Nearly a decade ago, Blizzard launched its first-ever MOBA, Heroes of the Storm (HOTS). The gaming giant’s answer to existing genre titans, like League of Legends and DOTA, saw heroes from Blizzard’s iconic brands clash against one another in mixed-team battles. Heroes (and villains) from World of Warcraft, StarCraft, Diablo, and eventually Overwatch, duked it out across Heroes of the Storm’s lane-based landscapes.
The game grew in popularity as more characters, modes and maps were added over the months and years following the game’s release. While the game kept growing, Blizzard didn’t seem all too happy with how profitable the game was. In 2022, Blizzard announced that they would cease developing new content for the game, basically putting the game’s growth on an indefinite pause.
For most online games, where new content is needed to keep players around, this shift would have been the harbinger of doom, with the playerbase gradually trickling away to newer games with fresh content to explore.
But for some reason, HOTS feels as healthy as ever. Well over two years following Blizzard’s announcement about stopping active development on the game, you wouldn’t know that the game hasn’t seen a new character in almost five years. Matchmaking is impressively quick (faster than Overwatch 2’s by a long shot, even) and although there’s been no notable new content in quite some time, the near-infinite team comp/talent combinations help make every match feel unique in its own way.
I’ve been playing HOTS frequently over the past few months and after years of watching Mordhau’s playerbase linger to basically nothing, I don’t get the same feeling with HOTS at all. Of course, they are two very different games, but you get the idea. Mordhau, to be fair, is still in active development with a fairly recent update that added an entirely new game mode. Yet the game that should be dead, is the one that feels more alive.
There are so many characters to choose from in HOTS that I’m almost glad that you don’t have immediate access to them all. You can still pay for premium currency to unlock characters and skins whenever you want, but you can also earn those characters and skins eventually by just playing the game. A rotating menu of free characters helps keep things interesting for new players who don’t have access to much earned currency yet.
Do I think Blizzard will put on their Dr. Frankenstein goggles and zap HOTS with a bolt of new content? I hope so! I’d love to see them add in some of the newer Overwatch and Warcraft characters we’ve met in the years since the last character was added to HOTS. Even some of the original Overwatch characters, like Doomfist, Reinhardt, Baptiste and Sombra would make great additions to the game.
Unfortunately, unless Blizzard can come up with a way to monetize the game better than selling premium currency to fast-track character/skin unlocks, I don’t see them devoting renewed resources into HOTS. If it didn’t work for them the first time around, they’re unlikely to do the same again. Business is business, after all.
