How the fuck can overwatch be a bigger e-sport than sc2?

How the fuck can overwatch be a bigger e-sport than sc2?

Because statecraft unfortunately turned to shit a few months after the HOTS expansion came out

you need people playing the game

RTS games aren’t popular

explain

Starcraft 2 requires a brain to be played.

makes sense

Takes a lot of brain bower to memorize build orders made by somebody else

I think the expansions didn't do SC2 any good.

The units they added were awful for the flow of combat and outright made other units nearly obsolete by providing a hard-counter. They've been struggling to balance it all and it turned into an awkward mess. Lots of flashy effects but gameplay is very floaty.
In older RTS, including Broodwar, you had a lot more time to fight battles and far larger frontlines. SC2 still had that in WoL but then got streamlined into "make ball of units, throw against one another and who wins has won the match". This gets incredibly stale very, very quickly as you can't have a lot of fancy tactical fights and it's mostly about build orders and macro.
SC2 also sped up gameplay to a point it's hard for average players to compete. That killed the more casual community required to feed any ladder system.

Sc2 wasn't that big of an e-sport tho

Guessing you're a master-rank player?

>Esports bigger than SC2

LoL
CS:GO
Dota 2
Overwatch
Hearthstone (why)
PUBG (why)
Some shitty Chinese games

>Esports around the same size as SC2

Brood War
HOTS
Halo 5
Whatever the latest COD shit is
FGC
Melee
Smite (literally who still plays this even? Still has big tournaments apparently)
World of Tanks
Rocket League
H1Z1 (dying)

A game needs to be watchable and easy to understand. Plus what said. For example, Dota 2 is huge because following the action is easy and fun.

100% free-range gooks, hard to sympathize with pro player or watch their stream when they don't know a single English word. At least Overwatch practices Affirmative Action and puts at least 2 whites on each European/American team(Except for Korean/Chinese teams but those are an obvious pass), so western viewers can sympathize with a team.
Also Overwatch is piss easy to get into / any gaming casual(as in less than 10 hours played per week) can pick it up and understand what to do, whereas SC2 requires thought and just doesn't pull in the casual market.
That's my take on it anyway.

>Hearthstone(why)
Now that is a better question than the OP. I would say it comes down to the very, very large casual playerbase, and the fact is it has unholy amounts of RNG. Obviously we can all agree RNG is complete shit for a skill based game, but that's not what Hearthstone is at the core, it's just reducing your own ability to get fucked by the game. Watching twitch chat will show you this, half the of comments during a pro match is just reacting to the shitty or timely draws of each player. It becomes a sort of circus act to see how fucked other players, even professional, are by the RNG of the game and how they react to it.

SC2 was only big because everyone was waiting for it and it soaked up basically the entire RTS genre's fanbase. But the game itself wasn't that good and most of the time people just watched tournaments for the casters because watching the same builds get played out over and over to produce the same clashes over and over was dull. Obviously there were exceptions but the bulk of it wasn't interesting.

On top of that, it was garbage to get into - having the biggest step back in custom maps imaginable (which are what encourage people to actually play and enjoy the game) and an incredibly obtuse matchmaking system with no chat rooms or functional social features.

SC2 tried to be an esport first and an actual game second, and that's retarded.

>100% free-range gooks, hard to sympathize with pro player or watch their stream when they don't know a single English word.
It's not that. Korean BW had a substantial fanbase abroad (not to mention the fanbase in Korea, obviously). But SC2 didn't even keep a major Korean fanbase for the Korean players, because it just wasn't that interesting and didn't develop organically.

>WoL Custom map scene
Please, Don't remind me. I still have nightmares. How they could ever go from the stellar SC:BW and WC3 custom game scene to that shit is beyond me. I think it's mostly because they wanted to birth the next "DotA" or some garbage.

Because esports rely on viewership and viewership is directly impacted by the amount of people playing the game.

More people play overwatch because it's a team game, and sc2 stands no chance with its zero social aspects and inability to shift the blame for losses onto others.

This on top of the fact that SC2's gameplay is just a less accessible than overwatch's.

Normies

I'm willing to start playing a RTS, SC2 or AoE2 what do you guys think?

I enjoy SC2 as a serious game a lot more than AoE2.