EPTAfter that, more LSL3 news :D
LoveTV Starleague: Brood War 3.0 - Page 18
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HyralGambit
2439 Posts
After that, more LSL3 news :D | ||
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shizzz
Australia127 Posts
While the betting scandal would not have helped the industry, especially with how scandalous such a thing would be in a place like SK, I think there was definitely enough money to be made from BW that the important sponsors would not have walked (and didn't until Kespa did). Then again I don't check Korean sites at all, so I may have missed some pretty obvious stuff. | ||
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sabas123
Netherlands3122 Posts
On October 19 2014 22:59 shizzz wrote: I'm not doubting anyone, but I'm wondering if anyone has some hard proof how the savior etc incident actually affected sponsorship of Korean BW. To me, the large majority of BW's death was due to Blizzard pushing Sc2, and whether it was done for monetary reasons or simply Blizzard saying so, Kespa swapping over pretty much sealed the deal. While the betting scandal would not have helped the industry, especially with how scandalous such a thing would be in a place like SK, I think there was definitely enough money to be made from BW that the important sponsors would not have walked (and didn't until Kespa did). Then again I don't check Korean sites at all, so I may have missed some pretty obvious stuff. I don't know why we keep having this conversation but what ever. it simply doesn't matter if there is still money to be made. the important thing is the how people view the scene, so if there is a lot of talk about how many scandals there are in bw, it doesnt matter if your team is pure or not, it will be viewed as the same. so sponseres pulled out. and then teams like stx and woojin pulling out because the main company is nearly bankrupt | ||
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The_Red_Viper
19533 Posts
On October 20 2014 01:00 sabas123 wrote: I don't know why we keep having this conversation but what ever. it simply doesn't matter if there is still money to be made. the important thing is the how people view the scene, so if there is a lot of talk about how many scandals there are in bw, it doesnt matter if your team is pure or not, it will be viewed as the same. so sponseres pulled out. and then teams like stx and woojin pulling out because the main company is nearly bankrupt See, why do these sponsors then invest into the lol scene? Cause lol =/= bw? I don't really buy that. | ||
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Stratos
Czech Republic6104 Posts
On October 19 2014 22:59 shizzz wrote: I'm not doubting anyone, but I'm wondering if anyone has some hard proof how the savior etc incident actually affected sponsorship of Korean BW. I've got hard proof right here in my pocket. Wait. I don't have any pockets + Show Spoiler + ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/qwW5eOx.jpg) | ||
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Masheyoon
United States781 Posts
On October 16 2014 07:33 Chef wrote: I think you're cherry picking data a little here. First of all you're picking only BW's premier events which happen but a few times a year. That's the time when everyone comes out including old fans. But what's important to sponsors is consistent viewership throughout the season, how many people are actually following the league? That's important because unless you're KT or SKT your players and your team aren't making it that far all that often. The teams we saw disbanding that really set off the gloom in the community were the less glamorous teams, naturally. Unlike other big sports where even crappy teams have the support of their home towns and manage to fill at least half a stadium every other week, normal proleague games were trying to fill a small room with maybe 40 people and if the teams weren't popular it wouldn't be full. Top onto that that it is in one place and the schedule for matches was incredibly frequent, and you might actually get a different perspective. Of course for foreigners who just watch for the top players, it seems insanely popular, but it was only those top players who could draw audiences. Not to defend Pharaphobia. Just saying that while a BW proscene was probably still maintainable, I'm not so sure it was pulling the numbers year round and sponsors had a lot of reasons to duck out including the difficulties with negotiations between KeSPA and Blizzard, the match fixing scandal (I think actually kind of negligible, but it certainly wasn't good; just another motivator in the other direction). For those who didn't duck out, they probably didn't fight all that hard against Blizzard's esports plan, LoL and other big games, which it's hard to say didn't work. We can laugh all we want that SC2 is not adored by every Korean, but they still pull foreign $$$ which is just in general good for South Korea's economy. The Koreans are poor, that's why you don't even have