It’s still apples to oranges to some extent.
I don’t think the success of MOBAs is necessarily linked to their business model, though I am sure it has something to do with it.
The combat mechanics in games like DOTA 2 and LoL are very different and I think overall just lead to a more skill intensive game.
While that’s debatable, I don’t think it’s debatable that the combat is substantially slower and easier for viewers to track. I think this is a huge factor into why it’s succesfull.
A lot of the top games with huge competitive scenes have this in common.
Hearthstone is a stragetic card game where you can easily track every player as a viewer. The game is arguably not competitve, because of all the RNG, but that’s why it has such a high number of viewers. Matches are unpredictable and the RNG mechanics interact in ways that create one in a million type events. You can watch a game of Hearthstone and you’ll never see that same game again.
Starcraft is real time stragety game with a huge ESL scene. There is a channel on twitch that does nothing, but stream Starcraft tournament runs 24/7. It’s a very hard, skill intensive game that requires a lot of APM, but the overall game is still slow enough for viewers to understand the plays.
The same applies to LoL and DoTA 2. Just slower paced combat that’s also more skill intensive.
GW2 doesn’t have any of that. The fact paced second to second combat is an intensive playing experience, but god awful to watch. It’s a blue of particle effects that make seperating out the individual skills being used by players nearly impossible. Even as a player who has played for 3 years and understands the game, watching it is incredibly boring since half of the time I don’t know what is going on in a match as a whole and less so in individual fights where I have to stare at an action bar and track cooldown usage to try and get an idea of what skills they just used.
It’s even worse given that a lot of people playing the game don’t understand basic stragetic tactics being used in maps like “rotating” and the lack of availability of that information makes it incredibly difficult for a potential viewer to learn and understand just what is going on or why certain things are significant and deserve a “ooo” or a “awwww”
Even player roles in matches like “bunker” are player defined terms and not actual roles built explicitly into the game mechanics itself.
These games in question have streamers that average 20k viewers and the viewership on tournaments on single streams average into the 40-50k. At any given time, a GW2 streamer exceeding triple digits is rare and the tournaments rarely go heavily into the thousands.
You break it off into it’s own game using a model like MOBAs do and it will never achieve the critical mass needed to support itself, because it’s not an interesting eSport to watch.
Rehabilitated Elementalist. Now, trolling the Thief forums with my math.
