“Personally, I came to Blizzard to work on Heroes simply because I was such a huge fan of Dota and, at the time, Heroes of Newerth,” he said.

So even though it took some time to fully adjust, we are really hitting our stride right now.”Ĭrawford said that the goal is always to bring as much content into the game as possible, and the team is currently working to remove some of the barriers in an effort to quickly and efficiently scale up its output.Īs the team celebrates HotS’ fifth anniversary, Crawford reflected a bit on his experience as lead designer. “The team is firing on all cylinders and we can actually do a lot of things now that we couldn’t really do before.

“The new normal is actually pretty amazing,” Crawford explained. Things appear to have leveled out, though, and the HotS team seems to have settled into a new routine. The layoffs that resulted from the wider restructuring left HotS with a reported skeleton crew, and development was a bit touch-and-go for a bit. These numbers are merely a fraction of the audience commanded by Dota 2’s The International, which had 14.96 million peak viewers, and 493 million hours watched. In 2018, the HGC finals event garnered only 183,000 peak concurrent viewers and a total of 3.21 million hour watched.

Throughout its lifecycle, Hots has experienced many ups and downs, including the birth and death of the Heroes Global Championship esports league amid Activision Blizzard’s now-notorious restructuring at the start of last year. It has been an incredible five years of playing alongside all of you in the Nexus I can’t wait to see what the next five brings,” Brett Crawford, lead designer on HotS, told GameDaily. “We are so incredibly grateful to our players. In the five years since, HotS never reached Dota 2 or League of Legends levels of success, but it has earned itself a respectable and passionate following. In June of 2015, Blizzard entered the MOBA sphere with Heroes of the Storm, a competitive multiplayer battler that features some of the most beloved characters from across the company’s stable of properties. Lead designer Brett Crawford talks about Activision Blizzard's restructuring, his inspirations in the MOBA genre, and the future of Heroes of the Storm.

Heroes of the storm popularity 2019