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Hey,
Bit of a random rant, but I'm starting to get really bored by mainstream news websites obsessing over 'fashionable' online activities and completely ignoring what's popular.
I'll paste my recent complaint as an example:
Hey, I've been following the BBC tech section for many years now, and I've noticed recurring themes with ridiculous minority subjects such as second life whilst a complete lack of comment on significant gaming competitions such as the GSL sc2 finals today which had thousands and thousands of viewers (the restreams alone were on 10,000 viewers each) and a prize fund of $100,000. Would it be possible to get some kind of gaming/technology writers who can tell the difference between what is 'popular' and what is 'fashionable'.
It's probably a losing cause, but maybe if a bunch of people to send complaints, they'd be tempted to employ at least one tech writer who actually had some insight into what is actually interesting in the tech/gaming world.
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thousands of viewers is honestly nothing. lumberjack, eating, spelling, poker, and strongman competitions absolutely dwarf SC2 viewership numbers. just fyi. start a letter campaign if you want to then more power to you. it would help to post an address you want people to write to and a form letter for them to send
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It is an interesting idea. Unless the BBC is assured their readers care about 100k USD tournaments of SC2 they will not publish anything about SC2. Do enough of their subscribers care? I do not know. The burden of proof is on the community.
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Over 10,000 viewsers is a big deal...
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Norwegian national broadcasting has actual done a bit of esports stuff, but not on any regular basis.
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Yes but unlike those shitty competitions (cept poker of course) SC2 is a fascinating new phenomenon, and with the prize pool and momentum going its way, it's more interesting than those old things. And I hope you know, that even if those things do have more viewers, that's partially BECAUSE NETWORKS REPORT ON THEM.
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in general. it would be sweet for TV station to show stuff about starcraft and E-sport
i heard rumours about Eurosport concidering it for IEM, but it didn't happen
but regardless, it would be awesome
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United Kingdom12041 Posts
Sadly, it'd never work. Even though the GSL is hosted at 10AM our time, I just don't see the BBC broadcasting it.
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ESPN has a 15 minute show/week here =(
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On October 02 2010 20:58 yomi wrote:
thousands of viewers is honestly nothing. lumberjack, eating, spelling, poker, and strongman competitions absolutely dwarf SC2 viewership numbers.
Then why the heck do people talk about a football game? Ten of thousands is a lot.
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As long as I can watch tournaments over TL.net, I´m happy enough!
Although more money for the players would be a good thing. THX to GSL so far.
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imo, ask them to report it yourself, maybe just start on the website, advertise it all over to get hits, then it MIGHT go mainstream,
gather your stuff together to proove to thwm its worth it, get pictures and statistics and all kinds of shit that makes the guys your pitching to, want to have it on their webspace
(could even get you a job outta it haha)
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The BBC doesn't advertise. It only plugs. 
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In the UK football, rudgy and tennis(if the 1 player we ever has is doing well) is the only things that get reported on usually.
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I'm no expert on these things, but could they be getting paid by Second Life and other things for the coverage? It would make a lot of sense, considering how un intuitive and garbage second life is compared to something action packed and thought (strategy) provoking like SC2.
One last thought: You could submit an article to them covering it yourself! That way, all they would have to do is post it after some editing. 
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Totally agreed. We must bring SC2 to the world scene.
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Video games are still not mainstream culture even though it's a bigger industry then Hollywood. That should tell you plenty. You'll not see SC2 on TV until mainstream culture accepts it. Now why Twitter could do this while starcraft hasn't quite done it? I have no fucking idea.
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The problem is, the mainstream looks at those above mentioned sports events and sees some people with above average skills in otherwise common areas (everyone can lift some weight or chop wood but not as good as those competitors). However when mainstream looks at a starcraft match, sees an overly complicated cartoon with too many fast moving objects that make no sense. This is even true for FPS games.
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I do agree with the OP, it's not so much about how SC2 compares to other already well established sports but the tendency of news outlets to constantly spout misinformation regarding what's popular. This trend has been going on for years, gimmicky games and websites are constantly reported on as if they were actually relevant, yet those who are relatively more influential keep getting overlooked time and time again.
