EPTNothing went wrong. At least not from a technical standpoint. Over 4 days we had no technical problems at all beyond a handful of good old “Xsplit mic crackle” incidents, a bug in the app that has yet to be resolved, most likely caused by ASIO audio interfaces. It clears up after about a minute, there's no apparent cause other than “sometimes when you unmute the mic it does this, most of the time it doesn't”. I've yet to be able to diagnose the full problem and neither have the Xsplit devs. It's not a huge deal but I'd certainly prefer it get fixed. Any technical improvements from a visual standpoint cannot be done until better internet options arrive in my city. Pushing a 3.5mbps stream at 30 looks pretty good, pushing it at 60 not so much. Only way I can go any better is to get better internet and that's impossible right now. MURICA
Timeslots and rebroadcasts
It is easy to decry someones chosen timeslot from the sidelines. Some of the most common and banal criticism of tournaments by armchair analysts in this scene consists of little but that. They're not wrong, if you don't put your tournament on at an EU friendly timeslot you will have reduced audiences, guaranteed, but they also don't understand that if every tournament could have the primetime 2pm CEST onwards slot on a weekend, they would. But they cant. Clashing with HSC was an option we chose not to pursue. The sponsor required us to execute the event during a specific time window, ie. The launch window of their new product, the Sandisk Extreme Pro SSD. They were made aware that this could result in lower viewership than doing it on another weekend, but they accepted that because the timing was more important to them. If we had clashed with HSC, we would have been rolling the dice against an established event with strong European loyalty as well as splitting the audience, hurting both tournaments. It made no sense to do this. I could have run the rebroadcasts during that time, which may have gained higher viewership from Europe, since the rebroadcasts ran early in the EU (8am CEST onwards every day), but I chose not to do that because frankly cannibalising the Starcraft audience is dumb. HSCs success is everyones success and with Starcraft now in something of a holding pattern, not exhibiting any growth in its audience, it makes no sense to be taking potshots at each other. However, the timeslot gave us one key advantage.
I build for China
Well, looking at the numbers I can safely say if you don't cater to the rapidly growing Chinese audience, you are shooting yourselves in the foot. We got NeoTV onboard early for a few reasons. One, the timeslot was ideal for Asian audiences. Two, one of the three key markets the sponsor was looking to advertise to was in fact China, so it made sense to have a Chinese cast. Including China paid off in a big way, the viewership was surprisingly high for the event in China and we benefited greatly from NeoTVs coverage. We also managed to get some of the elusive Korean audience. Let's be frank, Korean audience on Twitch for SC2 is tiny. Next time we might wanna try simulcasting to Afreeca, but whatever the case we did manage to secure a small, healthy audience of Korean fans but perhaps more importantly, key coverage on influential Korean webzines like inver.kr and dailygame.co.kr. Even the sports section of naver.com covered the event. Naver is like the Korean Yahoo, they are a search portal and they control the lions share of South Koreas search queries. With this tournament we were able to make inroads with new audiences and connect with fans in Asian territories in a way we haven't been able to do before and well as expand our brand and name into non-English speaking demographics. Speaking of connections.
KeSPA players cometh
It was great to be able to field such a powerful roster, in particular 4 players from KT Rolster and CJ Entus, who showed incredible games. If anyone thought these players wouldn't take things seriously because they were playing an online event, they were in for a surprise. All the KT and CJ players played out of their minds, so much so that they were the only ones left standing after the group stage. We got what we thought were some of the strongest Korean players from foreign and ex-eSF teams to oppose them but only DRG was really able to put up much of a fight. Innovation and Life took maps but fell regardless and Liquid`HerO was quickly ejected from the event 0-4. Considering the quality of play on display, it seems like continuing to pursue involvement from KeSPA teams in future would be the best course of action. The quality of games they showed was so far beyond what we usually get to see in a foreign event that we must make sure it's not the last time play of that caliber is seen in an online tournament. We would have liked to get a greater variety of players from the KeSPA teams but completely understandably, the other teams declined due to their focus on Proleague. We were very pleased that CJ and KT agreed to play and hopefully they had a great experience doing so. Perhaps when Proleague ends for the year and players schedules become a little easier, we will be able to bring more fantastic players to the event.
