Microsoft Should Remaster StarCraft II
Seriously!
A month or two back, the United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority blocked Microsoft’s proposed acquisition of Activision-Blizzard. Microsoft plans to appeal, but in the meantime, I’ve been thinking through the acquisition and its implications, assuming the likely possibility that it eventually goes through.
I’m interested in where Microsoft could take StarCraft. Today, I’ll offer some thoughts on why one reasonable thing to do would be to remaster StarCraft II - the most successful competitive real-time strategy game of all time.
The Business Case
Prior to going free-to-play in November 2017, StarCraft II had around 2 million monthly active users. Free-to-play roughly doubled this, though it’s hard to get an exact publicly available number. We know from ladder statistics that F2P increased the competitive population by about 60%, and the developers have noted that free-to-play brought a mix-shift in player population toward more casual modes. I interpret that to mean the other modes - which were already substantially more popular than competitive - saw a proportionally even larger increase.
As a point of comparison, on the Age of Empires side, Microsoft’s Adam Isgreen noted that the entire franchise had over a million monthly active players in 2019. In other words, back when StarCraft II was actively developed and maintained, it was roughly three to four times larger than the entire Age of Empires franchise.
Since then, Age and StarCraft have seen opposite development trajectories, with Blizzard effectively abandoning StarCraft II in early 2020. If we ignore the COVID peak and compare today’s numbers against the stable player population in 2018-2019, the competitive side of the game has shrunk by 10-20%. I would guess the casual side saw a similar proportional drop. Microsoft, by contrast, invested significant resources into Age of Empires, remastering Age of Empires I, II, and III. Based on average concurrent players on Steamcharts, all of the legacy Age of Empires games have grown by 60-80% since then. (Note that this is anchored on Age of Empires II, which accounts for more than 70% of the legacy Age of Empires playerbase).
If we assume the worst about StarCraft II, it’s somewhere between 2 and 3 million monthly active users. If we assume the best about legacy Age of Empires, it’s still a little shy of 2 million monthly active users. In other words, the overall opportunity from remastering StarCraft II is at least as large as the opportunity of remastering the entire legacy Age of Empires franchise. And this is important because Microsoft deemed the latter sufficiently investable that they spent the last few years doing exactly that.
If it makes business sense to remaster Age of Empires, then it makes business sense to remaster StarCraft II, too.*† And the great thing about StarCraft is that it features long-term monetization features, like co-op commanders, that offer a continuous revenue opportunity. It’s already setup as a live service game - it just needs someone to continue pushing it along.
The Game Case
I think many folks will raise two objections (at least) to a remaster - one is that remasters are not always successful (and can sometimes be harmful); two is that StarCraft II doesn’t need a remaster. And I get those concerns, having personally gotten a refund for one unsuccessful remaster (Warcraft III: Reforged).
For the success objection, my thought here is to give credit where credit is due - Microsoft did a good job remastering Age of Empires. Age of Empires II: DE is particularly great - it retains the gameplay from the original, adds a ton of new content, significantly improves the single player AI, and features all the standard ranked multiplayer stuff (mutual random, map vetoes, etc). I’ve played enough to say that I trust them to do this right.
As for whether a remaster is needed, I get it. I could probably play StarCraft II, in its current state, forever. But aside from the ideas I’ll mention below, I also think a remaster would be a reasonable way to restart StarCraft II’s development lifecycle. I think Microsoft could make a boatload of money from investing more in StarCraft II, and I think we as a community would appreciate a developer actively maintaining and updating the game. So I think a remaster is a win-win way to kick all that off.
Besides all that, I do think there are some legit reasons to do a remaster, too. People more creative than myself will come up with a better list, but here’s what I’d look for.
On the multiplayer side, Microsoft could take a page out of Frost Giant’s book and implement rollback. They could also improve the production quality of StarCraft’s servers, like the weird server selection logic on NA, the leagues that break every season, and the flaky ladder API. My understanding from offline conversations is that some of this stuff is hard to fix with a patch and requires some amount of re-architecting to do right.