But then again, mainstream journalism is trash so this is nothing short of expected.
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On October 02 2010 21:48 Scrapiron wrote:I'm no expert on these things, but could they be getting paid by Second Life and other things for the coverage? It would make a lot of sense, considering how un intuitive and garbage second life is compared to something action packed and thought (strategy) provoking like SC2. One last thought: You could submit an article to them covering it yourself! That way, all they would have to do is post it after some editing.
The BBC is mandated to be neutral, they are not getting paid by people for coverage.
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On October 02 2010 20:58 yomi wrote:
thousands of viewers is honestly nothing. lumberjack, eating, spelling, poker, and strongman competitions absolutely dwarf SC2 viewership numbers. just fyi. start a letter campaign if you want to then more power to you. it would help to post an address you want people to write to and a form letter for them to send
That is false, there were more people watching the HDH then G4Tech and starcraft 2 falls right under g4's wing. SO I don't see why requests couldn't be put in to other tv channels. I mean MLG has [or had] a deal with ESPN to report a few of the major games on their show and had a content deal to report games on the site itself. I don't see why starcraft 2 cant go a bit more commercial. HOWEVER to ask yourself is that what you really need or is that what starcraft 2 needs is a better question; Personally I'm quite content with the free streams and the free enterprise tournament system we have now that virtually anyone can make money off of this game.
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Sad to say this, but watching people play computer games that I don't play myself is boring.
I love to watch SC2 and Counter-Strike because I play them. But watching street fighter or some other game I don't play - no way for more than 10 minutes. Football is way more fun to watch.
Don't know how they manage to pull it off in korea... all I can think of is different culture.
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On October 02 2010 22:01 Coeus1 wrote:
Sad to say this, but watching people play computer games that I don't play myself is boring.
I love to watch SC2 and Counter-Strike because I play them. But watching street fighter or some other game I don't play - no way for more than 10 minutes. Football is way more fun to watch.
Don't know how they manage to pull it off in korea... all I can think of is different culture.
I disagree i don't play much halo but watching the top 10's from mlg or watching an mlg event for any game is actually quite entertaining regardless of the genre that they're showing. Obviously they'd have to get really good viewership and find out some good settings and totally 100% fix the downtime and the huge tech problems that prevent the games from going fluid, however once the community figures that sort of stuff out I'm sure it could make a really good spectator sport.
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I think unless someone kills and blame sc2 they wont notice it ... =X
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On October 02 2010 22:01 Coeus1 wrote:
Sad to say this, but watching people play computer games that I don't play myself is boring.
I love to watch SC2 and Counter-Strike because I play them. But watching street fighter or some other game I don't play - no way for more than 10 minutes. Football is way more fun to watch.
Don't know how they manage to pull it off in korea... all I can think of is different culture.
lots of people play sc2 in korea though, and girls watch it because they like to see the men that own at starcraft.
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wow, this is a huge step, why haven't anyone talked about this o_0 ?
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If the BBC covered Starcraft, my life would be complete
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Coverage is also largely related to what comes down the news wires, rather than what the journalists go out and get.
Hence we get coverage of E3, Halo releases, and even SC2 release as all these things have PR agents pushing updates out to the press.
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On October 02 2010 21:08 canikizu wrote:Show nested quote +On October 02 2010 20:58 yomi wrote:
thousands of viewers is honestly nothing. lumberjack, eating, spelling, poker, and strongman competitions absolutely dwarf SC2 viewership numbers. Then why the heck do people talk about a football game? Ten of thousands is a lot.
Because millions watch football games every sunday?
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be superb, beats idiots running kikcing balls.
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Only ever time I've seen gaming mentioned on the BBC was when Apollo won WCG gold for us in CnC3, and that was still a tiny spec.
British society still doesn't really accept it as more than a fun activity, we will be waiting quite a while for anything E-Sports related to appear on the TV.
Look at Xleague.tv that collapsed after only a few months in business, the viewer base just isn't there.