to pay to see a finals  Better to take money from people who have too much, like American teenagers and college students.As for BW being on Korean TV regularly again (my arbitrary standard for what a revival would probably look like), I'm not holding my breath but I don't think it's totally impossible. More in the case of Sonic getting studio space, getting TV casters, and the like. It's really hard to look at that and say it has no potential. It's also kinda hard to look at all the names that are around right now and not think that there aren't a lot of new ones, and there are a whole lot that were the proscene still going on, probably would have vanished into the ether. Like what's the next generation of pro players actually supposed to be? All the names that seem unfamiliar are only unfamiliar because they were B teamers. I wrote a lot of garbage here. In the end I think it's actually kinda hard to get a good synthesis of information. Sonic keeps investing more and more and you think he must have a reason, but being totally honest it looks kinda bad long term. These guys aren't gonna stream BW from their parents' houses forever lol. They're just spending time with their family before military, it seems in a lot of cases. I honestly didn't intend to cherry pick. Two of the three examples I provided were of either opening or closing premier events, true, but the Yongsan Stadium at Full Capacity article states "SK Planet StarCraft Proleague Season 1 continues to fill up the Yongsan Stadium, from the opening match to the present" and "Yongsan eSports Stadium was packed with enthusiastic eSports fans who came out to watch Ace versus STX". And even for a premiere event, ranking 1st in viewership is a pretty big deal. I'm going to try to dig up old articles, but even in BW's final year, viewership remained consistent throughout the proleague and OSL (I know this because I've paid close attention to the pro scene since I can remember, and my attention was especially fixed throughout BW's final year). Of course viewership and crowd turnouts weren't as great as premiere events, but that's to be expected. I even remember comparing a typical BW event stream to that of several SC2 events (both premiere and regular matches), and not only were BW crowd turnouts bigger, but it always had at least twice as many stream viewers. That's saying something considering how new SC2 was at the time and the fact that those numbers have only dwindled for SC2 since then (in Korea, of course). Now, the teams that disbanded weren't necessarily all that less glamorous. Oz was very popular thanks to the golden boy that was Jaedong in his prime, yet that didn't mean anything. We might just have to agree to disagree, but what set off the "doom and gloom" atmosphere was the fact that sponsors were ditching BW, and as such, forcing teams to disband. I'm confident that, based on the numbers and evidence I've gathered, sponsors left BW for the two reasons I mentioned in my previous post. From a business point of view, they actually made the correct decision. Sponsors take risks all the time, so they have to be sure that they're making the safest possible investment. They had no way of knowing whether or not SC2 was going to be a hit, but considering it was BW's successor being developed by the very company that made and was pushing for BW to be axed, it was the more logical thing to do. The match-fixing scandal in my opinion was a really big deal. It caused the talismanic CJ couch to retire and according to a liquipedia article, crippled Hite Sparkyz. | ||
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N.geNuity
United States5112 Posts
tl;dr- -----MBC closing is heavily rumoured with match fixing scandal/higher ups calling shots to change image -----OGN has frequently talked about it, but again, not hard evidence -----post-shinhan proleague BW era has had tons of rumour mills (there are always rumors, but the shinhan contract was a concrete one) -----personal opinion: OGN tried to "go big or go home" and ended up just having to go home There's not really any hard proof because all we have is just discussions, and even those are very brief generally. And the realist/pessimist can always look at when OGN says "oh the match fixing scandal is hurting us getting sponsors" or "hurt the image of starcraft so badly" and simply say OGN could have been having more difficulty and just using the matchfixing as an easy out. Since it really is just the word of the organizers (eg OGN), you don't have "hard" facts--this is present all across all esports industries, people have their word vs my word and people don't follow up on contracts, just korea got real large companies involved. But it's hard to pinpoint if any potential sponsors shyed away. One note is that some of the sponsors (eg STX, Air Force Ace) really would have been 100% more of an image thing than return on investment, and those that can get return on investment didn't focus on that. Most esports teams (probably all) definitely lost money. KT, SKT, CJ, Samsung, they