Blizzard marked the tenth year of official Hearthstone esports events. Drastically reducing the competitive calendar, player count, and prize fund, transforming the scene into little more than a recreational activity.
It is easy to forget how enormous the game’s audience used to be. Despite changing esports trends, Blizzard’s mismanagement of the industry has led us to where we are today, with little hope of improvement.
It is not the first time Blizzard has stifled its esports holdings. In comparison, it may seem logical to micromanage every aspect of your game’s competitive offshoots. The early days and successes of competitive Hearthstone demonstrated what could have been had it allowed the third-party circuit to thrive. Massive audiences and fierce rivalries developed organically from the bottom up; a top-down approach would be different from this phenomenon.
It took numerous errors to reach this point. Let’s see how we got here.
A decade of card-playing Let’s begin with a tiny celebration. Even as the global gaming market and the role of collectible games within it continues to alter, Hearthstone has maintained a competitive environment for a decade, which is a testament to the game’s success. Hearthstone was a powerhouse in the then-nascent digital card game sector in 2014. Transferring exploitative monetization tactics from tabletop titles without repercussions. In contrast, Wizards of the Coast struggled with MTG Online to raise enormous earnings.
There was enough money to go around. Over the years, people often need to be aware of how large Hearthstone’s esports sector has become. Still, ahead of Rocket League, Apex Legends, and VALORANT at the time of writing, the game has the eleventh-largest total prize pool on esportsearnings.com, with $29.4 million paid to roughly 3,000 players in more than 1,000 tournaments.
Big streamer personalities are cheered on by overly devoted fans. Producing the cauldron that other competitive titles can only dream of, with Amaz-Reynad rivalry and Forsen meme moments providing further attention. Importantly, third-party tournament organizers were all over the game, with ESL and MTG holding numerous tournaments and SeatStory and Viagame continuing to warm the hearts of Hearthstone veterans.
As usual, Blizzard then stepped on its foot. It has the propensity to micromanage and strangle its esports titles, much like how it sidelined KeSPA in the past to bring StarCraft events under its banner. It decided to exert more and more control on officially sanctioned Hearthstone esports events. Displacing other actors from space over the years creates an extremely top-heavy affair.
How it all came apart: poor vision and a plethora of mistakes?
There is a recurring debate over whether Hearthstone is sufficiently skill-intensive to qualify as an expert. Although the win percentages required for sustained elite-level outcomes matched or even surpassed those of other competitive games—as long as the tournament format was appropriate.
Due to intrinsic variation, the skill-testing element of card games is only apparent across a large sample of games. That means the skill is optional. The fact that anyone may beat anyone in a single encounter is a significant part of the appeal of games. Consider poker for a moment and the fact that a full game theory optimal technique has been thoroughly calculated. It would be absurd to claim that the modest percentages picked up by better players along the way do not build up to something tangible over time.
Long-term is the main concept here. The ladder provides an acceptable method for measuring sustained greatness. (though the final-day dashes for qualification spots were still variance-ridden affairs if also great streaming content). The individual high-stakes tournaments, however, all came down to something improbable. You can’t have decisive series come down to Ragnaros Hero Power coin flips. Where players repeatedly tried to hit the correct target with their ability to deliver eight damage to a random enemy.
The fact is, occurrences like this are inevitable in card games, making multiple series and tournaments the only way to ascertain who is truly the best.
Instead, we received the Hearthstone Championship Tour, a series of top-heavy events coordinated by a team of ten individuals, with a sprinkling of LAN tournaments staged worldwide. The intricate ban-based multi-deck formats meant casual players never could play like the pros. Because ladder lineups could not be tested or piloted, participants had to create separate practice groups. This disconnection made Hearthstone esports feel even more incidental to the audience.
The team, directed by Che Chou, also squandered resources on an ineffective collegiate program and a concurrent, nation-based competition known as the Hearthstone Global Games that could have attracted the audience’s attention.
Though the big events were well-produced, a never-ending string of gaffes and controversies suggested this was an afterthought. There were too many amateurish events to list them all here. Still, even a summary reveals the complexity of the issues at hand.
Hearthstone Esports’ future, especially in competitive play, is uncertain. Nonetheless, it cannot deny that the game had something truly unique going on in 2014. A massive grassroots interest is kindling high-level competition in a well-balanced game that offers something unavailable elsewhere in the esports landscape. Many of us will miss the contest, but we cannot prevent Blizzard from conceding.