Does that mean we've given up on the other Korean players or even foreigners for these invitationals? Foreigners maybe, I don't think any foreign player would have stood a chance in those groups, but there are maybe a couple that are getting to that level. Snute and Scarlett are looking strong right now, as are Dayshi and Vortix. They are perhaps getting good enough to play at this level, so maybe we'll see next time. HerO was the biggest disappointment of the event, he played very sloppy games and bombed out of the tournament very quickly as a result. In hindsight, he would have been better replaced with someone else. Looking at his form over the past couple of months, it shouldn't have been entirely surprising that he was not up to the standard of everyone else. DRG on the other hand played out of his mind, it just wasn't quite enough to beat some of the absolute best. Consider the players we got to oppose him. Bbyong is a monster, Zest is the reigning champion and yet DRG came close to beating both. I'd happily have him back, he's clearly still got it and that's great to see. Life and Innovation acquitted themselves well. Lifes games against Flash were closer than the scoreline leads you to believe and Innovation was splitting his attention between this tournament and GSL so was understandably not playing at his best. I'm sure on a different day he would have been a real contender for first place in Group A, but it wasn't to be this time around.
Whatever the case, the point is very simple. If you invite the best players, you get the best games. The best players are on KeSPA teams, so it behooves you to entreat those players. If you do, you will get some of the greatest Starcraft you have ever seen.
Match quality
I'm not gonna pull punches here, the matchs were incredible. They were in another galaxy from what we've shown previously on SHOUTcraft, nothing compares. They were in many cases beyond GSL level of quality. Bbyong vs Flash and Zest vs herO in particular were contenders for series of the year in and of themselves. They were also very rare matchs, players of that caliber only play BO7 once in a blue moon. None of the players in the finals had played a TvP best of 7 before, Day3 showed us a BO7 TvT which was also a first for both players. If you want the best Starcraft, accept no substitutes. Get the best players, not the most popular ones. Popularity comes with skill, as it should. After watching HSCs miserable finals and feeling terrible for TaKe that the end of that tournament ended up being such a letdown after a great event, I think it's safe to say that aiming for the highest caliber player is the way to go.
Frankly, I've kinda given up on creating events for other scenes at this point. I've said it before, Korea has a gigantic cadre of talented players and not enough tournaments for them to play in. Online cups don't exist in Korea, they died with ESV Weekly. They need to come back, as do big ticket high profile invitationals for these guys to compete in. I would like to be the driving force behind both. My experiences with SHOUTcraft America Winter put me off catering to the American scene, with lackluster games and a bunch of forfeits, plus despite trying to get another sponsor for a future American event, nobody is biting. With this event we proved that quality results in great numbers and that quality comes from the Korean scene. Hey consider it a blessing in disguise, maybe if we give Koreans more tournaments to play in they won't need to come over and steal all your Dreamhack prizemoney.
Oh and BO7 is the way to go. Take a long look tournament organizers and if you can fit it into your schedule, use the BO7 format. It results in incredible games. BO5 is not suitable for a SC2 finals, BO5 would have denied us the result of herO vs Zest and cut a great grand finals, RO4 TvT and bronze match short. I'm even considering ditching the dual-tournament group format and going back to the old BO5 single elimination, though the disadvantage of that is that there's a smaller variety of matchups to watch and you don't necessarily get the best 4 players by the RO4, since bracket-screwing even with careful seeding is possible. I'll keep thinking about it. BO3 just doesn't cut it, but using BO5 has it's disadvantages too. Whatever the case, BO7 RO4 onwards is obviously the way to go, we'll keep using it.
The numbers
The Sandisk SHOUTcraft Invitational broke our records, simple as that.
198120 SCI4 Day 1 Uniques
184462 SCI4 Day 2 Uniques
181360 SHOUTcraft America Day 1 Uniques (highest figure attained of the 7 days broadcast)
67640 SHOUTcraft America Winter Day 1 Uniques
99660 SHOUTcraft America Winter Day 2 Uniques
And now...
English stream
155360 Sandisk Day 1 Uniques
125200 Sandisk Day 2 Uniques
155440 Sandisk Day 3 Uniques
197600 Sandisk Day 4 Uniques
Korean stream
3760 Day 1 Uniques
4180 Day 2 Uniques
4040 Day 3 Uniques
4200 Day 4 Uniques
Chinese stream
59101 Day 1 Uniques
71106 Day 2 Uniques
97265 Day 3 Uniques
93307 Day 4 Uniques
Leaving us with a grand total across all 3 streams of
218221 Total Day 1 Uniques
200486 Total Day 2 Uniques
226745 Total Day 3 Uniques
295107 Total Day 4 Uniques
For some reason some people add up all their uniques to give a “total uniques” number. This is completely pointless as far as I am aware, since I don't believe Twitch properly “de-dupes” this figure, meaning that if you ask it how many uniques you got over a period of time that is longer than a day (Twitch only offers Hour Resolution and Daily Resolution as time periods for stats), then it will count each viewer on each day as a unique, regardless of if the same guy turned up 4 days in a row. Since the vast majority of viewers use Dynamic Ips that change every 24 hours, it can be argued that this number is worthless. But I like big numbers, so I'm including it anyway just for you. THIS NUMBER MEANS NOTHING
Total “uniques” : 940559.
