I don't consider anyone who isn't living with a team and getting paid a stable salary to be a pro. There are plenty of people who are just decent at the game and play in a lot of tournaments occasionally taking home a cash prize. That's your amateur scene. If you're asking why people don't watch the amateurs it's because they don't offer anything unique. [I guess this is more or less how you defined it, but I am just going to leave it to be specific about what I think an amateur is]
In BW, in the beginning, you watched amateurs because it was hard to get VODs of pros. Replays of amateur tournaments were low file size and that was very important back in the day. However, even when VODs became freely available, it was still your only chance to watch different nationalities competeting, and they had a unique style and view of the game that would often throw Koreans a little off even in WCG (although they still conquered).
College basketball and football and stuff offer the appeal of scouting players who may one day be stars, who will reign supreme in the 'little leagues' and have a natural progression towards becoming a pro (indeed, there was actually a lot of stuff like this even in BW with elite school leagues getting broadcasted). Maybe this sort of exists in SC2, but to be frank watching SC2 amateurs is fucking boring. It is hard enough to watch pros on the cutting edge figuring out the game. There is no stability to the scene and no reason to believe random amateurs whose names come and go like farts in the wind are ever going to rise to stardom. By the time they are worth watching they're already pros. The development of a player from amateur wasting his time to pro is so rapid that you're not exactly going to scout someone years in advance before he joins the NFL. You don't have hometown spirit or anything going for you. You just have no reason to watch amateurs in SC2.
SC2 is going to need to prove it's stable to have anything like this given how international and schizophrenic the game is. With expansions on the way and yet more balance adjustments incoming that's really hard. With the death of professional BW everyone see's a max ten year clock on SC2, if that. We've seen how IP rights can cripple a game that suddenly falls out of favour with its creator, and suddenly we are below square one with thinking about how video games can be esports, what an esport even means, and what the point of an amateur scene is. If SC2 can overcome these things, prove itself stable etc, then you can think about anyone caring who the next big players might be.
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On July 25 2012 12:40 Bagration wrote:Show nested quote +On July 24 2012 20:11 Arcane86 wrote:On July 24 2012 10:02 Bagration wrote:First off, I appreciate all the work that you put into this blog, and the thought and analysis behind it. I agree with you that having a sustainable amateur scene is pretty important, and that currently it is usually not worth investing in a amateur scene. But you can't draw conclusions from assumptions, nor can you force the baseball model onto eSports. Just because amateur baseball gets 1% of the viewership that MLB does, does not mean that amateur SC2 tournaments will get 1% of the viewers that professional tournaments get, nor should they necessarily strive to reach that number (often times I would expect them to surpass this). Let us assume that an event needs 10k online concurrent viewers to be worth running.
Target Semi-pro Viewership = 10k Concurrents
Semi-Pro/Pro Viewership Ratio = 1%
(Target Pro Viewership) = (Target Semi-pro Viewership) / (Semipro/Pro Viewership Ratio)
(Target Pro Viewership) = (10,000) / (1%)
(Target Pro Viewership) = (10,000) / (.01)
(Target Pro Viewership) = 1,000,000 Concurrent Viewers
For an investor to safely run an SC2 amateur event, major SC2 events must draw 1,000,000 Concurrent viewers. The issue that I have with this analysis is that you begin by abitrarily throwing out the 10k minimum concurrent viewership number, and use the 1% ratio from baseball that I believe does not necessarily apply to SC2, which gives you a number that doesn't really make sense. For example, the 10k minimum concurrent viewership is a number I would dispute. NASL and IPL broadcasts, while they may break 10k viewership, often fall short of these goals. Meanwhile, even smaller tournaments like the ESV fall far below the 10k mark. Furthermore, realistically there is very little chance that SC2 events will ever reach 1 million concurrent viewers if our largest events now do not even reach half that number. The only realistic way for that to happen would be if North Korea's Kim Jong Un was secretly a massive SC2 fan and forced his entire nation to watch SC2 tournaments. I jest a bit here, but it will be very difficult to more than double viewership just like that :p Now, my critique was pretty harsh, and I hope you don't take it personally. You did make some very good points, as well as recognize the importance of amateur and talent-development programs, and I really appreciate the effort you put into this. I also agree with your conclusion that currently investment in amateur programs is generally