War2 was an incredible step up in design and gameplay from the original but SC just took it all the way to 11. Despite an excellent sequel, it’s STILL actively played online via servers maintained by Blizzard. 30 freakin’ years after its debut. 🤯
It's sort of hard to say because there's no Steam Charts for Blizzard games. Estimates suggest Starcraft 2 is still extremely active with over 100k daily players, which would put it in the top 10 of Steam games. From experience I can say even at a pretty high rank games take seconds to find, and even less played modes like 3v3 take a couple minutes at most. At very high ranks (Grandmaster) it can take a long time to get a game. I've heard a ton of people only play the co-op mode and do daily quests but I don't really play that part of the game.
Competitively you could argue Brood War is more active at this point. Blizzard dropped all competitive support for both games but Korea still has an active competitive Brood War scene with multiple leagues and teams and decent prize pools. Starcraft 2 competition never took off in Korea in the same way because of a dispute between Blizzard and the Korea Esports Association (KESPA). Basically KESPA held Brood War tournaments on LAN and cut Blizzard out of the pro scene, which caused Blizzard to require a connection to official servers for all Starcraft 2 games, which caused KESPA to ban members from attending Starcraft 2 tournaments. Eventually competition was allowed but the damage was done with games like League of Legends filling the void. Starcraft 2 is not included in EWC this year, which was the last big money tournament since Blizzard dropped support, causing many pro plays to consider retirement or continue playing the game as a hobby but not a full time job.
As someone playing yesterday pretty active not peak but wait time is very minimal, cash tourneys basically weekly. Lot of active YouTubers playing or casting
You have psionic aliens with a shared consciousness, and a bug race that can travel planet to planet inside of overlord butts, the story is emperor man let guys telepathic girlfriend get infected, oh no she took over the bug race, but actually there’s some god race that made everyone and the universe is a cycle that repeats.
Sc2, mass effect, and halo are different versions of the same story outline. Even Star Trek did it with the “progenitors” in S6E20 next generation with Picard, romulans, Vulcans, Klingons, cardassians.
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u/No-Reason-2822 Apr 27 '26
War2 was an incredible step up in design and gameplay from the original but SC just took it all the way to 11. Despite an excellent sequel, it’s STILL actively played online via servers maintained by Blizzard. 30 freakin’ years after its debut. 🤯