For the sponsor, uniques are definitely what matter the most. Did people stick around long enough to be impressed by the branding and sponsor? In the case of Twitch I think that's very likely. We went as far as to replace our icons on the frontpage with Sandisk branding, basically you immediately knew who was involved in the tournament from the very start and we gave frequent commentator shoutouts to the sponsor along with a regular Sandisk ad being played every series. Some of these uniques didn't stick around long, we were featured on the frontpage sometimes, similar to all the other big Starcraft tournaments (SHOUTcraft America and SCI4 were featured too), but what matters is whether or not a lot of unique people saw the branding and whether or not it left an impression on them. Hopefully the answer to that is yes. We also received positive feedback from doing an “old school” presenter voice-over style of commercial that was no nonsense and got right to the point. If chat feedback was anything to go by, viewers vastly preferred the more personal and less condescending approach to advertising. There was no bullshit in that ad and it came from a voice they trusted. I only agreed to do the ad because I've had good experiences with Sandisk products in the past, so it acted like an endorsement. Where possible, whenever I engage a sponsor in the future, I will attempt to do so based on products I've used in the past and can honestly recommend.
What did we learn?
Include China
Include China
Include China
Include China
Include China
Seriously though include China, it's a massive untapped audience and a lot of sponsors are going to be selling in the Chinese territories, so include China. NeoTV did a great job, they're the big guys over there and they also do the official Chinese casts of things like GSL, so if you can include China, include China.
* Korea is a difficult market to penetrate
The Korean numbers were really low, as you noticed earlier. It was a little strange, we noticed that there were thousands of unique viewers from Korea coming in on the English stream. Some of those were obviously English speaking people living in Korea but Day 1 had an abnormally high number of 15,000 viewers from Korea. I personally think that stat was a glitch because the numbers after that are much lower, but there were a few thousand uniques from Korea tuned into the English stream every day after that as well. It may be those are all foreigners living in Korea, such as those stationed over there in the armed forces, it's also possible some of them speak English and prefer listening to the “original” broadcast, or simply did not know there was a Korean cast to begin with. Twitch is not a place where many Korean viewers hang out. We may wish to consider simulcasting to Afreeca next time in Korean, though that has it's own set of interesting and unique problems to overcome. Regardless we did receive a lot of Korean webzine coverage both before and after the event, including
http://esports.dailygame.co.kr/view.php?ud=2014060912374934707
http://www.fomos.kr/board/board.php?mode=read&keyno=141553&db=issue
http://www.inven.co.kr/webzine/news/?news=110738&iskin=esports
http://sports.news.naver.com/sports/index.nhn?category=e_sports&ctg=news&mod=read&office_id=236&article_id=0000103297
The overall response from Korean netizens was positive. Those that watched the Axiom cast praised the level of analysis and humour and said that they would like to see Axiom continue to cast. As a result I'll be offering Axiom chances to cast SHOUTcraft Clan Wars and any future invitational events I do. While the Korean audience at the moment is small, I think it's worth trying to connect to it and help it grow, in particular since KeSPA sponsors want that audience most of all. The viewing culture over there is simply different to the west and even China. Esports has been televised for the longest time and Twitch has had a huge competitor over there for ages. That said, Starcraft 2 is not that popular on Afreeca, not at all, it's arguable that broadcasting on Afreeca would not help much. We may need to attempt to forge closer ties with Proleague and GSL to provide crosspromotion for the event, in order to get it out to a wider Korean audience, though this would be a very difficult task. Regardless, we are glad the event had coverage and even if the numbers over there were low, we feel it's important to connect to the Korean fanbase and not leave them out in the cold, so we will provide Korean casts in future when it is feasible to do so (ie. When Axiom isn't playing in the event)
* Go full top-tier.
