![]() ![]() Even though Heroes does a lot of things right and evolves the concept of a MOBA in interesting ways, players, esports fans and pros are already very invested in their respective games, so it’s a tough sell to get people to switch. But in the case of Heroes, Blizzard entered a scene with enormously established titles like League of Legends and Dota, and other players like SMITE and HoN as well. While Blizzard did not invent the digital card game or the hero shooter, when Hearthstone and Overwatch arrived, they were able to secure themselves as market leaders, and everyone else is still trying to live up to them to this day. The problem with Heroes is that it felt like a rare example of Blizzard arriving practically last in a space where there just might not have been all that much room for them. The game itself has continually added new maps, heroes and features since launch, and now with the release of Overwatch, it’s likely that more and more heroes from that game will carry over to Heroes. Still, what’s clear from these recent changes are that Blizzard seems to have no intention of scaling back support for Heroes, and if anything, is ramping it up with his fresh esports push. If we’re using a very rough estimate, trying to translate stream interest into players using the games where we know the playercounts, then maybe Heroes has somewhere between 500K-2 million monthly players? Again, that’s an incredibly rough guess, but it would seem to make some amount of sense. Heroes of the Storm, meanwhile, is in 22nd place with 2,400 people watching. Dota is second only to Hearthstone with its 38,000 viewers (with 13 million monthly players). At the time of this writing, for instance, League of Legends (which recently revealed it has 100 million monthly players) has 138,000 people watching streams of the game. Still, it’s a pretty daunting task for Blizzard to get interest in Heroes esports up to the level of League and Dota. You can go by stream numbers, which on average, puts Heroes way behind competitors like League of Legends and Dota 2, but it’s hard to make a 1:1 comparison of how that translates into active players. In contrast, players who taunt Heroes for being a “dead game” have no evidence of that either. Given that Blizzard is not on Steam and Heroes is not selling box copies, it is almost impossible for any third parties to extract official figures on their own. ![]() When Activision does talk about Heroes, it says things like " Hearthstone, Destiny and Heroes of the Storm have a combined 70 million registered players," which means practically nothing unless you know the exact breakdown. This is in contrast to years of WoW subscription totals, record Diablo 3 sales figures, 30 million Hearthstone players that have been announced and recently the indication that Overwatch is crawling its way toward 15 million players. But the overall popularity of the game is pretty hard to judge, given that from what I can tell, Blizzard has never discussed the number of Heroes players openly. Heroes of the Storm has managed to find its way onto ESPN for its “Heroes of the Dorm” championship series, which drew an 0.1 rating that ESPN actually seemed pleased with.
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