Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

Today, it was announced that Starcraft 2, a real time strategy title for the PC with a niche following in certain gaming circles, has officially ceased operations necessary to be classified as Sufficiently eSports. Now, it falls on Blizzard Entertainment, the game’s publisher, to figure out where to go from here.



The first and most obvious answer to the question of how to save the sinking ship is to take the advice given by luminaries of the fighting game community like the guy that exclusively attends MLG tournaments to play Dead or Alive and spend as much money as possible on prizes and orchestras. It’s time for Blizzard to get serious about making Starcraft 2 like League of Legends. Having a trophy that takes no less than eight men to lift it is an obvious place to start.



Sure, you have Starcraft players talking about how they prefer sexual relations with underaged girls, but if Blizzard wants to upgrade this pitiful attempt at making Starcraft an eSport, they need to take their excesses to the expected level. I find it insulting to think that with the hard-earned money of so many of our privileged white youth in their coffers that Blizzard can’t make a donation to whichever Super PAC it would take to legalize the massive quantities of cocaine they should be distributing to their top tier talent. Some of these players have to work day jobs. That is un-fucking-acceptable. Starcraft players need to be given the freedom to get on stream and pleasure themselves to internet pornography like their counterparts in The League.



There is also, as Reddit so astutely pointed out all morning, a complete failure on the part of the game’s enthusiasts. Every professional gamer knows that all the organization, money, time, and logistics in the world don’t mean a damned thing if people don’t talk about things a lot on Twitter. That’s why efforts like the Twitter campaigns to Save Heart of the Swarm are so vital. Multi-billion dollar corporations can only do so much. It falls on the player to hold up their end of the bargain, stop being so lazy and irresponsible, and do that which matters most.



Starcraft has a long road ahead if they intend on coming back from the dead. With the right amount of money, the right connections to Columbia and Thailand, and enough Twitter, they can do it. eSports is not a joke. It’s time Blizzard stopped treating it like one.