This might sound unfair, but I think Liquid`HerO was a mistake. While he might have an excellent history, his current form has been lackluster and I think that showed in his play. He was the only player to go out without taking a map and he also looked significantly weaker than everyone else, while players like Life and Innovation put up very solid fights and looked like they were capable of taking their groups, even though they failed. This is my fault as a tournament organizer for not being more attentive to current form and instead looking at a players long-term history as well as their relative popularity within the scene. A few months is a long time in SC2 and just because you won a big tournament a few months ago doesn't mean you are currently in your best shape. Players slump and rise all the time and with invitationals in particular it is your job to prepare the most competitive and compatible lineup. I did not fully succeed in that and I will be more careful in future to ensure the tournament is balanced and competitive, paying close attention to the current form of the invited players.
Game quality was at an all-time high. I watched HSC to enjoy the player banter, I did not enjoy the games as much as I usually do and that was a result of SHOUTcraft because the disparity between the level of the games was so vast. On any regular day I'd probably have enjoyed them more but it's hard to watch Taeja vs MC and then Flash vs herO and/or Zest vs Bbyong without seeing the large difference in game quality. It's actually quite heartening that there can be such a disparity and the highest levels that even among the very best we can still have stratification. That's good news, particularly since players tend to rise and fall between the different tiers so regularly, keeping things interesting.
* There is no such thing as “KeSPA players are only good at Proleague”
This has been an excuse used by forum posters for a long time. Why? Not sure, maybe it's denial of KeSPA dominance, maybe they're just fans of some of the old-guard and want to make out like they are just as good as the top KeSPA pros. Sorry, but I think this tournament proved otherwise. Flash is not just a BO1 player, this tournament made that clear. Zest and herO are both gods in their field, there are very few people outside of KeSPA teams that could even come close right now. Face it, they're the best and the only reason that's not more clear to people is that they don't go to foreign tournaments that often. Expect that to change when Proleague season ends.
* Rebroadcast.
If you've read any of my previous posts then you know that the European audience is the largest out of any region for Starcraft 2 at the moment. As a result it is paramount they are catered to in some way. When you are forced into a timeslot that doesn't cater to them, your event suffers greatly. Unfortunately everyone else also knows this so those timeslots are hotly contested. Could we have done the tournament a different weekend? Not really, at least not this month, everything is locked down and more to the point we have a duty to the sponsor to promote their product during its launch window. That was of paramount importance to the sponsor, so we executed the event on the best set of days we could find for it. Thankfully the numbers were very strong regardless of the fact that we left Europe out in the cold, but they also received a significant boost thanks to a rebroadcast at the event run prior to each day of HSC. It was early in the day and that was a problem particularly for Europeans going to work/school in the morning, but it helped out quite a lot. We were also able to hit the Australian demographic with the rebroadcast since most were getting home from school/work around that time. We will be using rebroadcasts in future, they are clearly the way to go. They resonate better with viewers than VoDs since they are the “live experience” and the feeling of being able to interact with an audience, even if it's smaller, is important for some spectators. I'd appeal to Twitch to provide official tools for rebroadcasting. As it stood we had to cobble something together with a 1 hour countdown just to try and get it to a reasonable time in Europe and even then I was staying up til 2am to make sure it got started and ran. I had to stream the rebroadcasts directly from my computer because Twitch has no rebroadcast capability and is as a result lightyears behind MLG.tv in that regard. MLG.tv even remembers when you ran commercials and injects them into the rebroadcast at that point. Twitch has no such facility, I had to have a staff member stay up during the rebroadcast in order to run the ad breaks. This is silly, Twitch VoDs are not up to snuff, they don't run well and Twitch still does not allow us to pick which VoDs we want behind our subscriber paywall, it's all or nothing. I'd like to see add the ability to properly rebroadcast footage and automate the breaks based on what happened in the live show. Up until that point we'll be stuck doing things manually, but we will do them regardless because they clearly have a lot of value.
In Conclusion
The most successful SHOUTcraft event of all time and contender for most successful online tournament that isn't TSL3 of all time. Initial indications from the sponsor are that they are very happy with the results of the event and I hope their first foray into eSports has convinced them that this is a good place to spend their ad money. You'd be hard pressed to find a better way to spend a budget like that.
Thanks to those who made this event possible.
Sandisk
Axiom eSports
NeoTV
Artosis
Olivia Wong
Genna Bain
Cristian Baltoc
Ben Goldhaber
Kelby May
Fred Gau
Robin Nymann
Do Kyung Kang
Kang Min Ko
Won Joong Wook
Park "Coach Park" Yong Woon
KT
CJ
Innovation
Flash
herO
Life
HerO
Bbyong
Zest
DRG
zircon
Frank Klepacki
