Free Ladder, Same Humiliation

The story I have to tell is basically everyone’s: loved the StarCraft 2 campaign, dove into multiplayer, and got my ass handed to me within two minutes by some fourteen-year-old who politely informed me I was wasting his time and would I please just concede already. I went back to single-player. I told myself it was a content decision.

Which is why the comment Blizzard’s lead designer Dustin Browder dropped at the Valencia eSports Congress caught my attention. He floated the idea of making StarCraft 2’s multiplayer entirely free-to-play—no purchase required, just download and suffer. That’s a meaningful change. Right now there’s a price of entry. Remove it and suddenly everyone is in the ladder: little brothers, coworkers, the guy who still brings up FarmVille unprompted, anyone who ever had a passing thought about Zerg rushes and never followed through.

The floor drops. The ratio of experienced players to confused newcomers inverts overnight. For the already-good, it’s more cannon fodder. For the rest of us, it’s a shot at clawing to somewhere above the median without being immediately dismantled by someone who treats this as a career. South Korea figured out years ago that StarCraft was a legitimate competitive sport—stadium audiences, professional players, coaches, the whole structure. Free-to-play doesn’t change any of that ceiling. It just widens everything below it.

I’d probably go back. That’s the honest answer. And I’d probably lose. But at least whoever beats me would be doing it for free.