I see the IMO very dismissive "competitive Starcraft sucks now" sentiment being repeated all over the internet. While it is smaller than say DOTA/LoL, I would encourage you to check out the Blizzcon finals from this past weekend, which I think shows that it is still just as compelling as any of the other eSports out there.

Nothing lasts forever. Sports go through cycles like this. Tennis was in quite a down cycle before the emergence of Roger Federer. Competitive RTS is in a down cycle now. The real tragedy here is how much more power large corporations have over esports as compared to traditional sports.

> The real tragedy here is how much more power large corporations have over esports as compared to traditional sports.

This just makes me think you have no idea how traditional sports are managed at levels above "let's get some kids together to play in the field". If anything, large corporations have much more power in traditional sports.

They have a lot of power over the medium of broadcast. They don't have much power at all over the rules of the game. Fans tend to revolt over such things.

There's so many failures to it. The company apparently thinking the professional scene drives the player base, the company apparently thinking it's responsible for 100% of the balance of the game, not realizing "the meta" plays a huge role towards that end. Because of these Blizzard was way too conservative and the game ended up just not being fun. Once the game is not fun, the player base leaves. Once the player base leaves, the professional scene dies.

The most egregious error might be the company not having a genuine designer in charge of the game, which to me seems like a very corporate-y lack of respect for game design. SC2 as a whole was way too conservative. And this is just on the design side, there was greed and short-sightedness all over the place.

Competitive Starcraft is bigger than its ever been outside of Korea right now, as measured by total views.