I don't think high-level competitive play matters at all for success - the biggest issue with SC2 IMO is that they prematurely optimized for competitive multipl

I don't think high-level competitive play matters at all for success - the biggest issue with SC2 IMO is that they prematurely optimized for competitive multiplayer. If they spent the majority of their time worrying about how to make multiplayer fun for new players instead of trying to ensure that it works for existing StarCraft pros and would make a viable esports game, we may not be talking about the death of RTS). The fact that the co-op mode was released in 2015 with LoTV (5 years after the initial release of SC2) despite this being a substantially better default multiplayer mode that's unconstrained by multiplayer balancing speaks volumes about Blizzard's blind spot. They also learned the wrong lesson from DotA - SC2 isn't just a game but an incredible game engine, but Blizzard wasn't very good at taking advantage of this to broaden its appeal.