Foreigners > Koreans? - Page 10

On April 04 2010 10:01 Liquid`NonY wrote:

I don't know the exact state of South Korea and its economy when SC was rising up, but I would guess it's something like this: SC sweeps the nation -- it's what all the kids are doing. The country is officially trying to be more technologically advanced as a way to secure a good economy in the future -- better internet, pc bangs everywhere, huge electronics industry, etc. Geographically small country, dense population in Seoul makes live competitions much more feasible and promotes the unity of culture and ideas. These things put together made it possible for tournaments and leagues to actually be worthwhile investments. Extremely competitive education system creates an abundance of youths who can see that they're not headed for some great professional job. The chance that these kids are the ones playing a lot of SC is pretty high. Tournaments and leagues gave kids incentive to go all-in with becoming progamers.

In other countries, you have a bunch of problems: investors have other opportunities, costs more because of travel costs (or you accept that people aren't going to travel and the number of relevant people gets cut), less general interest in the game which reduces the number of potential spectators, the potential progamers have better opportunities.

This analysis is really vague because I don't know the history that well and I don't know much about economics. But it seems you are thinking about it intuitively and, since I don't have a lot of solid facts and stats to back up my view, I'll admit that I'm thinking about it intuitively too. But if there is any truth to the way I put it, then a lot of happenstance and convergence of beneficial circumstances helped Korea get their e-sports scene.

So the main point that I'm sticking to in this thread is this: Korea worked hard as hell to get their SC scene as amazing as it is now, and that's admirable, but comparisons to other communities are meaningless.