On the single-player side, I think it would be nice to remaster the campaign cutscenes. I feel that they haven’t aged that well. This applies to both the in-engine renders and the cinematics like Tychus getting fitted into his suit.
I also feel there’s a lot of opportunity on the single-player side; maybe I am just a whale, but I would pay good money for pretty much any amount of content in pretty much any context. More missions, more campaigns, cooperative missions, or even just slightly reworked missions or new or different upgrade paths. Same for stuff like new co-op maps, co-op commanders, and the like.
Graphically-speaking, I think StarCraft II is already in a really good state. I’m sure someone more knowledgeable than myself could speak to the myriad ways in which one could make it look better while maintaining its clean and readable design. Speaking personally, though, I wouldn’t expect or even necessarily want too much change here.
Finally, engine-wise, StarCraft II seems to be a hard game to update without breaking things. Anecdotally I’ve heard that this is because the original developers didn’t invest enough in build tooling, causing some types of changes to require error-prone manual fixes. This results in stuff like changing a unit’s damage output accidentally causing burrow to not work, because the change wasn’t applied correctly. A remaster would be a good chance to fix all this up so that the game is easy to patch and maintain.
Why Now? And Why Not Just Restart Development Without a Remaster?
Microsoft started deeper investments in the Age of Empires series by first remastering the legacy games. To remaster StarCraft II as the first step in officially restarting its development would match their MO. I’m sure there are other ways of going about it, but Microsoft has already proven that this way works, so it just kinda makes sense, right? Plus, I also feel like Microsoft is only going to start said development if they feel like they’re going to make a meaningful amount of money, and I think a remaster is going to deliver that for them.
Why Not StarCraft III?
I mean, sure. But I feel that a new game is a much higher risk-reward proposition, and I don’t have the data to make that case. I also think a remaster is simpler in the sense that in its most basic form it’s “just work”, whereas a new game requires real creative vision to be successful - that means finding very specific and very hard to find talent, which may or may not even be available now that everyone’s gone off and started their own various indie RTS companies.
Come On, They’re Never Gonna Do This!
Yeah, probably not. But I’ve spent enough time in big corporate environments to know that if you’re willing to patiently provide concerted influence and direction with a smile on your face and a willingness to regularly be told no, you can slowly convince enough people and actually make something happen. So here I am, offering the start of some concerted influence and direction.
Plus, I think people underestimate the market potential of solid gameplay design. Age of Empires II was in trouble for years; even after the HD Edition, playing competitively meant using some very inconvenient third party tooling. But Microsoft kept investing in it, and now the game is bigger than it’s ever been. CS:GO was deemed dead at one point, and now it has 1.5 million concurrent players. Games with good gameplay design always have market potential. And StarCraft II is a very good game.
Final Thoughts
That’s it! It makes good business sense and it would be a great first step in restarting development of the game. This is the most successful competitive RTS game ever made, Microsoft. Just give it a little push!
Until next time,
brownbear
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* The point of this section is to show in simple and clear terms that remastering StarCraft II is an equal or better investment opportunity compared to a similar opportunity that Microsoft already deemed investable. I didn’t try to be more specific because ultimately Microsoft can just check the exact numbers for themselves. Realistically, though, I think it undersells StarCraft II’s popularity. SC2 features 5-10x more activity in games played per day and ongoing concurrent games, respectively, compared to Age of Empires II, which accounts for the majority of Age of Empires playtime. And StarCraft II’s casual side, especially co-op, is more comprehensive and popular than anything currently on offer in Age.
† This section does not account for Age of Empires IV, since it’s focused on making an apples-to-apples comparison of the investability of remastered Age vs. remastered StarCraft II, and Age 4 is a brand new game. Per Steamcharts, though, even if we included Age of Empires IV, StarCraft II would likely still be at least as popular as the entire Age franchise. It’s mind blowing to me how many people still play this game.