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On October 02 2010 21:01 SmoKim wrote:
i heard rumours about Eurosport concidering it for IEM, but it didn't happen
it actually happened yesterday.
but it wasn't that interesting imho... was about 30minutes long, they said they're going to accompany one player on each IEM event.
so the first one was about the global challenge in shanghai and they followed the leader of the fnatic.MSI CS 1.6 squad.
you got to know very little about the games, it was just like "I'm doing this and that ingame, telling people where to go, putting all the information we get together to the fitting strategy" that was about everything about the actual game... the rest was just "now they're going to eat", "now they're in the hotel getting ready for the next day", "now they won 16:14", "and now 16:4"...
so it's probably nothing a regular visitor of TL would be interested in i guess and the fact that it was broadcasted at around midnight (after a bowling match, lol) makes sure nobody else is going to see it and gets interested...
next episode is going to be about the IEM in cologne and they said they're going to cover SC2 and Quake live
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CNN did that interview with Idra for the release of Starcraft 2. BBC covered the Matchfixing scandal. However, them covering things like the winner of the GSL just isn't really possible unless it's a special interest article they run every once in a while.
Think about it, they don't even cover sports like MMA and barely touch on most American sports. All these things are still far more popular than starcraft, and involve far more money. The only time Starcraft gets covered is either in some totally random idiotic peice on video game addiction, or as part of some "hur hur" xenophobic peice on how weird asians are taking PC games seriously as a sport.
The West just isn't ready for Esports yet, and England is still lagging way behind Germany and Sweden in this respect.
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On October 02 2010 22:01 Coeus1 wrote:
Sad to say this, but watching people play computer games that I don't play myself is boring.
I love to watch SC2 and Counter-Strike because I play them. But watching street fighter or some other game I don't play - no way for more than 10 minutes. Football is way more fun to watch.
Don't know how they manage to pull it off in korea... all I can think of is different culture.
It's all got to do with the 'viewability' of the game. Some games are less audience-friendly so would only be appreciated a lot by people who play it. But SC and SC2 are not like that. I haven't played either of them and I've been following both for some years now, and I'm not alone either!
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On October 02 2010 22:01 Coeus1 wrote:
Sad to say this, but watching people play computer games that I don't play myself is boring.
I love to watch SC2 and Counter-Strike because I play them. But watching street fighter or some other game I don't play - no way for more than 10 minutes. Football is way more fun to watch.
Don't know how they manage to pull it off in korea... all I can think of is different culture.
I think the reason it could be that way though is because E-sport games generally is much more complex then real sports. If you do not know what is happening on the screen or understand why the player does like he does and why it's a good or bad move much of the entertainment is obviously lost.
You don't need to be a football player to enjoy football because there's not much to it. Try to get the ball in the goal and win. There's strategy involved of course but you don't really need to know or be able to relate to that to enjoy it.
Strategy games like starcraft is mostly about the strategy part so you need more knowledge.
If the game is big enough that it is common knowledge to know enough to enjoy watching a game one might start hoping it will be as successful as in Korea. I mean I enjoyed watching starcraft for years even though I was a wc3 player and barely played BW, you just need a basic grasp of the game. In the current state you kind of have to be a gamer to get that basic knowledge which is a problem.
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Darts has about 500 times the viewership of SC2 in the UK. So, yeah.
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On October 02 2010 22:57 thespitfire wrote:
be superb, beats idiots running kikcing balls.
They may or may not be idiots, but there is a surprising amount of strategy in football, as well as immense skill in the higher levels, it's really engaging to watch.
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On October 02 2010 22:28 SmoKim wrote:wow, this is a huge step, why haven't anyone talked about this o_0 ?
They talked about this on these forums already, but it is uninteresting until they show live IEM coverage. During the IEM there was nothing on eurosport so i stopped thinking about it.
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while we're comparing the viewership of darts, lumberjacking, pre-teen spelling contests, and eating to the starcraft2 viewership, are these statistics compared to some starcraft2 event televised on the same television station channels? (ie. if darts is on espn, then sc2 on espn... if darts is on channel 1023, then sc2 on channel 1023..)
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A word of warning - eSports may very well be run as a joke report by mainstream media outlets.
Honestly I don't see what good it would do for the scene for some evening news show somewhere to report on these crazy kids with their competitions playing video games. People who would actually follow esports don't get their news from those sources anyway.
