Lowko reacts to 'The Next Major RTS Will Fail. This Is Why.'

--

[GiantGrantGames]

Hey Lowko, I wanted to say thanks for taking the time out to watch my video! Your videos are some of the best user-generated content in the scene, and are a great example of how important it is to building a sustainable, thriving, RTS community!

[roshangoab]

Glad to see Grant is gaining more and more traction. Great guy, great content. Also I love starcrafts multiplayer and pro scene as much as the next guy but we have plenty of people on YouTube covering those. It's nice to see campagin and custom campagin content on the rise with guys like Grant

[HVtux]

It's been awesome watching grant's popularity grow so much. Like many people the first I saw from him was beating WOL without losing a unit and thinking it was great entertainment but he probably wouldn't make much more. Glad to say I was wrong.

[liamgonzales]

Lowko literally describing me, when he says, “Starcraft 2 is fun, but it’s like a have a second job and I don’t have the time or the stress levels to manage all of this. So I’m going to watch other people play instead.” Yes, that is exactly how that played out!

[JayborinoPlays]

Would love to see you check out the custom stuff Grant is spearheading!

[DodacLA]

The point with focusing on a Campaign rather than 1v1 matches has another big Implication. Most people know and love StarCraft because of it's campaign. The reason why there are so many people are interested in watching SC2, even on Levels they can't compare to, is because they are invested in the game from the campaign.
So if you have a good Campaign a lot more players will stick to the game and the more players stick and stay interested in the game the more likely Hardcore players will also stay to play 1v1, even if it is not perfectly balanced and designed because they are already invested enough to look past some flaws from having played a really good campaign that allowed them to get accostumed to the gameplay. So 1v1 should be an 'after thought' because without a campaign the 1v1 can be as good as it wants to be, it likely won't be enough to retain players because nobody is invested enough to keep playing. Competitive 1v1 is rarely enough to get someone hooked UNLESS they are already hooked from similar titles they can always fall back on. You don't create new hardcore players and won't hook the existing ones hard enough to retain them if they have a different game already that has them invested in 1v1

[iratevagabond]

When it comes to monetization. . . I would literally continue buying Starcraft campaigns non-stop. It would be way cooler if they had a grand campaign, where you fought over planets, built up planets, and tried to become the dominant faction in the galaxy.

[Meat]

Having community-generated content is one of the biggest reasons I've enjoyed SC and SC2. Playing on OG blizzard maps is kind of painful compared with the the current map pool. Love your content Lowko

[Jaxck]

Mark Rosewater talks about this “competitive player bias”. He’s the head dev of Magic the Gathering and they basically came to the conclusion in 2005, after years of slowing sales, that competitive was simply not worth pursuing. Casual players are not only the bulk of the playerbase, they’re the bulk of your customers. Competitive will come, but it should not be the focus.

[ballboys]

I remember one of the big SC2 streamers from a decade ago (was it Destiny?) said the main reason that SC2 started to fail is because the casual audience was essentially pushed to the side in favor of marketing the game as a hardcore eSports game. I tend to agree with that, considering many successful eSports nowadays rely on having a strong casual player base (LoL and Dota 2 have a super solid casual base, and every big FPS also), which feeds into an audience for really high level play. These games took a long time to establish themselves culturally before eventually turning into a competitive game, but lots of devs nowadays try their version of a get-rich-quick scheme.

[Mahons]

Fyi the giant void ray that was shown is actually a part of a custom campaign which is basically just the real scale mod but put into the campaign and the entire campaign has been made with the real scale mode. Also I would love to see you play the custom campaigns

[okamiman]

I agree because I'm part of this, too. I love watching pro games and pro casts especially. But I have never touched ladder and have zero intentions to. I adore SC2's campaigns and play a ton of co-op.

[soulfilcher]

The fact that proper campaign support became part of SC2's arcade in the "last nail in the coffin" update, years after I decided it was not worth my time creating assets and collaborating in community projects says a lot about developers that though keeping an esports scene was their priority. SC2 and SCBW still have people creating campaigns and custom maps for them. Hell, I was creating art for SCBW last year, and I will probably get back to it eventually. The community that keeps these games alive is way larger than the 1v1 scene.

[mikoajciemiega]

Grant on last video- I don't know if loko even knows that I exist
Loko- reacts to grants video the same day

[chronowolf]

Grant basically perfectly described me there. I have played the Warcraft and Starcrsft campaigns to the death, I love watching competent players play multiplayer, but I would never have the guts to play it myself because it feels like such a time sink. So I agree the major focus for an RTS should be the campaign. Esports should be given a lot of attention, definitely, but you can only milk a certain amount of players with that. The major profits come from the casuals who buy the game just to play the campaign once a year or so.

[Willdreynolds]

I know I’ve commented a lot lol. But me and my brother wished they had a coop campaign rather than just missions. Like a whole story line. Bruh the alliances and betrayals in the story left so many missions available.

[TheIndignation]

I would love to see you play through the WOL Nightmare difficulty mod. It was really cool watching Grant play through and test it out and I think you'd really enjoy it. The difficulty is ramped up in a really intelligent way and there are a few modifications to the upgrades that I think are really smart too. It's like a tightened up and improved Wings of Liberty campaign.

[dkkanofkash]

Giant Grant Games is a genius and one of the best content creators I started watching recently (mostly because I'm an RTS and StarCraft fan). I found him because he and Rhyme made the Realistic Scale Wings of Liberty, Realistic Scale Heart of the Swarm, and the upcoming Realistic Scale Legacy of the Void mods, which is beyond awesome.

[Owlrider]

Speaking of absurdly overpowered units in multiplayer, I think Supreme Commander did a great job at just that with the tier 4 OP units of every faction, and also the combat SCVs and of course the commander SCV(which if it dies you lose the game) which are terrific fighters in their own right.

[petrberanek]

I have played SC2 the moment it released. Wings of liberty, Heart of swarm, Legacy of void. Each chapter 2-3 playthroughs on average (more the old ones). I have played altogether like... 3 1v1 matches (in Heart of swarm time). Without watching any 1v1 guides, builds anything. I still remember the oracle arriving to my mineral line before I even had anything that could shoot up, just bunch of zerglings. That moment I realized that it will take a lot of time and effort to learn it and it will be a pure stress as there is so many things you have to look for, people already know all the optimal builds and there just won't be much fun in that, unless you are best of the best. Not as much fun as in the campaigns.

So I say that he has a point about Campaign being important.