EPTI'm switching to CS:GO. CS is a staple game that I played off and on from the age of 15 beginning with - go ahead and laugh - the Xbox version. At 16 I played 1.6. At 18 I made a late switch to CS:S. And CS:GO when it first came out in 2012 (before skinning). Getting it to grow in Asia, however, will be a very difficult chore. Valve will have to coordinate with local distributors in each country individually to get it to grow faster.
I never wanted to leave Starcraft. But I look back on all the days of glory Taiwan had and the events that before I could only watch on streams from thousands of miles away. Before I actually started working in eSports I had never actually been to an event for Starcraft before. And for clarification: I'm leaving Starcraft, not the industry. I'm hoping Overwatch will do well in the near future. It could potentially exceed all other FPS titles in Asia. These days, I feel somewhat particularly in Asia, eSports orgs are beginning to feel more and more like they are "brand-named" or "franchised" like MacDonald's or Burger King. Now that I think of it, this could potentially be a trend found across a lot of industries in Asia as a whole - even the education industry has these kinds of business philosophies build into it. Try to compare this to the education industry in America and it gets difficult to explain. At best this sort of "competition between schools" exists at the university level.
"Nothing is inherently good or bad, but thinking makes it so" as William Shakespeare had once said. I miss the grassroots era. And if you guys don't know what that means, it basically means when NASL was big and when new broadcast talent could openly apply for this or that job as a commentator. This is purely a subjective statement though. These days, it quite literally is an old boys club with few to no exceptions but I'm glad Blizzard is at least altruistic in selecting their broadcast partners these days. This is no country for old men, I think.
With the move to Taichung, the idea is to keep working "behind the scenes" in eSports and collect my thoughts, and fix myself some more. As long as I'm in Taichung I don't think there will be any opportunities to work in eSports full time. I'll be an ESL teacher during the day time (this is something I already have 2 years experience doing). During the evening I'll probably be streaming. If anyone wants me to work behind the scenes, off the camera, then that's alright by me. But I cannot work for any computer hardware manufacturers until 2017 for reasons that I won't disclose here.
Sen's retirement had little to no influence on this decision for me, but seeing him retire did bring me to tears. Starcraft had been uninstalled from my hard drive for at least a few weeks before Sen retired. I loved the game, I really did. I spent more time playing SC2 than any other game on the planet. I joined a pro team for it (Flash Wolves). At one point I was one of the top 5 twitch streamers in Taiwan for the game. TeSL essentially downsized and retracted to something that it never was before. They always had "open" and grassroots-style business philosophies, but they changed so much over the past two years that I no longer know any of the original staff at TeSL. I did not leave them, they simply ran out of work that required an English caster. It is also worth mentioning here that a majority of my work for TeSL was with World of Tanks, not Starcraft. I was always a fan of the game where you didn't need teammates to win. When I played Halo I was always playing Free-For-All deathmatch. Then I tried playing Quake 4, but it felt like there were less than 100 people playing it online at any given time - especially in NA. Then I found out about SC2. I remember the first VoD I ever watched: QxC vs. HuK at some MLG event. I think Husky casted it.
I was thinking of getting in to some cell-phone app programming languages. Toying around and seeing what I could do if I had enough free time. I think I have some original ideas.
