EPTAccording to the user:
I really find it disturbing that sc2 aint that popular with the people here in the Philippines.
i decided to start this thread to raise the awareness of this phenomenon, to figure out why this is, and how we as the starcraft2 philippine community can help change this. I personally would like to see sc2 as popular as DotA in the near future.
lets start. In this discussion thread i want you guys to think of reasons why not many people are playing sc2 AND ways that we could counteract this. This discussion is only to stimulate minds and maybe inspire people to change the current status of the philippine sc2 scene.
Here are my thoughts. The main reason why i think sc2 isnt that popular is because of the lack of advertisement the game is having in the gaming community. Advertisement not for sales purposes, but advertisement in a gaming sense.
Remember when you saw your friends playing DotA for the first time? Yes, that time. People screaming profanity at each other. All shouting. enjoying. Then you decide to try that game out. Well it didn't take too long, you where skipping classes just to play that game.
This is the kind of endorsement this game lacks. With the advent of online gaming, people are given the liberty to enjoy this game in private. Like alot of things done in private (ahem mastu.....), it deprives the community of the joy of the game; the intellectual satisfaction that comes with stomping your opponent with a build you thought of, or the rush of entering a major battle. The public fails to see how fun this game really is.
It is therefore the sc2 philippine community's responsibility to counter act this flaw in blizzards marketing strategy. I suggest that we, the sc2 community, hold more public events to endorse the game we love. In a smaller sense, we as individual players could get together and play sc2 in a public computer cafe to help show others the joy of 6 pooling, proxy gating, bunker rushing, and ,yes, winning in a straight up macro game.
is envisioning starcraft 2 as popular as DotA, LoL, HoN, and all the other online games just a dream? Only we can answer that.
* sorry for being lazy... This was a repost from pinoysc2. still my original work though
And according to my fellow group member, Dex Ancheta:
"To be fair, when DotA was first released last 2003, it wasn't magically popular overnight. Not even after a few months. It was only by 2005 that the game started to become widespread in the country. Now let's go to SC2. The game is just about to be one year old. This just tells us that SC2 and RTS is just starting to pick up locally. Let's be honest, the CnC games, Battle Realms and other RTS's after SC1 weren't "hits" compared to DotA in terms of local popularity. By the time SC2 was released, only a handful of SC1 players remained active (myself being one of them).
Public events for SC2 is inevitable though and this will surely help grow the SC2 community. Another thing that can help the scene get bigger is having a Filipino win a big international event like MLG or DreamHack.
However, the smallest thing YOU can do with hopes of a big change is by simply telling your friends about StarCraft 2. Share to them why you play this game more than any other game. Tell them that StarCraft 2 is fun to play and very rewarding in terms of competition. Give them your guest passes if you still have them. Teach them how to make use of a Prepaid Account if they are not yet willing to shell out cash for the full version. "
Here are my thoughts though I am not sure how accurate this is:
In the Philippine gaming community. the most played online games are the ones that can be acquired for free and business is done with microtransactions. Why pay for something when you can play something else for free? If you can, pirate the shit out of it and use Hamachi if you want to play it's multiplayer? And that's one of the reasons why Starcraft 2 is not very popular in the Philippines. Hell, that game costs about 80 dollars if converted from the Philippine peso. Though as mentioned by Ancheta, there is the option to play the game if you are on a tight budget. There are guest passes which you can get from other gamers, preferably gamers you know. There is also the option for pre-paid where you can basically play the game for 7 days for 150 pesos, which is more than enough to at least let you finish the campaign. How it works is sort of like an extension to one's guest pass since you do not have the proper license needed to benefit from services that Blizzard provides through their Battle.net website (i.e. posting on their forums or even leaving a comment on Blizzard's articles).
In my humble opinion, the only way for more and more Filipino gamers to be exposed into the awesomeness that is Starcraft 2 is to have it distributed on a lot of cyber cafes. and not just the cafes that are found inside or outside of malls. With the pre-paid model IAHGames has gone for with Starcraft 2, it is bound to be popular with the right amount of exposure. So far, we got a pro-gaming team in which I am confident will grow strong enough to compete in bigger leagues and I think more can be done to make Starcraft 2 a very popular game to play.
Okay that's my thoughts. A bit lacking in organization, but at least I got that out of my chest.
