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Australia1191 Posts
On September 22 2015 22:06 looknohands119 wrote:Show nested quote +On September 22 2015 20:50 jinyung2 wrote:On September 22 2015 20:30 ZodaSoda wrote:
It kind of sounds like hes lost the controlling vote in these types of Ventures for SBENU and that the board/CEO see Profit in working with KeSPA and Manchester, but do not see where SBENU gets profit or gains in running a BW tournament. I feel like this is the case too, business seems to be doing well but the board/higher ups/whatever see 0 profit in running bw tournament. in the end its about the money. seeing as though sonic says hes tried contacting other businesses regarding sponsoring and came up short im thinking maybe combination of BW not being very marketable and all this OGN high production quality shit must take shit load more money than the ghetto afreeca run SSL from before. Wait... Is SBENU not privately owned by Sonic? If it is, why would there be a board? That isn't usually how private companies are run. Also, why does Sonic say he would have to be doing all the work? I assume this means OGN has opted not to continue running BW Starleagues with Sonic next year?
Its an educated assumption honestly, Starting a Business and being successful within your local city is quite easy, But no matter how much money you have once you wish to expand you usually need to attract investors to pay for an increase in output of goods and input of materials to service a larger consumer base, then unless you already have distribution connections you attempt to attract investors who have these and are interested in distributing your product more widely, Eventually the business becomes such a large scale you need to appoint a CEO and a CFO and even sonic would be overwhelmed attempting to fufill both rolls, and the reason im explaining all this is usually once Investors and a CEO/CFO are involved, you have them requiring shares in the company as assurance they wont be screwed by the owner, and a Board is naturally formed from there, Obviously what ends up happening to the business savy is they tend to dive shares but always hold 51% for majority vote, but many many people in the 50s to now still make the mistake of going down to 40 or 45 and can then be out voted.
Obviously this is all assumptions it could just be his CEO/CFO and Investors just dont think he should spend money on BW and he doesn't wanna force the issue with his power and piss them off.
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GRAND OLD AMERICA16375 Posts
i agree with zoda on this, it's a nature of a company that is rapidly expanding and growing. Sonic gets tied to his company and can't do things a freely as he used to.
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A good move for Sonic's business.A bad move for bw players/fans.
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konadora
Singapore66364 Posts
im guessing the biggest problem is
1) he's mentally burdened
2) sponsors maybe dont see any good returns in sponsoring a 17 year old game
3) investors/sponsors probably want him to focus on selling more shoes, not hosting a brood war tournament
so he probably just needs someone else to take the helm and organise the SSL
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It's fine, Sonic has shown time and again that his passion for BW shall never fade. Once his business stabilises in new regions, he will be able to kick back and run the show once more.
On September 22 2015 22:14 BisuDagger wrote:
This is what happens when Bisu loses a finals.
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Terrible news. Regardless, much props to Sonic for his effort.
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Booh, those "CEOs and professionals" have no true love in their heart.
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Knowing how brutal K-netizens can be, I'd surmise some unkind remarks about Sonic buying one less Lamborghini to enable a few more SSLs...
let the man buy his lamborghini, he's not working for the sake of working
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let's hope this isn't really it. sonic has pulled this kind of speech before this and always came back. I respect him for caring about his business first but it would leave a bad taste if SBENU continued to support their respective interests in Sc2 and Lol but give up on Broodwar. If sponsoring a BW Starleague is not interesting enough anymore to Sbenu, i doubt someone else will (on a mjaor scale, we might still see evebts like the VANT Starleague aka KSL2, but it's considerably smaller.
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Croatia9556 Posts
Does anyone know anything about the upcoming/rumored proleague, or is that canceled as well? Also, how does this news affect Sonic's BBARAS team?
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Bear in mind also that 100m KRW is about $85k USD, so several 100million would be (assuming the translation is reasonable) $300k+ (as you wouldn't say several for 2 in English) and while it may potentially not be a burden overall, if they are investing lots in order to develop, such as with the Manchester United deal, it may be that they are tight for cashflows and needing to manage everything carefully.
Businesses of all sizes need to manage their cash, even if they have lots of profit.
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On September 23 2015 03:08 Lonyo wrote:
Bear in mind also that 100m KRW is about $85k USD, so several 100million would be (assuming the translation is reasonable) $300k+ (as you wouldn't say several for 2 in English) and while it may potentially not be a burden overall, if they are investing lots in order to develop, such as with the Manchester United deal, it may be that they are tight for cashflows and needing to manage everything carefully.
