Heroes of the Storm is a surprisingly easy game to learn. Blizzard’s friendly MOBA cranks team fighting up to 10 and dials farming down to about 3, all within a wonderful crossover universe that draws from the company’s other successful franchises. The height requirement for Heroes of the Storm is considerably shorter than the other roller coasters at the esports amusement park. You don’t even have to last hit the minions.

This should have been a home run, right?

According to Blizzard, it is. Though they haven’t broken out specific numbers, a recent tweet by game director Dustin Browder indicates that the metrics for Heroes of the Storm are great.

We have millions of players. We have a team of 150+ developers making stuff. We patch every 3-4 weeks. Is good.=) https://t.co/x6rsamAsOg — Dustin Browder (@DustinBrowder) May 19, 2016



But plenty of players and cool design don’t magically turn a game into an esports success. At the time of this writing, fewer than 2,000 people are watching Heroes of the Storm on Twitch. This is the grim reality nearly a year after release: Heroes of the Storm is not catching on as an esport.

View photos (Blizzard Entertainment) More

A rough start

Like most online games, Heroes was playable during its development. That’s usually a good thing — it helps foster a community — but it initially felt pretty clunky. The skeletal ranking system left me (and many competitive players) with no incentive to continue playing. Though Blizzard is typically known for delivering incredibly polished games, Heroes was a little rickety from the start, and the hype surrounding it led to many people grabbing keys, trying it for themselves, and bailing out.

A small community with a big voice and a reputation for vehemently demanding changes took to social media and the Heroes subreddit with their concerns. Blizzard responded well; as they refined the game and updated its UI and matchmatching, it was clear that player feedback was playing a major role. But giving in to the demands of players has created a community that feels somewhat entitled. This attitude hasn’t helped Heroes find the broader audience it’s desperately hoping to connect with, but it’s a very small piece of a much larger problem.

Lack of extended support

Considering how oversaturated the MOBA market has become, Heroes still feels a bit malnourished. So it falls on the shoulders of the publisher to support its most passionate players: the professionals. Unfortunately, Blizzard hasn’t done a great job of that.

The money was slow to roll in; initially, the only tournaments in the U.S. were played weekly, with a small $100 pot going to the winner. A few bigger prizes popped up sporadically, but Blizzard provided no assistance to the competitive scene prior to release, even going so far as to remove custom games at one point, forcing pro teams to queue up Quickmatchs at the exact same time in the hopes of luckily catching each other on the servers.

It eventually got better. Big name orgs like Dignitas, Team Liquid, Cloud9, and Na’vi entered the space, encouraging smaller organizations to pick up teams as well. They were betting on the future, and when Blizzard announced their plans for the Global Circuit at Blizzcon 2015, the community breathed a heavy sigh of relief. The wait was over.

Except we’re all still waiting for Heroes to really take off. We are now nearly halfway through the Global Circuit, and the numbers for the biggest Heroes of the Storm events still hover abysmally between 10k-50k concurrent viewers. For an esport trying to compete with Dota 2 and League of Legends, that won’t do.

That’s not to say Blizzard isn’t trying. For the Global Circuit, they pumped $4 million into the professional ecosystem. This is both exciting and disconcerting: it’s a ton of cash, sure, but there are simply no third-party tournaments to speak of. There’s been just enough money flowing through to retain some talented players, but it’s not flourishing.

Story continues