were willing to pay $100,000 USD salaries to top players without even worrying if they got that money back (e.g. is paying Bisu that much really selling more SKT mobile apps or whatever? Is CJ sponsorship really causing more consumers of CJ media? Did Hite Entus really sell more Hite?). But that doesn't matter, it's essentially just part of the advertising budget. Esports is not a financial gainer for the sponsors. OGN What are the most accessible forms would be things from OGN discussing sponsorship, perhaps most notably this: OGN after talk on match fixing [edit: timestamp should be 13m 25 s] specifically linked to a segment where discussion of "Honor" company mentality still, that was RIGHT after the match fixing scandal, and heresay; the timestamp linked talked as if the sponsors were a little more hesitant than usual, but that doesn't really indicate anything real of "they specifically did not sponsor because of match fixing" MBC More rumour mill type of things are like this: translation of MBC closing (not anything formal) I don't think there is anything too "hard" facts around the MBC closing, but some of the MBC employees were quite outspoken at being mad how the game channel was dropped without real hesitation. This thread is the farewell MBC thread and has link to the caster kim min chul angry interview So MBC closing, from the words of semi-angry ex-MBC employees losing their job, was based on a higher up's decision and image thing rather than financial. Of course, afaik the MBC kpop channel is doing fine so financially the company may have made the "right" decision anyways, but the thing is that it is really an "image" idea rather than money making. Shinhan Proleague The end of bw (post-shinhan bank) /current bw is full of floating details; it's not as simple as just "Shinhan bank going for 3 year contract" that happened back in 2007 (an old post of mine just has text that at that time, the kespa english site said it was a 5 billion won contract w/ shinhan and that includes doing the special forces proleague, etc). You have very rumour situations with "is a sponsor coming?", "is MBC going to stay open?" [started a new MSL after ABC mart--MBC employees said it was "promised" to finish, didn't get sponsor, channel shut down], "a sponsor backed away because of sc2??" [this never confirmed and IMO unlikely], persisting all the way until now (LoveTV Starleague S3 announced a while ago but no details to come forward....) Go big or go home My personal opinion is that OGN never wanted to "scale back" on BW. Many of the major sponsors of BW (skt, kt, mbc, stx [I think], cj) had special forces teams, samsung and wemade had WC3 players with high salaries (uh wemade's closing is a bit odd, they were a game company and pulled out because I think they only wanted to promote their own games, though I don't know how the company ended up). The sponsors supported other esports to smaller scales, but BW was the "big name" and the highest paying. There was a big hubbub about how team 8 was maintaining salaries of the players picked up by kespa, etc etc. I don't know how much was true, but I never really got the impression that BW ever wanted to "Scale back" or, perhaps equally important, to change it's model. It was always "big sponsors, big chaebols, they make the contracts, that's what we need". Edit- is it ever confirmed that match fixing made big sponsors more weary? Not exactly. It makes sense. But since BW relied only on that model, any minor reductions definitely hurt the scene more than perhaps if BW was just more flexible For LoL, that is actually still working fantastic with korean scene. The big companies pour the money in, and there is a huge success. But as we see with afreeca (balloon donations), and outside korea with dota 2/twitch/etc, many small contributions from crowd funding are--although highly unstable comapred to having a committed parent company--remarkedly successful (referring to The International prize pool w/ dota 2) GSL survived starcraft 2 because you had foreigners buy like 15$ tickets to watch + blizzard; the korean viewership of GSL is much smaller. For BW, getting 300,000 koreans watching on TV and sell that to a major sponsor (e.g. Korean Air) may be worth a significant portion less that having 50,000 viewers all willing to pay 5$ for content. All OSLs continued with ~100,000,000 - 108,000,000 KRW price pool in total after batoo (I think). BW never scaled back. Then, blizzard came along to support proleague for sc2, but when that didn't work out for OGN, they switched over to full commitment to LoL (and, are having massive success). OGN tried to attract China w/ OSL and w/ proleague grand finals [even if rained out], they tried to reach their net out further in the "attract big sponsors" mentality, but they never either asked less of the sponsors or turned to the community at large. OGN kind of talks about how they turned LoL into the successor to BW at the very start of LoL in korea. They planned to. I am a fan of OGN, and don't blame them (and the individuals involved still support BW, casting at sonic, etc etc), but if we could rewind time, I think BW definitely had many years left. On July 05 2013 01:19 N.geNuity wrote: its actually very easy to know how LoL got big in korea: n00bs said chaos (korean dota) was too hard and bw was too hard so they went to LoL (turn on eng subs, video timestamped): + Show Spoiler + which this short little series (3 episodes + first finals) also explains how LoL was totally a conspiracy by OGN in korea all of them: + Show Spoiler + | ||
