The competitive calendar was drastically scaled back by Blizzard to commemorate the tenth anniversary of official Hearthstone esports events.
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The competitive calendar was drastically scaled back by Blizzard to commemorate the tenth anniversary of official Hearthstone esports events, along with the player base and prize money, making the scene little more than a light-hearted hobby. It’s easy to forget how popular the game once was, and while esports trends have undoubtedly changed, Blizzard’s egregious mismanagement of the industry has left little room for optimism that things will ever get better. If you need more information about How Blizzard ruined Hearthstone esports, bottom right then read carefully and don’t forget to share with your friends.
As logical as it may seem to micromanage every aspect of your game’s competitive offshoots, the early days and successes of competitive Hearthstone showed us what could have been had Blizzard allowed the third-party circuit to flourish. This isn’t the first time Blizzard choked out its own esports holdings. Massive audiences and fierce rivalries developed naturally, bottom up; the top-to-bottom strategy was never going to work with them.
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A brief cause for celebration first. In the gaming industry, ten years is an eternity, so the fact that Hearthstone has survived this long with a competitive scene is proof of the game’s success even as the global gaming market and the place of collectible games within it continued to change. While Wizards of the Coast was still stumbling along with MTG Online to generate eye-popping profits, Hearthstone was a gorgeous game with AAA production levels and a juggernaut in the then-emerging digital card game scene. Hearthstone imported predatory monetization schemes from tabletop games without repercussions.
Money was available for distribution. People may not be aware of just how large the Hearthstone esports scene has grown. According to esportsearnings.com’s statistics, the game has the eleventh-largest cumulative prize pool, with $29.4 million distributed to nearly 3,000 players across more than 1,000 tournaments. At the time of writing, it was still ahead of Rocket League, Apex Legends, and VALORANT.
With events like the Amaz-Reynad rivalry or the meme moments of Forsen further generating interest, the cauldron that other competitive titles can only wish for was created by big streamer personalities encouraged on by excessively devoted fans. More importantly, there were numerous independent tournament organisers in the game, with organisations like ESL and MTG hosting a variety of competitions and others like SeatStory.
Then, as is customary, Blizzard stepped on its foot. It has a propensity to micromanage and stifle its esports titles, and similar to how it sidelined KeSPA in the past to bring StarCraft events under its own banner (and tried to wish the Overwatch League into existence from scratch), it decided to exert more and more control over officially sanctioned Hearthstone esports events, pushing out other actors from the space over time and creating an extremely top-heavy affair.
There’s always the debate over whether Hearthstone is skill-testing enough to count as an esport, but as long as the tournament format was appropriate, the win percentages necessary for sustained elite-level performance matched or even exceeded that of other competitive games. Due to their inherent variance, card games’ skill-testing aspect only becomes apparent over a large sample of games. That is not the same as saying that there is no skill at all, and a big part of the appeal of games like this is the fact that anyone can defeat anyone in a single match.
The key phrase here is the long term. The ladder offered a practical method to assess long-term excellence (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 an improbable outcome.
You cannot have decisive series come down to coin flips involving the Ragnaros Hero Power, where the players repeatedly attempted to hit the correct target with their ability to deal eight damage to a random enemy.The fact is that events like this are inescapable in card games, making numerous series and tournaments the only way to definitively establish who is the best.
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