Interview with Paul Sams on SC1 and negotiations - Page 5

On October 25 2010 04:36 leakingpear wrote:


First things first, I think you and everyone else is right about the whole player's being contracted under Blizzard thing, if that is true. That said the only time it was referenced was in a press release by KeSPA and hasn't been mentioned since, it's pretty likely that if it is true it was an attempt at trying to over-reach in negotiations in order to gain more favourable terms on other issues but again that's pure conjecture. Blizzard are very likely not to release information about what happened during the negotiations as they will want to use the KeSPA NDA breaking issue as a key point during any future litigation.

Secondly, the IP rights issue with regards to proleague all stemmed from the KeSPA broadcasting fee decision, there's nothing to implicate that it had anything to do with SC2 (the negotiations started almost immediately upon KeSPA's decision). Yes obviously any resulting deal would be for Blizzard as a whole in terms of any future games that would feasibly under KeSPA stewardship but there's absolutely no indication it was started with a grand scheme of getting KeSPA out of the way for them to run all leagues and abolish the Korean BW scene.

Third, (this doesn't apply to you as much as you're atleast attempting to approach this logically) there's very little evidence to support the idea that any Blizzard/Gretech (again we don't know how much is Blizzard and how much is Gretech) wanted the licensing fee for actual financial gain and not as a means to formalise that Blizzard's IP rights were being respected. IP rights are important going forward for Blizzard (as I understand it) as not consistantly protecting them means it's harder to win litigation when they are under significant threat (e.g. a Korean company producing a copy of BW and selling that, or making it free). It's a very shaky area for the games industry in general, IP rights to franchises are worth huge amounts of money and it's pretty much the entire reason for a game development house or publisher to have a legal department.

My main point is that without all the facts of what happened in the negotiations, there's nothing to indicate that any of this was part of any concerted effort to remove KeSPA or the existing BW infrastructure until the point at which negotiations broke down. Yes of course they're going to sue them now, negotiations failed and Blizzard have the legal authority, whether the negotiations broke down because KeSPA were too stubborn or Blizzard were asking for way too much it's almost impossible to tell, there's just not enough information to take either side.

As for any Activision/Kotick/Vivendi bollocks, all of that is people literally pulling things out of thin air, Blizzard have been very clear about maintaining their independence from Activision as a whole and they wouldn't have any perceivable reason to not handle it all internally in the direction they wanted to go.

edit: The end of the first paragraph can serve as a response to you too maybenexttime.

On October 25 2010 05:44 leakingpear wrote:
I think it's a bit too late for that to be honest, they essentially stirred up a hornet's nest by poking it gently, then when they started getting angry decided to keep poking it on principal. I don't think there's anything to suggest Blizzard are intent on destroying the Proleague as much as the issue is around the licensing of the proleague (as I understand it there was no attempt on Kespa's end to charge for using their players in individual, channel owned leagues). Therefore any action against KeSPA is going to negatively effect the proleague because that's really all KeSPA have in terms of assets they can use.

I think it's very easy and wrong to assume that the end of KeSPA means the prohibition of any team based league in the future, there's a number of SC2 teams that form naturally who will more than likely end up attracting the same amount of advertising and there's already been a number of team based events, all without any governing body. I think it's really dangerous to equate the great times of BW, the team rivalries, the players that were trained by teams and so on, with KeSPA's involvement in any way. It's a consortium of sponsors, driven by KT/SKTelecom more than the others, where the players' and fans' interests were never the prime motivation for their actions, just the amount of people watching. They ended up putting up barriers to progaming while putting teams in the hands of sponsors and players in the position of having to conform to their approach at all costs.

That said it seems unlikely that we'll see anything on the level of Proleague again for BW if they do lose, but I don't think it's absurd to say that in the next few years (just going by the consistent trend downwards of viewers since the Boxer era) that even without SC2 and this whole debaucle it wouldn't be around or would be heavily scaled down. I don't really want to continue on this point as I think it's too easy to get stuck in an endless loop of predicting the future that can never happen where some people will argue BW is this age's chess and blah blah blah.

As for whether it's a far leap to go from broadcasting to distributing copies, the issue isn't the broadcasting, it's the charging for the broadcasting, thus why it all started in 2007. I'm not sure if KeSPA ever reneged on the charging fees thing, you'd think they would but again I don't think anyone knows (unless i've missed something).

I think Blizzard probably think that taking control of approving and disallowing events and leagues (including individual leagues) is more of an attempt to avoid this in the future, but there probably is a case for the lord of the rings-esque no one entity should have that much power argument. I think it's one of those things that people will tend to extrapolate to some grandiose idea of holding back eSports becoming mainstream though, people love slippery slope arguments.