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Why wasn’t PVP Live’s HPL a Major Success?

by - 9 years ago

From June to August, PVP Live went live on Twitch weekly to bring us the Hearthstone Pro League. From the very first show, I felt I watch witnessing an historic moment. HPL was like nothing I’ve ever seen in the Hearthstone Scene before, it was shiny, new, and great. In fact HPL looks like somebody had read my March article about Presentation in Hearthstone eSports, and took it to Heart.

Partnered with the Production Resource Group, HPL looked like a window into the future of eSports. PVP Live’s HPL didn’t look like a 2015 event produced for a niche audience, it looked like a 2020 production for a mainstream network.  So HPL had by far the best production values in Hearthstone, it boasted some of the best and most consistent players in Hearthstone today, it brought a new and exciting format, and it even broke new ground trying to come up with advanced statistics to enrich the viewing experience.

So why wasn’t HPL a massive success like the Archon Team League? Why was PVP Live’s Twitch Channel struggling to break 10k viewers? Join me as we break down what I believe HPL did right and wrong, and as I try to answer the important question of, why did this great production failed to capture the imaginations of Hearthstone fans worldwide.

HPLCasters

Change is Scary

We could go on with a lenghty discussion on whether PVP Live is doing eSports better or worse than other brands, but I feel the important part is not whether the product is better or worse, but the fact that it is so different to today’s standards.  Change is scary, and that is evidenced every time a popular brand changes its logo, or social media outlets like Facebook or Twitter introduce new features, or change the way they display your information.

Change is very scary, and HPL introduced way too many changes, in a short period of time. The casters weren’t the usual popular crew, the players weren’t the most well known, the tournament format was completely different to the usual conquest, the emphasis on stats was something that not many people were asking for, the production values where head and shoulders above the usual “produced from bedrooms” tournaments, and then you had the constant breaks between games.

The changes where overwhelming, and they probably scared a bit portion of the audience away.

Evolution is a Mystery

Earlier, I mentioned that HPL looked like a glimpse into the future of eSports. But maybe that’s exactly what was wrong with it, the audience just wasn’t ready for something like the Hearthstone Pro League. HPL was very innovative in many areas; in fact, it was so innovative that at times it looked nothing like the usual Hearthstone productions. It was something completely different than then product that the audience was accustomed to, it wasn’t what the Hearthstone community wanted to see….yet.

Have you ever looked at an older picture of you and be surprised to how changed you are? Have you ever wondered why you didn’t figure that out sooner? Likely, it was because the change was so gradual, that you don’t notice any change at all.

Evolution Pit

Evolution has always been a part of Blizzard Gaming.

Think of evolution, a change in the heritable traits of biological populations over successive generations. Evolution is a process of gradual change, it’s not like all of a sudden a creature of one species starts giving birth to a completely new species, it took generations and generations of change. But while HPL looked like the Evolution of eSports, they failed to evolved the scene. They skipped the process of gradual change and lost the audience in the process, instead of capturing the essence of the Hearthstone scene and slowly evolving it into its final form, PVP Live decided to skip past the evolution process and jumped straight into the future.

To put it in Hearthstone terms, you could say that PVP Live got greedy, overextended, and got punished for it.

Can PVP Live recover?

When PVP Live first let out that their finale was postponed from September to November, I was a bit annoyed. I spent a lot of time following the event, and I wanted to see that time investment to immediately pay off, and to see who was going to emerge victorious. But after thinking in depth about it, it does make sense. HPL started off with the wrong foot, and built a bit of a bad reputation as “that league with bad casters, that was taking themselves way too seriously”. Even if THE Tannon Grace and Nathan “Thats Admirable” Zamora showed great improvement and quickly became one of the best casting teams in Hearthstone, even if they fostered a lighter mood as the season progressed, a big part of the audience had already written them off.

The last month of HPL was a completely different animal, than its first few episodes. But despite morphing HPL into something much more approachable by a casual audience, their viewing numbers didn’t reflect those improvements.

I guess PVP Live needed to let their bad reputation die down, and try in someway to reboot their image, at least in the eyes of the Hearthstone community. If this HPL finale teaser is any indication, this is exactly what they are doing. Hopefully, they will succeed!


That’s it for this week, but stay tuned as next week I will be going in-depth on how HPL can maximize its success going forward with “5 changes I would bring to Season 2 of HPL!”. Meanwhile you can watch my HPL Player Spotlight Interviews with Zalae, Jab, and Muzzy. You can also get to know The Tannon Grace, the hottest new caster in Hearthstone eSports.

Also, you can follow me on Twitter. I’m not that bad there, I promise.

 

 

 

 


posted in Hearthstone Tags: , ,
JR Cook

JR has been writing for fan sites since 2000 and has been involved with Blizzard Exclusive fansites since 2003. JR was also a co-host for 6 years on the Hearthstone podcast Well Met! He helped co-found BlizzPro in 2013.


0 responses to “Why wasn’t PVP Live’s HPL a Major Success?”

  1. Dorkmaster Flek says:

    The breaks are unfortunately a necessity of the format they’re trying to run. However I think they could minimize them further. They always do a quick wrap up commentary right after a game ends, THEN they take a full 2 minute break for the deck construction, then there’s a bit more commentary as the game gets set up and under way once the break is over. It does seem like they could shorten the downtime so maybe they’re doing the wrap up commentary as the players are adjusting their decks.

    Also I’m just going to come out and say it: I don’t think being sponsored by UFC was the best decision. 😛 It shouldn’t really matter who’s doing the sponsoring ideally, but UFC is like the antithesis of Hearthstone, instead of for example a PC peripheral manufacturer like Razor sponsoring a tournament. I don’t think that was the main issue, but it definitely didn’t help.

    I really hope they come back for season 2 and have a big rebound. I really like what they’re trying to do with pushing a different format, and trying to get more stats into the commentary. It made for some really cool games where people teched in strange choices you never normally see because of a specific player they were up against. I’ll definitely be watching the finale.