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N.geNuity
United States5112 Posts
plus I don't think the um dream league was around when hite sparkyz was around, they really only had an A teamer squad afaik | ||
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sabas123
Netherlands3122 Posts
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N.geNuity
United States5112 Posts
OGN trying to go big w/ blizzards support on sc2 makes sense a bit; it's very disappointing to me personally and all bw fans, but remember, just a "little" while ago there was once proleague, OSL, MSL, and gomtv all happening. Gomtv left, partly due to kespa junk (some teams boycotted last season of gomtv), and MBC getting closed down (potentially directly due to match fixing scandal) meant OGN was left as the only provider for proleague and an individual league. Their staff obviously wanted something to go big on, and seeing the potential for global growth in sc2 and direct support from blizzard is very appealing, rather than doing any scaling back. If they only maintained the status quo, even though the status quo was very large, they could fear for a similar fate for MBC--they wanted to carve out an ever larger presence. What won out easily, of course, was LoL. In that sense OGN massively won. They wanted to grow into a global leader, and that wouldn't happen with BW. BW was, and still is, a korean product, if you want to get out of very niche audiences. | ||
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sabas123
Netherlands3122 Posts
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prech
United States2948 Posts
Really exciting to see all these map-test/show matches on LoveTV, really whets the appetite to what will surely be a wonderful Starleague  | ||
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rebdomine
6040 Posts
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The_Red_Viper
19533 Posts
I hope we get them this week ... | ||
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N.geNuity
United States5112 Posts
On October 21 2014 17:49 rebdomine wrote: Oh shit, some matches played already? Damn, I missed it then. Time to look for VODs. They are map test matches | ||
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Stratos
Czech Republic6104 Posts
In the meantime, as you have sure noticed, there are the ongoing "sponleague" matches on weekdays 9PM KST. This will give the players time to practice the maps and viewers to get used to them and everyone to give feedback. They did expect to progress more quickly but since it's not just their project, they need to have a lot of meetings with the sponsoring company over all the details, including things like the finals. | ||
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HyralGambit
2439 Posts
On October 23 2014 22:59 Stratos wrote: Today's update: They're finalizing the schedule with anon players and the offline location was narrowed down to two places - Gangnam stadium and east Sangam stadium. It should take in around 400 ppl. In the meantime, as you have sure noticed, there are the ongoing "sponleague" matches on weekdays 9PM KST. This will give the players time to practice the maps and viewers to get used to them and everyone to give feedback. They did expect to progress more quickly but since it's not just their project, they need to have a lot of meetings with the sponsoring company over all the details, including things like the finals. Wtf should I call these "sponleague" s on Liquipedia? :p | ||
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Stratos
Czech Republic6104 Posts
In less than an hour, there's another match, Guemchi vs Sharp. Kinda unexpected since she said they'd be on weekdays only, but clearly there's demand and various sponsors interested so yay! http://www.teamliquid.net/calendar/2014/10/#event_24266 | ||
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HyralGambit
2439 Posts
On October 25 2014 20:05 Stratos wrote: Call them whatever ^^ In less than an hour, there's another match, Guemchi vs Sharp. Kinda unexpected since she said they'd be on weekdays only, but clearly there's demand and various sponsors interested so yay! http://www.teamliquid.net/calendar/2014/10/#event_24266 Yeah, too bad I missed it (was it posted on LoveTV's Notice Board on AfreecaTV before it went live?) Good thing you were there with the LT thread | ||
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mishimaBeef
Canada2259 Posts
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