Heroes of the Storm died in July 2022. Except… it didn’t.
I was sad the game had officially gone into maintenance mode. The Blizzard all-stars MOBA was my favorite online game since I started playing it in 2015, shortly after its release. But I can’t say I was surprised, because it felt like HotS had been abandoned much sooner than that.
“Moving forward we will support Heroes in a manner similar to our other longstanding games, StarCraft and StarCraft II,” Blizzard’s death sentence to HotS read. “Future patches will primarily focus on client sustainability and bug fixing, with balance updates coming as needed.”
Facing the harsh reality of maintenance mode was difficult, but believing that Blizzard would support the game for a long time was even harder.
The game’s downfall started when Blizzard killed the Heroes of the Storm Global Championship in December 2018, while also announcing it would slow down game updates to set up the game for “long-term sustainability.” Still, they promised “new heroes, themed events, and other content that our community loves.”
In 2019, game updates that used to happen weekly popped up every 15 days. A year later, still with lots of reworks and balance updates, it became one update every 30 days, with developers not seeing “any end in sight.” They kept that update pace in 2021, but it took the entire year for HotS to see new content that ended up only being cosmetic items for Starcraft, Diablo, and Warcraft characters already in the roster. No new heroes had been released since Wacraft’s Gnoll King, Hogger, on December 1, 2020.
It was on July 8, 2022, after only two updates in that year, that the game’s development was pronounced dead. Still, there was a promise of continued support to keep the servers running.
That was when I stopped playing Heroes of the Storm for good. The story Blizzard told the community about how they’d support the game felt like a lie. In 2018, they said we’d get several original Nexus characters exclusive to HotS, but they only released Orphea and Qhira. They also said new content would keep coming in 2019 and onward, but didn’t release any maps or heroes after 2020.
They were telling us to move on, I said to myself. And I moved on.
Wait, people still play this game?
Bored in July 2025, I remembered Heroes of the Storm was still in the Blizzard launcher and installed it only to learn that people are still playing the game. HotS was never the most popular game, so the five-minute queues even felt nostalgic.
Other things felt like they were in the right place, or even better. The Heroes subreddit is active, with sometimes hundreds of players online, and that’s where I got the feeling most players took maintenance mode well. There’s a running joke about “The Janitor,” believed to be a single developer or a small team who keeps HotS clean and ordered for everyone to use since 2022.
Whoever the Janitor is, they’re doing great work. HotS is the healthiest dead game I’ve ever played. Aside from some weird reworks to Tassadar and a few other heroes, the game in 2025 feels the same as it always has, and it’s comforting for someone with almost 3,000 matches like myself.
Keeping Heroes of the Storm alive is a good move by Blizzard. They could’ve followed the footsteps of Ubisoft’s shutdown of The Crew or EA’s abandonment of Anthem, but instead they’re keeping the game alive just like they’ve been doing with Starcraft 2 and Warcraft Rumble.
I’m not saying Blizzard is perfect, and we know it’s not. The sexual harassment and workplace culture scandal that happened in 2021 forced massive changes in the company. The repeated layoffs caused insecurity among developers of the games we love the most. The Microsoft merger created a gigantic corporation that edges far too close to a monopoly.
Hell, even in HotS, Blizzard received backlash when it canceled the esports league without letting teams and content creators plan beforehand.
Still, in terms of keeping their games alive, Blizzard is doing it right. They were also right about what they needed to keep Heroes of the Storm alive, and other publishers should probably copy them. Hire a Janitor, make sure the game doesn’t break, and stop killing games. Players will have fun and even spend some money.
We should play dead games
Playing an online game that gets no content updates might not seem worth it, but if you check the now-empty Reddit communities of games that were shut down, you’ll see how much worse it is to not be able to play something you had fun with. Something you played with friends, grew up with, or even just put time and money into. It’s sad to visit communities like the subreddit of the defunct dodgeball brawler Knockout City and see post titles written with “was” and “could,” players calling video highlights “old,” or simply sharing that mourful feeling of “I miss this game so much.”
When a game dies, it feels like a magical part of us dies too. Returning to a video game after years is like time-traveling and recalling all the emotions, thoughts, and moments we lived back then.
I remember calling my friend to play Heroes of the Storm when I was fresh out of college, and playing for hours with him and his friends that I never even met in person. The inside jokes, the ranked frustration, the weird comp wins, the rage quitting, and getting trolled.
Fortunately, I still have access to all of that whenever I play HotS today, and I wish more people could say the same about the games they enjoy.