There's a very large community of gamers and they have their own media, mostly online.
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wiki says second life has 18 million registered accounts. SC2 sales this year are predicted to be <10 million (http://www.gamespot.com/news/6271382.html)
so I don't think your framing is fair here
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Who honestly cares if the BBC reports in SC2 stuff or not? The main viewership doesn't care so why report it. Mass media on TV is full of fake news anyway. SC2 is doing really dam well. I don't know why threads like this need to be made.
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On October 02 2010 22:01 Coeus1 wrote:
Sad to say this, but watching people play computer games that I don't play myself is boring.
I love to watch SC2 and Counter-Strike because I play them. But watching street fighter or some other game I don't play - no way for more than 10 minutes. Football is way more fun to watch.
Don't know how they manage to pull it off in korea... all I can think of is different culture.
That's only your opinion. I watched some matches of SC2 before I played it and I sure as hell found it alot more interesting to watch than some football match, while I played football myself!
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I think SC2 is too complicated for mainstream (compared to say, Pop Idol, F1 [whoever is in front wins], soccer [kick ball into net lol], Big Brother) people don't generally enjoy or are very good at thinking. Especially in the UK.
Still worth a try, I'd be glad to be wrong.
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On October 03 2010 00:03 MoonfireSpam wrote:
I think SC2 is too complicated for mainstream (compared to say, Pop Idol, F1 [whoever is in front wins], soccer [kick ball into net lol], Big Brother) people don't generally enjoy or are very good at thinking. Especially in the UK.
Still worth a try, I'd be glad to be wrong.
SC2 doesn't have a sweet spot for the casual observer. You can turn on a football game (American) and have a general sense of what's going on without having to know the intimate details of football. If you know the small details, then watching the game is even more rewarding. In SC2, I don't see that happening. You can't just pop the game on and have a sense of what's going on. You need to see it from start to finish and with a fairly deep understanding to actually enjoy what's going on.
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On October 03 2010 00:33 0mar wrote:Show nested quote +On October 03 2010 00:03 MoonfireSpam wrote:
I think SC2 is too complicated for mainstream (compared to say, Pop Idol, F1 [whoever is in front wins], soccer [kick ball into net lol], Big Brother) people don't generally enjoy or are very good at thinking. Especially in the UK.
Still worth a try, I'd be glad to be wrong. SC2 doesn't have a sweet spot for the casual observer. You can turn on a football game (American) and have a general sense of what's going on without having to know the intimate details of football. If you know the small details, then watching the game is even more rewarding. In SC2, I don't see that happening. You can't just pop the game on and have a sense of what's going on. You need to see it from start to finish and with a fairly deep understanding to actually enjoy what's going on.
Imagine if you hadn't grown up with football, baseball, basketball, etc. The first time you see them, they are going to be confusing. The more you know about the rules and strategy that goes into the game, the more rewarding the viewing experience can be. The same rules apply to SC2. That being said, it would be much more difficult to get the casual viewers because of the social stigma that goes with people who spend too much time playing video games (in America anyway).
Having SC2 covered by a major media outlet in the UK or the US is probably a long way off but I don't understand why an American channel like G4 doesn't run some SC2 related material. Good commentators explaining the action can really add to the viability of SC2 as an entertainment form and I'd be willing to bet that G4 can cut one of their Cops or Cheaters re-runs to give us a little SC2.
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I've decided the best way to get it mentioned in the news is to get a UK guy into the finals... Guess that means Demus needs to get practicing
And the only reason second life has so many accounts registered is because BBC plugs it so much, so people register just to see what their talking about, then never go back. I think the actual active figures for second life are a tiny proportion of the registered.
I wasn't really expecting constant reporting, but I would of thought the GSL worthy of mention at least!
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On October 02 2010 21:59 vlf wrote:
But then again, mainstream journalism is trash so this is nothing short of expected.
Fox news?
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anyways, this should be mainbstream... 10k views for the LIVE tourney going on in the middle of the night for most americans..
as anchorman would say.. "Im kind of a big deal"
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lol @ second life
those ppl just dont have a clue do they
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Two things.
