so was click and move puzzle games but they all died out, u judge 2003 game by 2019 ...
not to mention i still wait an answer on how a game lost 2/3 of its team is expected to stay in same spot in first place
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it was blizz mishandle that was killing it
the game is better than 40 min dota/lol competition, even on esports, both dota/lol suffer from very boring early game that - rarely - can turn to gankfest interesting match, but the usual is 20 min of boring farming and even trying to avoid destroy tower to not push lane much and risk ganks ... not to mention how lol/dota use 1 map no alteration, making if a hero sucks he sucks, not hero works in a map and bad in another, they just flat out sucks
hots had so much potential that i never understood why blizz sh8t on it (mostly because OW success pulled the rug from under it? no idea)
1) blizz old reputation as most trusted pc games developer (which was shattered with 'don't u have phones')
2) dota is still alive and well and massive even after 15 years since its release, dota 2 is only graphic upgrade and was using same as dota 1 mechanics (got tweaked later, but so did dota 1 with every major patch)
so why expect anything else from blizz? well now we don't but back then we did