Businesses of all sizes need to manage their cash, even if they have lots of profit.
this.
hopefully it's just a temporary short term cashflow thing
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On September 23 2015 03:08 Lonyo wrote:
Bear in mind also that 100m KRW is about $85k USD, so several 100million would be (assuming the translation is reasonable) $300k+ (as you wouldn't say several for 2 in English) and while it may potentially not be a burden overall, if they are investing lots in order to develop, such as with the Manchester United deal, it may be that they are tight for cashflows and needing to manage everything carefully.
Businesses of all sizes need to manage their cash, even if they have lots of profit.
I read somewhere here that the osl's back in the kespa days costed about 250k to host, so sounds about right.
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Oh, sad news. 
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For what it's worth... here are some stream-of-consciousness-level thoughts.
1) I bet sponsorship of SC2 will not continue either. There's even a joke that only the people who watch SC2 in Korea are degenerate gamblers ("토쟁이"). If I had to guess I would bet that the SC2 sponsorship was just a way to keep Blizzard happy while bringing BW back to TV. They say that SC2 Proleague has seen improvements in viewership, but they also say that a dwarf whose height has doubled is still a dwarf.
2) LoL sponsorship is likely to continue. LoL continues to make more TV money than BW in its heyday.
3) Despite appearances, Sbenu has yet to make a profit. Their sales growth has been great but not enough to cover the fixed costs of exponential expansion rates and super aggressive marketing (unrelated to gaming). Of course, all of these expenditures are leveraged through loans. Sonic/Sbenu is likely strapped for cash for the foreseeable short-term.
4) No matter how much some trolls on the Korean webs shout otherwise, Sbenu has not benefited from SSL. 95% of BW viewers on Afreeca are male. The Starcraft audience in general is overwhelmingly male even if the cameras focus on fangirls and give the false impression that they make up a significant proportion. Sbenu's core customers are women and mothers buying for their children. You can see some of this in how color has been an important part of Sbenu marketing. The celebrities who have appeared on Sbenu ads during SSL are part of much bigger ad campaigns for Sbenu. If anything, Sbenu probably has suffered a little bit from crazy Afreeca TV viewers who go around posting false rumors about their products. A large portion of anti-Sbenu posts on the web originate from Starcraft-related communities. Fortunately, Sbenu's core customer's don't read those sites so it probably wasn't too damaging.
5) I remember after FIX SSL9 and Gabangpop Proleague (when the Afreeca BW scene was arguably at its peak), Zeus once said something (many months ago) on stream about how pro gamers had missed a huge opportunity to revive the scene in a more sustainable way because of their shortsightedness about the importance of big leagues. More can be said about this in a systematic way, but I will leave it at that. I agree with his argument that some of this falls on the pro gamers...although I don't think that I can truly blame them because most of them don't have the level of education and life experience to see these things.
6) About Man U deal, Sbenu probably has to pay big licensing fees to sell Man U branded Sbenu shoes. This is something that will hopefully bring them closer to profitability but that sponsorship is a legitimate business gamble and not because Sonic wants to show off how much he likes Man U.
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Is there support that Sbenu isn't profitable?
Not that I doubt it couldn't be, considering it's growing and probably requiring significant up front investment especially if they are sorting out designs and production, plus lots of marketing, just wondering where the information comes from and whether there are any available figures to show the position.
Most licensing agreements also will have a combination of up front costs and per item costs, or one or the other, depending on how it's worked out.
For Man U I would assume they would set an up front licensing fee to guarantee them some money, and then also a per item fee, so that would probably make them take a reasonable hit as well like you say, and on an up front basis as well.
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I've always said and felt that the scene isn't stable until we have multiple consistent sponsors. Whatever the result of this turn of events, news like this is inevitable, rather than sad and unexpected.
What worries me more is the fact that the other partners don't want to step up to help. That hurts more than Sonic being either unavailable or having money troubles.
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On September 23 2015 03:59 Lonyo wrote:
Is there support that Sbenu isn't profitable?
Not that I doubt it couldn't be, considering it's growing and probably requiring significant up front investment especially if they are sorting out designs and production, plus lots of marketing, just wondering where the information comes from and whether there are any available figures to show the position.
Most licensing agreements also will have a combination of up front costs and per item costs, or one or the other, depending on how it's worked out.
For Man U I would assume they would set an up front licensing fee to guarantee them some money, and then also a per item fee, so that would probably make them take a reasonable hit as well like you say, and on an up front basis as well.
A sum of $100k is tough for them. I think that is a sign of trouble, at the very least.
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a solution would be to switch to a DOTA2 TI sponsorship model. Considering what people give to streamers, funding SSL12 through crowdfunding would be quite feasible
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Sad,
but it sounds like he still loves BW and wants to do more in the future? I would be shocked if he didn't. But well, the new KSL might be good
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EPT
