Infusing Cash into Starcraft 2 - Page 8

On December 14 2010 14:12 Steven.Bonnell.II wrote:
Imagine, for a moment, that you are a young, aspiring poker player. You've played several home games and find yourself consistently beating your friends. Feeling on top of the world, you decide to venture into the world of online poker. Not wanting to get in too deep, too fast, you start with small $5 sit-n-gos on Pokerstars or Fulltilt.

STOP!

In the world of poker, a good player here might begin to gradually earn money and build bankroll. They may never sit across Phil Ivey, or out-read Negreanu, or put a play on Dwan, but this person could legitimately earn a small amount of cash over time by playing poker, even if he is never good enough to move up to high stakes games.

However, if the world of poker were anything like the world of Starcraft 2, this good player would never win a single tournament in his entire life. Why? All of the $5 and $10 sit and go tournies would be won by the world's best poker players. The average (or even well-above-average) poker player would likely never cash in any tournament because all of the world champions of poker would be dominating the lower stakes.

This happens every single week with the Starcraft 2 tournaments. The amount of skill chasing such few dollars is absolutely ridiculous. I've taken a small sample from just 4 small-cash tournaments that happen on a regular basis around here:

Undeniable Tournament
+ Show Spoiler +
Wolf Cup
+ Show Spoiler +
Craft Cup
+ Show Spoiler +
Go4Sc2
+ Show Spoiler +

These tournaments are all being won by some of the best players in the world. When I talk about "the best", I'm not talking about top-tier people like Idra, Ret, or Jinro, I'm talking about anyone who would make the top 200 (or even 300 or 400) list of any region. Compared to the number of people who play Starcraft 2 (3 million copies sold in the first month), these people represent a very small percentage (<0.05%) of the overall Starcraft 2 community.

This brings me to the "meat" of my problem with the current Starcraft 2 tournament scene....there's too much talent chasing too few dollars. There's just no money in it.

Now, I understand that there are plenty of people out there who say that the game should be played simply for the love of the game and that there's no reason that money should be a part of it, but if it could be, why not? When so many people are clamoring for Starcraft 2 to be taken seriously as an "E-Sport", and with so many eyes on the game (between Teamliquid web hits, stream viewers, professional match series observers, etc...etc...), why couldn't there be more money involved?

I think the single most detrimental problem afflicting the Starcraft 2 tournament scene is that there's simply no money going into it. The best players in the world are winning $50 tournaments. Much the same as my earlier example, it would be like a decent poker player enrolling in small-stakes online tournaments, simply to discover that the best poker players in the world are constantly sweeping every single event.

I believe the solution to this problem would be weekly buy-in tournaments. The Starcraft 2 community needs to stop relying on companies like Razer or individuals to donate money to prize pools in order for there to be any decent money for a prize pool. There would be a tremendous infusion of excitement and possibility for all Diamond players if small buy-in tournaments were to be popularized.

Imagine a 64 player, $10 buy-in tournament. With only 64 players involved, you have over $600 in the prize pool. You could go 400/200 for 1st/2nd, or even pay out some decent sized prizes to the top 4. With just 64 players (at $10 a player) you have a tournament with a larger prize pool than 99% of the tournaments currently posted on TL.



If you include a rake in the tournament, all of a sudden there are millions of possibilities. Imagine that it's set-up similarly to poker rake, where the tournament hosts would keep a small percentage of the buy-in. $10 tournaments would be $9 into the prize pool and $1 into the rake. There are an almost limitless amount of possibilities that could spawn from that rake, including, but not limited to:

- People paying casters to cast their tournaments
- Websites being supported by more than constantly plugging products or begging for donations
- Teamliquid taking a small percentage of tourney rakes that they advertise, giving them money to pay coders/webdesigners
- More incentives for sponsors or advertisers to get involved
- People being more interested in taking lessons from top-tier gamers

I understand there are some boundaries to initially setting this up. Paying $10 for tournies where you have almost no chance of winning is discouraging. But if these tournies continue for a while, ideally the best players would be playing in better tournaments. It's the same way with poker today. Negranu and Ivey and Hellmuth don't play in small stakes because it's a waste of time for them. They'd much rather play in the larger stake games. If there were a lot of money in Starcraft 2 games from people paying to enter tournaments, the $5 and $10 tournaments would receive no interest from top players. They would be playing in the $25, $50 and $75 tournaments.

I know there are a lot of potential hurdles to this (local gambling laws, Blizzard's tournament registration policies, how money would be transferred), but I would really like to see the communities response to this idea. I know, from personal experience, that there ARE people out there willing to put SOME money into this game. I've seen it in the form of donations and I've seen it in people paying for lessons. As always, keep trolling/flaming to a minimum, constructive thoughts only, blah blah blah, love you.

~Destiny

EDIT: Popular responses...

I know this is going to come up a lot, so let me explain how free market principles dictate who plays in which tournaments.

If there were three different tournies at the same time every Friday, one at $5, one at $25, and one at $100, you would only be able to play in each one. At first glance, you might think, "Wow, Idra or Huk are just going to register and roll one of the smaller tournies, this sucks!" But think about it from Idra or Huk's perspective. How would you feel if you were one of the top gamers in the world and you saw that you were taking $200 prizes easily in smaller tournaments only to find that 2000 rated Diamond players were winning $4000 for 1st place finishes in larger ones? I think this would only need to happen ONCE before pro gamers quickly moved to the higher buy-in tournaments.

It would be foolish for top tier players to waste their talents in lower buy-in tournaments if other players of much lesser skill began to win large sums of money in the higher tournaments.

I understand there may be legal boundaries to this, but I'm not interested in those right now. I'm just interested in gauging the community interest/response. If tens of thousands of people are in favor of an idea, they will find a way to make it happen. And if there's an opportunity for blizzard to generate more interested for a game, and some income from it, too, such as taking a small percentage of the rake of all the tournaments, I couldn't see them saying no. But that's an entirely different discussion altogether.