When HN users recommended it
1 HN user recommended this in 2010, in one comment.
20072026
Each tall tick is one HN user's first recommendation. A short tick is the same user again. Click a tick to jump to the comment.
1 HN user recommended this in 2010, in one comment.
Each tall tick is one HN user's first recommendation. A short tick is the same user again. Click a tick to jump to the comment.
I think a lot of folks are quick to marginalize the hardcore community, which indeed accounts for a fairly small portion of sales.
However, why do you think SC2 has the amount of hype that it does? Why do you think that, ten years after release, the Starcraft Battle Chest is still #2 on Amazon's PC strategy sales rank (holy shit!) [1]
My guess is that the great majority of the word-of-mouth that keeps games like this afloat after the initial 6 months or so comes from hardcore players. This seems even more pertinent for SC2 in particular, since Blizzard plans on releasing it in three parts. If it can't hold people's attention for a couple years, they're going to be missing out on potential sales soon. They shouldn't throw away their loudest evangelists.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/StarCraft-Battle-Chest-Pc/dp/B00001IVR...
Addendum: Plus, remember that "hardcore" players of WC3 basically spawned off an entire genre (DotA) in their spare time -- it's not likely that anything of the sort would be produced on Battle.net 2.0 with the mapmaking restrictions outlined in the article above.