StarCraft II released the summer after my senior year of high school. While in high school, I had a friend that was a big fan of strategy games. We played Age of Empires II plenty, and he enjoyed playing Age of Empires III online. Neither of us ever really played SC:BW. However, during high school, when the beta for SC2 came out and I got an invite, I was hooked (and still am). I convinced my friend to get the game once it came out, which he did. We played around 2 matches, and then I never saw him again online.
The story was similar with a good number of my friends that I convinced to get SC2 - none of them play anymore. A few played around 6 months to a year after release, but never very much even for that time. One or two of them finished the campaign, I think.
A large part of the reason why most people I knew stopped playing StarCraft II is because of college - as I mentioned earlier, SC2 came out the summer after my friends and I graduated high school. I have asked some of them why they don't play anymore and their answer was that they didn't really have time. So imagine my surprise when I learned some of these traitorous folk played league of legends. One of the primary reasons I don't play MOBAs very much is due to the length of a single match - which in my experience has averaged out to around 40 minutes or more. That's a huge block of time to allocate to not being able to do anything else. I find it unappealing.
I've tried a game or two of league of legends, and it seemed terribly boring. I've never played since. I asked some people who play league of legends why they play it since it seemed so boring to me. The most common answer is to play with friends. There are some people that enjoy playing league of legends alone, but in my experience, most people play it to play with friends.
Why, then, do people play league of legends together instead of say, StarCraft II? The answer is simple - it is easier to get started playing LoL with a group of friends than it is for StarCraft II. Why? There are two main reasons:
1. LoL is free.
2. LoL is an easier game.
A large part of the fun in games is playing with friends online. The social aspect of games is often the most fun. Even for single player games, it is fun to compare experiences and decisions or the like. Similarly, it's fun to talk about ladder games with friends on SC2. It's amazing how bad a game can be but still be popular because it is fun socially and accessible. LoL is a case in point.
LoL is a more popular game because people like to play games with friends and LoL makes that far easier than does SC2. This leads to a wider audience for the game, which in turn leads to more stream viewers. Riot fuels money into LoL tournaments, but the important fact is that the audience is there to watch them.
I think I've identified the source of the problem. Sure, there are other issues such as inclient stream viewing and the like, but the social accessibility is the true issue at hand.
So, the question is, what can Blizzard do to fix this? How can Blizzard make SC2 more appealing as a social game?
To start with, StarCraft II would HAVE to go free to play. I don't think there's any question about that. The Starter Edition is basically useless - its still stuck on an old map like Xel'Naga caverns or something and you can't really do anything interesting in the game. If StarCraft II were free to play, then Blizzard would need a source of revenue. I think this is a matter that has a surprisingly easy solution. If StarCraft II were free to pay, here's what I think would need to happen:
1. The Campaign is not free to play.
2. Some sort of micro transactions. My proposal for this is to be able to buy new colors for your army. If there were different kinds of armor, watching the game at a professional level might get confusing, but different army colors would allow the game to continue to be very good looking and professional. Now, I don't mean just any old new colors. I mean special patterns, like camo. Imagine being able to pick camo as your color instead of blue or red. That would be awesome.
3. The Custom Game Store. I think this is really the biggest part of this idea. The majority of people who played games like Brood War and WarCraft III played them for the custom games. Setting up a store for these custom games does 2 things - first of all it gives map developers incentive to make really fun maps, and second, it gives blizzard a very profitable platform. Just think of it as an App Store. It could work the same way, with free custom maps, charts, ratings, etc. Blizzard, like Apple, would take a part of the profit and let the developer earn good money.
It is not impossible to make StarCraft II free to play. In fact, I think that not only would it help the StarCraft community grow tremendously, it would also be extremely financially viable for Blizzard. Obviously, there is a LOT of tweaking to the UI that would have to happen for this and a lot of UI tweaking that Battle.NET 2.0 needs in general, but that's a topic for a different blog post.