[IEM] Grand Finals World Championships 2014 - Page 124

On March 17 2014 06:42 Romitelli wrote:


I see those stats and wonder how many SC2 spectators have given up actually playing the game since its launch, despite enjoying to watch it at a competitive level. That's probably the main reason so many people are absolutely obsessed with viewer numbers and engaging in what you called a dick-measuring contest with League of Legends. I don't think that the current negativity within the community is directly related to SC2's long lost "top dog" status, but simply because these people don't even play the game anymore and have to cling onto meaningless numbers for reassurance.

For a comparison, major online Dota 2 tournaments are usually hovering around 20k-30k viewers, with a few outliers here and there, which is a lot lower than LoL gets on their weekly official tournament thing. Despite LoL being a direct "competitor" to Dota 2, very seldom do you see people complaining about stream stats or viewer numbers or useless crap like that. Maybe because they're too busy enjoying the game (and complaining to Valve about the lack of new content haha).

On March 17 2014 08:00 boxerfred wrote:
Bah, just watched the VODs. Wish someone else won now, though I almost cheered for him after he pwned Jjakjji (how many freakin' j's are in that name, srsly?!) with carriers.

On March 17 2014 08:48 Faruko wrote:

Then why i dont see you winning 100k ?

On March 17 2014 03:33 TotalBiscuit wrote:


Time to drop some motherfuckin stats.

100k for SC2 is GREAT. Wanna know why? Because according to SC2ranks.com, there are 328,642 ladder players active during this season. So why is this great? Well, whenever someone drops some stupid statistic like "Oh look at this LoL final getting 350,000 in their best case scenario of white dudes vs Koreans", you can look at LoL's player statistics and see that actually the conversion of players to eSports viewers is far lower. According to Riot stats, which are most likely fudged but even if they're anywhere near... you have over 60 million monthly players yet these events are only converting that into 385,000 viewers concurrent? It's impossible to know how many uniques the SC2 and LoL streams got but if we compare concurrent, you are looking in the best possible case scenario at a ridiculous 32% player to viewer ratio for Starcraft 2 and fairly pitiful 1.91% ratio for League of Legends. I'm saying best case scenario because SC2ranks is only pulling ladder player stats whereas the League stats include everyone in every possible game mode. SC2 has more than 350,000 active players doing team games, unranked customs and Arcade, but even if you tripled SC2s playerbase, the ratio is still ridiculous. SC2s audience in general is more supportive of competitive play, more interested in eSports and as a result more likely to respond passionately (and negatively) in situations such as this.

We should be celebrating that conversion ratio, not trying to chase a viewercount that passed us two years ago and is going to keep passing us whether we like it or not. We have a large, healthy playerbase who likes to watch eSports events and who is on average older with more disposable income. That's very marketable to sponsors. If organisations are savvy and careful, they can create sustainable businesses around this game. WCS continues to get strong numbers, SHOUTcraft Clan Wars, a $500 per match event, is pulling in more than 40,000 viewers across its live shows, reruns and vods and is running in the black while continuing to grow. IEM Cologne was an instudio event that peaked at over 100,000 if you include the foreign language streams, again a model of sustainability and common sense.

People are extra salty after a terrible final and a questionable prize distribution model, but can we please just take a step back, look at the facts and stop comparing ourselves to a free2play dota-clone with mass casual appeal. Guess what, we're also less popular than Angry Birds, are you going to get salty about that too? If you actually love this game as much as you all claim, then focus on enjoying great games and supporting cool events.