#sc2isnotdead

hahaha, pls leave this thread. lol. if it is dead why u come here ?

You're not thinking about it the right way. The cost of entry is free. Imagine a game being a club or some sort of exclusive organization. Imagine trying to go in Club Starcraft II and then seeing a $39.99 entry fee. Then right across the street you have Club Dota 2, which is free to enter but has paid for food and drinks. Which do you think would have more members joining in? The former only earns money ONCE from the 5% of gamers that actually pay for stuff. Whereas the latter charges micro-transactions all the time for cosmetic changes that the 5% of paying gamers will keep on buying. Dota 2 is more fun to watch but Starcraft II is more satisfying in terms of play and is far harder to get into. The amount of skill and concentration you need to excel at starcraft is quite high. It's like reactive chess played in real time.

I agree. It's very serious and very mentally challenging, such that it absorbs all your attention. When you lose you get really stressed/pissed off due to how much effort you're putting in (to win). I've had a few sessions where I was throwing my stuff after losing a vital match that was very close but I lost due to my own errors. It's stressful when you're playing against someone on your level (ladder) but far less so when you're clearly outclassed (such as tournaments when I went against GMs and Masters some odd reason). SC2 is definitely not an easy game to get into without continuous effort and training to get better.

However it still doesn't detract from the point that the reason why Dota is popular is due to its f2p playing model which allows pretty much everyone to at least try it and get into it without to invest any money (just time). Paid products can't compete with free ones that have roughly the same entertainment value. Dota is a far more casual game since you can always "blame your team" for any losses since it's team based game and thus it's less stressful. It's fun to play and far more fun to watch official tourneys like the recent TI. Even though I had never watched a single Dota tournament before and I'm a diehard fan of watching sc2 tourneys, I can't say I've ever enjoyed watching other people play a game as much as I did when watching Na'Vi, Alliance and Orange duke it out live.