Ben Affleck, StarCraft and Valorant: the Hollywood actor who is one of us

It's not every day that a Hollywood star talks like they've just come out of a ranked match. As reported by PC Gamer, Ben Affleck has admitted that StarCraft ate up three years of his life, that he has very strong opinions on Valorant and that he feels nostalgic for real-time strategy games, a genre he sees as being in clear decline. The British outlet tells the story with humour and even suggests the actor could easily be one of the regulars in its comments section.

Beyond the anecdote, the story matters because it brings up two conversations the competitive community has been having for years. The first is that gaming is no longer a niche people only mention in hushed tones: even the most famous faces in film openly admit to having spent thousands of hours on a game. The second, less pleasant, is that RTS games, the genre that gave birth to much of modern esports, have lost the spotlight they once had.

What you need to know

• According to PC Gamer, Ben Affleck says he lost three years of his life playing StarCraft.
• The actor has strong opinions on Valorant, Riot Games' tactical shooter.
• Affleck laments the state of real-time strategy games as a genre.
• PC Gamer jokes that his profile matches that of a regular commenter on its site.

From RTS to tactical shooter: a very familiar journey

What makes the Affleck case interesting is that his path as a player sums up, almost by accident, the evolution of the competitive PC scene. For a long time, StarCraft was synonymous with serious competition: micromanagement, reading your opponent, decisions under pressure and an unforgiving learning curve. Anyone who threw themselves into it knew it wasn't a weekend hobby. Someone talking about years lost (or invested, depending on how you look at it) fits with what that kind of game demanded.

Valorant, on the other hand, represents the present: the team-based tactical shooter that fills tournaments, streams and Discord servers. The fact that the same player moved from one to the other and has a stance on both says a lot about how the centre of gravity of competitive gaming has shifted. Reflexes, team communication and role coordination have gained ground over the resource management and large-scale strategy that defined RTS games.

Why does the decline of RTS games hurt so much?

The nostalgia Affleck mentions isn't his alone. Many veterans feel the genre gradually faded away without a clear successor. The community tends to point to several reasons, and here they are as our own analysis, not as facts from the source:

• The barrier to entry: learning a competitive RTS takes a lot of time before you start to enjoy it.
• Individual pressure: in a one-on-one there are no teammates to blame, and that scares off part of the audience.
• Competition from other genres: MOBAs, battle royales and tactical shooters inherited part of their DNA and took a large share of the players with them.

Our take

Here in the Underworld Lordz newsroom, we find it amusing and, at the same time, good news. Seeing a public figure talk about competitive gaming so naturally, without the condescending tone of someone who only plays now and then, helps normalise what we do. Every time someone with that kind of reach admits to having lived a game intensely, the prejudice that spending hours getting better at a title is time thrown away breaks down a little more.

That said, let's be critical: a celebrity missing RTS games isn't going to bring the genre back from the dead. What keeps it alive are the communities, the grassroots tournaments and the content creators who keep teaching, casting and streaming matches even when the numbers aren't what they used to be. If we really want real-time strategy to matter again, we need more than nostalgia: we need games that lower the barrier to entry without losing depth.

For content creators there's a clear lesson: personal stories connect. Audiences don't just want to see spectacular plays, they also want to know which games shaped you and why. And for competitive players, an honest reflection: those years invested in a demanding game are almost never completely lost. Discipline, reading your opponent and the ability to adapt carry over from one title to another, whether it's an RTS or a tactical shooter.

What do you think?

Ben Affleck may not be hiding in our Discord, but there's surely more than one of us with a similar story. Which game stole years of your life, and do you think RTS games still have a future in the competitive scene? Let us know in the team chat or on our Discord.