EPTEnded up with 85%, even though I feel it was marked very loosely
In the early part of this century, there has been a mainstream emergence for non-conventional sports such as Texas Hold’em Poker and Ultimate Fighting Championships. Although both sports had both interest and potential prior to mainstream, the growth explosion in has revolved around two key factors: the expansion in viewership to the mass public via television and cable networks, and the availability of the sport as a global community. Today, UFC has developed into a spectator sport comparable to traditional sports such as NBA and MLB while online poker continues to show interest with people playing on sites such as PartyPoker.com and PokerStar.com. Undeniably, the emergence of UFC and Online poker to the mainstream has generated substantial revenue, making them sustainable industries in this new millennium. Despite not being broadcast on TV, eSports such as Starcraft 2 is following a similar path to mainstream.
ESports, or Electronic Sports, has existed since the introduction of online game play of video games. Players engage in various types of competition depending on the type of game, whether it is team based or one on one. Some of the popular game titles featured in eSports competition in recent years include CounterStrike (a 5vs5 First Person Shooter or FPS), Halo Reach (a 4vs4 FPS), League of Legends (a 5vs5 Multiplayer Online Battle Arena or MOBA), and Starcraft 2 (a 1vs1 Real-Time Strategy or RTS). The growth of these games has been mainly due to the increased popularity of livestreams, a technology that allows anyone to broadcast anything over the internet in real time. Although many more games feature a competitive element, these titles have the highest number of players and viewers engaged in the game. There are also a number of organizations dedicated to providing the competition a broader audience. ESL, Dreamhack, and IPL are some of the international organizations that host eSports competition with some of the above mentioned titles around the world on a regular basis. Dreamhack draws in tens to hundreds of thousands of people each year to its LAN events, ESL hosts events that pull in hundreds of thousands of people watching their livestream at the same time, and IPL is hosting events in major venues such as Las Vegas and Atlantic City. But the focus of this paper revolves around Starcraft 2 and the eSports organization MLG.
To understand the popularity of Starcraft 2, we must go back one decade to early 2000s with the release of Starcraft: Brood War in South Korea. Around that time, Asia experienced a financial crash, causing many Koreans to spend less time going out at night. At the same time, Starcraft was released with an online component, allowing players to play against each other in one on one battle. The Koreans started broadcasting Starcraft matches on TV, and very quickly, the popularity with Starcraft exploded. At the time, owning a computer in a household was very expensive; many people could not afford to play Starcraft in their homes. Instead, people would go to PC Cafes to play at a very cheap price. This led to PC Cafes sprawling up around the country; on a single block, more than one PC Cafes can be found. The popularity of Starcraft in Korea has led many players to engage in the game on a similar level to the professionals, some of whom are recruited by the pro-players[4]. The availability and accessibility of Starcraft in PC Cafes helped push telecommunication companies to greatly improve the internet infrastructure of Korea, and today, Korea is now a world leader in high speed internet[5]. In addition, many companies over a decade have sponsored Starcraft leagues and teams with two TV stations hosting programs dedicated to Starcraft alone. With the release of Starcraft 2 in 2010, many of the western fans wait in anticipation for a Korean-style boom for the rest of the world, and one of the main organizations that capitalized Starcraft 2 into their events is MLG.
MLG, which stands for Major League Gaming, is an American eSports organization started in 2002 focused on two games: Halo 2 and Tekken. Their events revolve around large convention center and three-day weekend competitions with the results carried from event to event, building up to a national final at the end of the year. As the years pass by, different game titles show up on their events showing different degrees of success. In the second half of 2010, MLG added Starcraft 2 to their events and it was a major hit with the fan base. By 2011, they were showing 240000 concurrent views (at the same time) and millions who watched live[3]. The significance of the high numbers is not limited to the advertising revenue MLG generates from running ads in between games, which is in addition to convention center ticket sales, it also provides MLG with data it can present to current and prospecting investors. Despite the viewership of the MLG events, MLG still needed to prove to its investors that it has a sustainable business hosting Starcraft 2 and other eSports competition[1][2], and so, in February 2012, MLG launched its first ever PPV Arena event.
The PPV Arena was an experiment by MLG to prove to their investors they have a sustainable business model. The explosion with Starcraft 2 was due in part of a free livestream to reach out to the public. Given this explosion in 2011, MLG decided that, rather than having a free stream for their Winter Arena, viewers are charged $20 for the weekend. This is very similar to UFC where the free content (the regular fights) lead up to a highly anticipated championship event that is PPV. Although it was met with a great backlash in the community, the Arena exceeded MLG’s expectations and was a success in terms of the number of sales for the PPV, and it renewed more venture capital from its investors. In a recent interview by the web show “The Losers Bracket – Round 106”, MLG CEO and Co-Founder Sundance DiGiovanni stated that the sales were rated “high” and more of the Arena events will happen in the spring[3]. We can also take away from that same interview that Jerry “LordJerith” Prochazka, owner of eSports team “vVv Gaming”, mentioned the core investors of MLG have stuck around for about as long as the company has, suggesting that the investors have faith in MLG’s business model.
So what can we take away from this? There is a demand for Starcraft 2 competition and people are willing to pay for it. Even at a very reasonable price of $20 for a three-day weekend, there was a tremendous amount of support by the viewer base. And it does not stop there. By proving their business model with the Winter Arena, MLG can secure sponsorship deals with companies to subsidize the cost of running their events as well as lowering the price tag of their PPV Arenas. The success of MLG has great impact on this industry and on society. Much like UFC and their PPV fights, showing these events in local bars can generate a lot of business from the viewers who want a more social experience watching Starcraft 2. So-called Barcraft, these initiatives have spread across the world, the most notable being Barcraft Montreal pulling in hundreds of spectators in a nightclub venue[6]. With enough interest, different cities around US and possibly Canada may want to compete for MLG to host events in their cities which would generate tourism revenue.
Whatever the future may be for Starcraft and MLG, one thing is for certain: they are not done causing an uproar with the youth of today.
