Eye on Esports

With Waxangel
In the future, I hope this column will become be about Starcraft II’s relevance in E-sports. It’s really difficult to understand what makes a game work in the competitive scene, even with the highly successful example of Starcraft: Brood War. Nonetheless, I’ll try do my best to intelligently analyze and speculate about Starcraft II.

In any case, this first article isn’t actually about Starcraft II. Let’s call it an introduction.

A long time ago, back in 1999, I was living in South Korea. Like many boys my age, I started playing the newly released game of Starcraft. As those many youths and I would quickly discover, Starcraft was an incredibly entertaining game. It was so entertaining, that an entire industry of competitive Starcraft on television was created from the feverous energy and attention we gave to the game.



Televised gaming began with Starcraft, the wildly successful pioneer, and then tried to expand to a myriad of other games. This fit rather well into my needs as a nerdy teenager, and I consumed everything on gaming TV. It was just dumb entertainment then, but in retrospect, it let me observe a short history of television trying to make you care about games and the people who play them.

The reasoning behind the creation of multiple new game leagues outside Starcraft seemed to be like this: A game (Starcraft) is drawing a huge audience on television, and the game is flying off the shelves. We don’t really know how this entire Stacraft phenomenon is rolling along, but it smells like money. Screw the details, there’s cash to be made!

In any case, the two essential components were clear. Video games, and people who are very good at video games

The TV channels and the game publishers had enough mutual interests for them to work together in the creation of tournaments. The channels needed games that would draw strong ratings, but also wanted direct sponsors for their leagues. The publishers wanted the publicity and sustained interest a professional tournament could potentially create. What would end up being the standard scenario was that the publisher of a new game would sponsor the league itself. Starcraft was in fact the oddity with its massive popularity, so even without Hanbitsoft (the Korean distributer of Starcraft) or Blizzard’s support, other big corporations such as Coca Cola or Panasonic would step in and sponsor the Starleagues.

From a sponsoring publisher’s standpoint, televised game tournaments were short term investments. They were satisfied to support the game for a short period where they expected to make more sales, but after the product cycle ended they would move on to their next project. Starcraft’s sustained pro-gaming scene leading to long term interest was something of a fluke. It might have been the jackpot in some publisher’s dream, but not a realistic goal.

Other real time strategy games seemed like the most obvious choice. Starcraft showed that Koreans had the potential to love an RTS game to the point of 1/10th the population buying a copy. The reality was, however, that while Koreans loved RTS games, they were perfectly happy to play the best one exclusively. Still, this did not stop developers from making countless BW clones.

Korean domestic RTS games such as Kingdom Under Fire, Jurassic War II, and Atrox had brief runs until interest pattered out (they did end up being the launching points for pros such as Starcraft’s Midas and Warcraft’s Showtime). Illustrious foreign RTS series like Age of Empires, Rise of Nations, and Command & Conquer followed the same pattern, having 2~3 season runs at best before shutting down. The fact was that not enough people played or cared about these games. The TV channels would produce and promote leagues to the best of their abilities, but only as long the ratings or sponsorships lasted.



Only when the Warcraft III expansion, The Frozen Throne was released by Sonokong in Korea, did we see a publisher with the desire to give continued support towards creating a mid-to-long term competitive scene. It funded game leagues on both OnGameNet and MBCGame, eventually sponsoring up to four seasons of MBCGame’s Warcraft III Prime League after OnGameNet stopped running a regular Warcraft III league. Warcraft III had the advantage of having a large user base, who were drawn to the game by the reputation of Blizzard alone (Diablo II had been very popular as well, but by nature was not suitable for competition or television).

The Prime League was an ambitious venture, and a huge success in the Warcraft III community in Korea. It ran in the Friday night timeslot directly against the Ongamenet Starleague, the most popular Starcraft (and thus, pro-gaming) program, and still managed to accumulate a devoted cult following. Coupled with strong leagues worldwide, Warcraft III became the only other RTS that was viable as a full time profession.



Unfortunately, Warcraft 3 would never realize its full potential as an E-sports game in Korea following the infamous Prime League map-fixing scandal. The controversy devastated the Korean Warcraft III scene. In the aftermath, the Prime League was dissolved completely, while DayFly, one of the biggest fan favorites in Korea (the Boxer of War3, if one had to compare. Played a supposedly weak race, used impressive micro), retired in shock and disgust after discovering that he had unwittingly been the prime beneficiary and target of the map-fixing. MBCGame attempted to launch the MBCGame Warcraft League (MWL) in later years, only to find that too many fans had given up in disappointment long ago.

There were a few other non-RTS leagues with long runs, but few of them ever had the $10,000+ first place prize winnings like that of Warcraft III or Starcraft leagues. These were the games that were simply the most popular at the time. The casual game Fortress 2 (similar to Scorched Earth or Gunbound) had a run of tournaments during the early 2000’s, but it ended as players slowly became bored and left the game. The beat-em-up franchises The King of Fighters (KOF) and Tekken were the two most successful arcade games in Korea, and had their share of low stakes leagues as well. However, these leagues folded as well amidst declining quality of franchise sequels (KOF 2003, Tekken 4) and the overall dwindling of the arcade industry (on the bright side, Tekken 6: BR has inspired the mildly successful Tekken Crash League in recent days).



In the meanwhile, Starcraft had run ahead alone and unopposed, becoming a real “E-sport” with professional teams, contracts, an organizing body, draft system, government recognition, etc. (I would later be pleased to hear about the short but spectacular success of the Kart Rider league. Kart Rider was a casual game, directly ripping off Nintendo’s Mario Kart, and was the most played game in Korea for a brief period. The Kart League wooed corporate sponsors and handed out handsome winnings during a 10 tournament run between 2005 and 2008).

I left Korea in the summer of 2005, having learned some basic principles of Korean E-Sports, though gaining little deep knowledge. From what I've seen, they still apply now. Koreans really love their damn Starcraft, but they’ll give any game worth a damn a shot on television if a lot of people are playing it.

So I’ll guarantee you now, barring some colossal screw-up between the TV channels and Blizzard over broadcasting rights, Starcraft II WILL succeed in Korea.

Now, will it be as successful as Starcraft: Brood War? Will it replace the original as the dominant E-sport? Or will Starcraft II become a parallel competition?

I hope I can answer some of those questions in the weeks to come.