User:Shard/Predictions

This is a WIP.

A history of Shard's predictions

Here are some of the predictions I have made about various games:

• Shadow stepping is broken, everyone will use it.
  • Everyone used it. On nearly every profession, in all pvp formats.
• In post-Nightfall Guild Wars, if you don't fix the broken skills in pvp, the game will die.
  • They didn't fix it. The game died. In 1 month.
• In StarCraft 2, if you cut siege tank damage in half, everyone will run mass tier 1 and nothing else.
  • They cut siege tank damage in half. Everyone ran mass tier 1 and nothing else, with the exception of Terran vs Terran, which saw a mech build in one out of every hundred matches.
• In League of Legends, if you keep releasing broken, unfair champions, the game will die.
  • They kept releasing broken unfair champions. The game died.
• In Heroes of the Storm, healers are way too good and will define the metagame if they're not fixed.
  • The chance of you winning when you have 1 more healer than the other team is 95%.
• In Heroes of the Storm, if you make XP gain passive instead of having to be in lane or killing buildings for it, people will only run 5-man push builds and the game will die.
  • People only run 5-man push builds. Also the game's dead.
• In Rocket League, if you allow players to ban each other, and you continue to allow players to make mistakes without any downsides, the game will never be an esport.
  • Rocket League isn't an esport and is currently dying.
• If you continue to power creep Magic: the Gathering, the competitive scene will shrink.
  • They continued to power creep MtG. The competitive MtG scene is shrinking.
• If you ban MetaKnight in Brawl, but not Snake, everyone will play Snake
  • They banned MK and not Snake, and Snake's play rate was close to 40%, in a game with 38 playable characters. That's 1520% higher than the expected value.
• Double Dragon will be the only fire elite Elementalists will use.
  • This one didn't come true, but it was in a parody article, so let's take the Trump approach and say it doesn't count.

These have been some of the major predictions I have made about some of these games. In every case, the developer ignored me (or sometimes us). In every case, the community paid the price. Allow me to explain why making a shit game and letting it die is bad for your company. I can't believe I have to explain this to grown-ass humans.

Good games make more money

Let's talk about how real sports make money. I'll use American Football as an example but this applies to any sport. The National Football League (aka the NFL) manages all the professional teams - when and where the teams play each other, who gets to televise the events, etc. The NFL makes income off this directly in two major ways - selling the rights to televise the event, and ticket sales.

The profits from both ticket sales and television bids are directly proportional to how popular the game is. More viewers = more tickets sold and more people watching on TV. How do the TV networks make money off this exchange? Through ad revenue. Advertisers know that a ton of people will watch football games, so they pay top dollar to get their 30 second commercials in. A 30 second commercial for the last Superbowl cost $2.6 million.

Cool, so we know how the NFL makes money, and we know how the networks make money by televising games. How do the players make money? Well, the NFL pays each team a portion of the league's income, and the teams make their own money through some of the ticket sales and merchandise. More popular teams, as well as teams that do well in a season, make more money. The team, in turn, pays the players, but the source of income is still the same - it all comes from viewership.

So, more viewers = more money for the NFL, more money for the teams, and more money for the players. So, how do you increase viewership?

There are two factors that affect viewership. Watchability, and peak player skill. Watchability is a measure of how easy it is to follow the game, especially for people who don't play the game themselves. Games like Basketball and Soccer are very watchable. Even if you've never seen Basketball before, you can watch it for about a minute or two and understand 99% of what's going on. A game like Magic the Gathering is not very watchable. Not only do you have to know a lot of Magic's rules, you also have to know what most of the cards do in order to follow along with a match. Games like StarCraft and Street Fighter are very watchable, which is why they have done so well in the past.

Peak player skill is a measure of how good the best players are. People watch pro sports because those are the best players in the world. They do amazing things very few humans are capable of doing. It's exciting to watch people make plays nobody else can make. Most physical sports have this feature, so do StarCraft and some other online games. However, most "competitive" online games don't. Most competitive video games today have dreadfully low skill caps, which is why none of them have become huge. When I say huge, I don't mean 150K viewers on Twitch. That's not huge. Every game today gets beat out by Games Done Quick on Twitch. Why? Because it takes more skill to speedrun bad games than it does to play Rocket League or DotA. People would rather watch the better players speedrun Superman 64. By huge I mean Superbowl huge. Kind of like how StarCraft was before its sequel ruined the franchise.

There's no reason most video games can't be as big as the NFL.

Game developers who make these "esports", and the companies that sponsor them, seem to be completely bamboozled as to why esports isn't happening for any of these games. There's no mystery. Your game sucks, and it isn't competitive. You don't make esports happen by making a shitty game and spamming it on ESPN5 at 2AM because that's the only slot they had available after all the real sports shows took primetime. You make an esport by making a good game that people can watch where the best players are way better than the average player.

The pinnacle of skill in Rocket League is "Shoot in random directions until you get lucky so that the opponent can't." People don't want to watch 6 terrible players take 50 bad shots in a row with no penalty.

People don't watch League of Legends because people don't want to watch 10 players use their 50 in-game-bans, invincibility buttons, one-hit-kills, and instant teleports over and over until someone gets lucky.

People don't watch StarCraft because people don't care to see yet another tier-1 deathball vs tier-1 deathball, both running off the same build order that everybody else uses.

People don't watch Magic because people don't want to see the same overpowered $100 cards in every single match doing all the work. Most Magic formats ultimately comes down to "who casts their broken shit first," which technically makes it a racing game.

What do we do about it?

Stop supporting bad games. When you buy a loot crate or a key or a skin, you are telling that company "I like what you're doing." The company will then continue to let their game remain terrible, because they think you're happy with it.

There's a word for refusing to support something: Boycotting. Boycotting works, you just need enough people to do it. This is a call to action. If any of these apply to you, you need to band with us to fight the good fight against these worthless game developers:

• You are, or want to be, a professional gamer.
• You like watching professional gamers.
• You like playing games that are more difficult than Rock, Paper, Scissors.

If any of these apply to you, follow a top elite player who is right about almost everything he has ever said, and boycott the bad games made by these incompetent companies:

• Blizzard (all of their modern games are hypercasual)
• Psyonix/Epic (Rocket League is hypercasual)
• Riot (League of Legends is hypercasual)
• ArenaNet (Guild Wars could have been huge, but they ruined it and abandoned it to make a WoW clone)
• Anything with EA's logo on it.
• Anything made by David Kim
• Anything made by Ryan Scott (aka Morello)