EPT****The Views expressed herein are not related to the ESL, and is my own violation****
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So let's talk about the recent Forbes article from Mr. Paul Tassi by bringing out a few points he made and find out how much truth is evident.
"But the winds have shifted, as they often do in this industry, and what once was a thriving game (Starcraft2) and community is now teetering on the edge of irrelevancy."
The word choice of irrelevancy is an interesting one... since it doesn't mean what I 'think' he is trying to say which is: "...is now teetering on the edge of obscurity " might be more 'relevant', but despite his word choice, let's go over the merit of his accusation with some statistics.
This information is taken from: TL Stream Data There was a -2299 user decrease on personal streams out of the total 65,415 total users. Or a 3% decrease in viewer-ship for the month of September.
This doesn't take into consideration the tournaments such as the HyperX cup the MSI Pro Cup the MLG vs Proleague or the ESP Berlin Open.
You can debate how important a 3% loss is, but it is still a decrease, so maybe Mr. Tassi has a point. Let's continue:
"Most notably three big name, Code-S level players (the best in the world), Puzzle, Min and Coca, said they’re leaving Starcraft 2 altogether. ."
Tassi's word flow here is misleading though, surely he must mean Code - S players are the best in the world and not, "three big name, Code S level players the best in the world etc..."
Two... big name Code S level players... Min never actually qualified for Code S, he made it to Code A but lost in the Round of 32 to Yoda in July so he dropped out completely. 3 months later he started playing LOL.
CoCa reached the Ro8 in July 2011 of GSL Code S but after some controversy of match throwing CoCa gave up his Code S spot in November (presumably 2011).
Finally Puzzle: This is a guy that beat Supernova and MMA to make it to the Ro8 in Season 1 GSL 2012. Seems like he was doing well, even won ESV TV Korean Weekly: Season 3 Week 8, but in the end has switched to LOL.
"It’s now the game being played 25% of the time in all Korean internet cafes, thanks to its accessibility from a skill perspective and the fact that it’s free to play"
EDIT: PC Bang Statistics indeed do show that League of Legends is being played almost 25% of the time.
"Despite event organizers’ best efforts, there’s nothing that even comes close to an event as epic as League’s World Finals which had a $2M prize pool funded by Riot Games itself."
There's this little event called WCS... Blizzard itself is funding it.
Data Taken from: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=368732
Asia: $127,000 and all trips paid to WCS World Finals(9), and Asia Finals(32).
Europe: $190,000 and all trips paid to WCS World Finals(9), and Europe Finals(32).
North America: $120,000 and all trips paid to WCS World Finals(9), and North America Finals(32).
Oceania: $30,000 and all trips paid to WCS World Finals(2), and Oceania Finals(8).
South America: $45,000 and all trips paid to WCS World Finals (3) and South America Finals(16).
+ 250,000 for the World Championship is: $762,000 in prize money for a single player game... if you want to make a fair comparison of splitting it between four other team-mates, then let's just say its the equivalent of a $762,000 * 5 = $3,810,000 million dollar tournament for a team game.
This is actually a very important point though, Starcraft2 doesn't need huge payouts so it will look more attractive on a balance sheet to investors looking for return on investment (ROI) or for companies that just don't want to dedicate the budget.
"League is a free game with free updates while Starcraft costs $60 "
http://www.saturn.de/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/MultiChannelSearch?storeId=48352&langId=-3&searchProfile=onlineshop&query=STarcraft
It's a German electronics store selling Starcraft2 for 35 euros or 45 dollars, not sure where you are shopping Mr. Tassi, but maybe try Amazon next time?
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias=aps&field-keywords=starcraft
($35)
The rest of the article: http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2012/10/18/starcraft-2-struggles-as-league-of-legends-rises/
Goes over how Starcraft2 for 1v1 just isn't fun for casual players while LOL is, that Riot seems to understand their game and their players, while Blizzard is accused that since they don't have free weekly release cycles that their product implementation strategy of having big expansions with small tweaks is seen as inferior? It's not really important to me that a new unit gets added on a weekly release cycle to Starcraft 2, because the game's depth is enough to keep me wanting more, but that isn't for everyone and that is OK, but it doesn't mean that Starcraft2 is inferior to LOL much like Tennis isn't inferior to Basketball, it's just a different game, for different types of people.
There is the concern however on how a very sparsely researched piece of literature made it to the front of Forbes... the holes in the arguments are huge! I won't claim I am a writer/editor or any master of the English language, but for gods sake... Google... that is all.
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Will write another blog on Paul Tassi's Update: http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2012/10/19/further-thoughts-on-starcraft-2-and-league-of-legends/
But for now, I want to see the reaction to my thoughts and research done.
Update #1 The tweet in question is here: F*** LOL. Love Starcraft. I am part of the 5%.
Update #2 Minor text updates
Thanks Jpak