not worthwhile at the moment. Hey, a thoughtful critique! Those don't happen often. Re: 1% If you can suggest a better model to use and show me some numbers, we can use that ratio instead. However, if I'm an investor, I need some sort of quantitatively supported basis to go off of. "striving for higher" means nothing to someone who's decisions are governed by ROI, and an amateur scene won't be "sustainable" if investors like this don't think its worthwhile. Again, MLB might not be the best model, but from an investors standpoint, its better than no model. You are welcome to present a better one. Re: 10k target concurrents It is not clear to anyone that NASL and IPL's daily broadcasts are making ROI targets for IGN. From a business standpoint, these are an attempt to get a foothold in a growing market so that, when the market becomes big, IGN will then be making lots of money. Moreover, if the target is 8k, that's still a target size of 800,000 for MLG concurrents. If the target is 5k, the MLG target size is 500,000. The overall point of, "it needs to be MUCH bigger" (ie more than 3x as big) still stands. Re: doubling viewership Indeed, it might not happen. Semi-pro players should read this analysis, realize that, and make their career decisions based on reasonable analysis. Moreover, I hope people start to realize how important it is for the scene to grow. That means broadening its appeal to people who know less about the game, getting all of us better at communicating with our friends who aren't into SC2, getting better at explaining to people why what we do is awesome. This stuff doesn't happen by itself. Regarding the 1%, perhaps we could take a look at the viewership numbers of college football (US) vs NFL, or the NCAA basketball vs the NBA. I don't have those numbers off of the top of my head, but it would be nice to have them for consideration. I agree that NASL and IPL daily broadcast viewership might not meet ROI minimums, so the sub-10k viewership may not be sustainable long-term. It would be very hard to know for certain what the viewership needs to be for each individual tournament without looking at their finances. I do want to bring up the topic of CSL, with the recent news of Suppy's signing to EG. Players like Suppy, qxc, Ostojiy, Spanishiwa are all CSL "stars" who have attained recognition and occasional tournament success at the professional level. The Collegiate Starleague is probably one of the best amateur leagues in NA, because it allows students to compete without giving up their studies, and gives them resources, such as tournament experience, practice partners, etc, that can help them transition into professional play, or at least become better players. What are your thoughts on the CSL?
Re: College v. Pro basketball/football.
I don't know much about these scenes to comment in an educated way. My follow-up here is solely based on conversations with other people who actually pay attention. The conclusion that I will come to here is that, by the criteria I defined above, high-rated College basketball/football should technically qualify for "Pro" and therefore are not useful for comparison.
The College level games that high ratings are, if I'm not mistaken, for teams in New England (for basketball) and top-tier Division-I conferences - e.g. Big 10 (for football). My perception is that the skill-gap between "Pro" and the aforementioned leagues are very small. It would not surprise me to hear someone argue that Notre Dame's Football team is better than [insert bad NFL team here].
My initial criteria for defining "Pro" v. "Semi-pro" included an obvious skill-gap between the "Pro" and "Semi-pro" competitors. When comparing large-conference football v. NFL, the skill gap would be too small to meet my criteria for "semi-pro." However, a Division-III school's football team would clearly be an amateur team.
I believe that, for the discussion of a "semi-pro" scene, the skill-gap is a critical criterion. The pro-gaming scene is, in the long term, mostly meritocratic. If you're actually good, you will simply beat good players at DreamHack or MLG or other tournament qualifiers and gain notoriety that way - e.g. Scarlett & Illusion. It is those players who are close, but not quite there yet, who actually benefit from a "semi-pro scene."
Re: CSL
- The CSL includes mostly semi-pro/amateur players but also includes some legitimate pros (Ostojiy & QXC). That makes it an interesting beast to look at. I would curious as to, if a CSL finals were held as an independent event, what kind of draw it would have, and what the skill-caliber of players would be. I would imagine that the resulting viewership would be inflated because any team that gets that far would actually include players who would qualify as "pro" players. It would still make for an interesting analysis, but I don't know where to get those numbers from.
Overall I think the CSL is a great thing for E-sports that we, as a scene, need to support and develop for the reasons you mentioned and countless more. However, a lot of that is irrelevant to the specific topic here, so I'm going to end my discussion of it here.
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