibbons are always a factor in any competitive game. You can also see that in what kind of interactions the games allow, with MtG Arena not having any chat, voice coms or direct messaging functionality. The only way you can interact with your opponent is playing the game and some pre-set text-bubble messages for your avatar.
The only competitive game I have played and never encountered an outright hostile match is Netrunner. The factors for that is that the game skews older and more mature, and that the community is rather small so you donât want to be known as that kind of asshole.
Been enjoying a lot of videos on this channel that got name Dropped by CCPGrey on his MTG Arena live stream recently. Artist profiles and card examinations around the history and design of MTG art.
Brandon Routh is voicing Gideon. Jace is the 2nd main character. I look forward to choice MTG Jace memes and gifs out of this.
Fresh Rhystic studies vid
The latest release, Kamigawa Neon Dynasty revists the original Kamigawaâs japan mythology and adds a cyberpunk layer on top. So of course MTG now has an anime opening.
Newest Rhystic Studies video
Perhaps a bit self-indulgent, but I want to share a gameplay story:
I regularly watch Commander Vs, a YouTube series about commander gameplay. Commander has surely become the most popular Magic format, and itâs played with 100 card singleton deck, with a legendary creature that determines what colors you play and you have access to most of the time. It is also usually played as a four player free-for-all. In a recent episode, a player presented a deck around Baba Lysaga, a legendary creature from a recent set inspired by D&D. It is black-green, my favorite color pair, and it is extremely long-term focused, gaining the advantage by little increments, something I really like to do. So I built my own.
I was unfortunately sick last week, but today I finally got to play with the deck, and it was a lot of fun. Unfortunately I had a murdererâs row of very powerful decks surrounding me. A mono-White Angel Tribal deck was probably the least powerful on the table, but it still packed a ton of haymakers. Then Kaalia of the Vast, one of the most dangerous commanders through her ability to just drop giant creatures on the table for free, and they are already attacking when she does so; and Edgar Markov, one of the most hated commanders for his ability to just flood the board.
So we started playing and I get a good start with some early mana creatures allowing me to set up the engine with Baba Lysaga. I even manage to equip Baba with Illusionistâs Bracers, allowing me to double the trigger without needing to sacrifice additional permanents. However, the mounting tide of creatures on the other three players forced me to use Damnation to clear the board. I also conveniently murdered my World Shaper, which got me five lands out of my graveyard.
The table begins to rebuild, only for the Kaalia player to stick her commander on the table, followed by an Armageddon, an extremely nasty card that destroys all lands. Adieu my ill-gotten gains. Worse yet, the Angel-Tribal player had Teferiâs Protection, meaning their lands would not be destroyed and suddenly they were miles ahead in the game.
Thankfully I had some decent non-land permanents left, and got to rebuild again, far enough and with enough life left that I could use Toxic Deluge to clear the board. This bought me enough time that I could rebuild entirely through trickery. I played quasi-enchantress with Eidolon of Blossoms that drew me like six cards through my enchantment creatures and other detritus. Most importantly, one of my all-time favorite cards, Whip of Erebos, provided me with the life to survive the newly mounting Angel Army. Thankfully the other players were less able to rebuild after so much mass destruction rained down on the table.
Worst of all was a Platinum Angel and me with answers running low. Thankfully someone else handled that and I managed to beat down the Angel player before dispatching the rest of the table.
I won a game after someone cast Armageddon, which is an Achievement unlocked in my book and a game that will stick in my memory for a long time.