Firstly, any sport is not easy to understand to a casual viewer who's unfamiliar with the sport. I've seen exactly ONE game of American Football [it was the only thing I could find on TV in English when I was in Germany and had a few hours downtime]. I had no idea of what was going on. Which leads into my second point...
Commentators make or break games for casual viewers. A good commentator [eg. Tasteless] will make the game entertaining and exciting for people who're unfamiliar with the game they're watching. A crap commentator will not.
I firmly believe that the future of eSports is in the hands of commentators more than anyone else.
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documentary about fnatic and IEM global challenge in Shanghai was already broadcasted on eurosport btw
oh ok was said already, i think in the next episode they will concentrate more on quake live than starcraft, not sure though. i think i read it will be about 2 quake live players, one of them being rapha
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Lets just put the BBC's lack of reporting into perspective:
GSL Season 1 final: $~100k prize pool, 3.5k people attended free event live, some people on the internets watched.
Australian Football League Grand Final: $~3.4 million prize pool, 100k people paid $100+ for tickets to attend live (2 weeks in a row since the first week was a draw!), 3.6 million peak viewership watched on free to air TV in Australia, also available on cable TV in several other countries.
As far as I can tell the AFL grand final did not rate a mention on the BBC news site. Why should the GSL?
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Over the summer the BBC did a series on e-sport on Radio 4. It was a lot of interviews with players from British teams like dignitas, 4kings.
They have also featured WoW related news, e.g they covered the outcry over RealID recently, and more besides.
If you think they should routinely provide coverage from events I think AT LEAST you will require a high profile UK player.
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^ because unlike AFL(which is boring as shit, and Australian), Starcraft is an international game that is accessible to everyone, it can be viewed by anyone and is very easy to understand compared to other sports, there are no "rules" and viewers can actually learn more about the game and improve their own skill through watching(unlike AFL).
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bbc technology had an article on the cgs finals so its plausible
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On October 02 2010 22:23 noD wrote:
I think unless someone kills and blame sc2 they wont notice it ... =X
Sadly that is pretty much how the British Media looks at games, and a one with the level of, not just violence but violence on a huge scale like S2 has getting coverage for a competition on the BBC? The Daily Mail would explode in a fireball of right-wing anger (would love to see that happen tbh).
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On October 02 2010 23:10 zeeQue wrote:
Look at Xleague.tv that collapsed after only a few months in business, the viewer base just isn't there.
I'm a gamer who played probably half of the games they covered at the time. but their coverage and commentating was so shit, I couldn't bring myself to watch anymore after the first week. Clueless non gamer commentators and celebs who looked bored, not the way to convince people this is something good.
There is a channel in the UK currently that does show E-Sports stuff, can't remember it tho.. I watched a Documentary (ok it was a few years old) on Sky playing WC3. And they show other stuff a lot too. Its just a dump ground channel, you find the gaming stuff in between motorcross and speed skating 
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What's there to report on? There was one main tournament in Korea with 95% amateur Korean players. It's irrelevant to the BBC. I'm sure there's lots of other unusual obscure sports in other countries which doesn't get reported on either. Pretty sure they didn't say anything about 100,000 people showing up to see the 2004 Proleague finals either despite that being more notable.
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People on the front page responded to me saying I am incorrect in thinking tens of thousands of viewers is nothing. I just spent 20 minutes looking up TV ratings and the lowest rated show I found had 900k viewers. Most have 5-15 million. Chuck is about to be cancelled because it was the lowest rated scripted show on NBC with 5 million viewers.
I'm glad there is so much enthusiasm for this, honestly. But you need to face reality. Nobody cares. Nobody takes SC2 seriously. Professional SC2 is not even a fringe niche interest. It's not nearly big enough to be considered that.
It is very fair to say that putting in on TV would automatically boost its ratings. But gamers are some of the people most likely to watch a show streamed online vs on TV and SC2 still gets nothing ratings. How many hardcore gamers were online playing games when the GSL finals were aired? How many people were logged into the SC2 Europe, LA, and NA servers playing games while GSL was being broadcast? Even SC2 players statistically do not care very much about professional SC2.
Everyone's going to flame me but I'm just trying to keep people grounded in reality here.
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EPT
