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On December 21 2010 05:14 TrainFX wrote: Looks like financing for operating activities to me...
nothing to get excited about.
Nothing to get excited about? Rofl, I take it you havent been around esports in america for that long.
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On December 21 2010 06:02 Glasse wrote: hopefully none of those console players get any of that. idc about wow cuz its on pc, but no consoles!
gogo sc2
Don't bite the hand that feeds you. There would be no SC2 at MLG without console games.
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On December 21 2010 06:25 DyEnasTy wrote:Show nested quote +On December 21 2010 05:14 TrainFX wrote: Looks like financing for operating activities to me...
nothing to get excited about. Nothing to get excited about? Rofl, I take it you havent been around esports in america for that long.
No he's right. It's nothing to get excited about when it comes to MLG.
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MLG should put ads in the SC2 UI like EG did in the tourny this weekend to help generate more money to increase prize pools. Just little stuff like that goes a long way.
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On December 21 2010 06:30 arterian wrote: MLG should put ads in the SC2 UI like EG did in the tourny this weekend to help generate more money to increase prize pools. Just little stuff like that goes a long way.
YOU LOOK LIKE A FOOL WITH THOSE BUNS
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Badass. All they need now are bigger prize pools, proper spectator seating, and proper noise canceling booths for the players.
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On December 21 2010 05:50 SwiftSpear wrote:Show nested quote +On December 21 2010 05:32 Eury wrote:On December 21 2010 05:24 Erandorr wrote: whoa if there are more than 600,000 viewers sc2 cant be that big compared to other games or am i mistaken there? Because , if you look at the Eg masters cup, there were around 10k on wheats channel . Of course MLG has a far bigger audience but Starcraft seems not to be the main focus of MLG. Where the hell do the 600k viewers come from? According to SirScoots on a recent LiveOnThree, Starcraft 2 was the most popular game on MLG this fall. I haven't seen statistics, but this would be my suspicion. Halo has alot of history in MLG, they are the most established platform, but does anyone seriously believe that 100,000 nubby rageful xbox kiddies leave the safety of their glowing televisions to use the internet to watch competitions? How does Halo even form a coherant community? You can't link your friends to the MLG website in game in halo, let alone any other halo related website. Maby there are ingame adds for MLG in halo? But even then I think it's a stretch that most players would give a crap, plus, blizzard could start doing that too if one of the competitive companies grew to the point they could afford to buy a little bit of advertising space on battle-net, especially if blizzard gives them preferential treatment (which I think they damn should) I would be surprised if starcraft 2 competition wasn't, in terms of viewer numbers, the biggest competitive gaming scene in the world right now. I don't even play any more, but I keep up to date with the competitive scene as if this game were hockey.
every time i read MLG threads, it really amazes me how ignorant people are of MLG and Halo and console gaming and basically everything involved between the two. i'll try to answer all of your various questions and correct your various assumptions, since even though i was never really big on Halo, i've been around MLG since 06-07 and by now know about a lot of what's happened. i normally just let people be ignorant but it bothers me a lot that so many people in this community don't know anything at all about what's probably going to become a major part of SC2 for a few years. i figure most people don't care but you should at least know what you're talking about and how things got to this point before SC2 came along since most people seem very confused as to how MLG is even big in the first place.
so, first of all, MLG IS Halo. SC2 is the first game in MLG that has made an impact even worth mentioning in MLG circuits in the many years i've been watching it. every other game is just them trying to support a game that could be competitive, but for various reasons, it doesn't work. MLG is really mostly just a Halo circuit that tries to give every game that looks reasonably competitive a chance with both their LAN circuits and their online events through Gamebattles. that's the reason they bother to pick up a game like Starcraft 2 in the first place. it's a very simple common sense thing that doesn't go much further than "Brood War was popular competitively, there's plenty of fans in the US and we think we can get enough people to attend a LAN and get a reasonable amount of invest ent back, let's give this one a chance."
to understand how a rather lame game like Halo gets such a huge circuit and following, you have to know the beginning. the first ever "MLG" was basically just a Halo: CE LAN and nothing special at all, you could probably compare it to Brood War LANs where prize pools are pretty laughable and no one ever made money playing. Sundance and Sepso (founders) were Halo fans, saw the LAN, asked some pros about how to set up a LAN with some more money behind it, and about 5-10 or so years later you have what we have now.
now, the community. Halo is and has been since the first game very LAN-based. it was the first game that came out for XBox that people were setting up LANs for, iirc. the original community came about because of those LANs. there was NO Xbox Live until Halo 2. every single time Bungie (the developer) released a new Halo game, an insane surge of fans, always small relative to the entire populous of Halo but nonetheless thousands of people, found MLG and played it competitively. in Halo 2, Bungie had a really awesome community set up for custom games, and so through word of mouth many people found out about MLG Halo 2, which was when MLG actually started to grow into something big, or something bigger than when it was very comparable to the lack of popularity for foreigner BW scenes (from what i've noticed) at least. that's how i first found MLG and got into competitive gaming.
in Halo 3, after a year or 2, i can't remember, Bungie added in a playlist, "MLG," where you could use the matchmaking instead of purely custom games (which was significantly poorly set up compared to Halo 2, and word of mouth was not as effective) to play Halo with whatever settings MLG currently had for the games, including custom made maps that MLG rotated into their circuit. Bungie cooperated with MLG so that each time MLG updated their settings, Bungie updated the playlist within a few weeks. so, you could play MLG settings with match making and not knowing shit about what MLG actually is, and basically anyone who still played Halo at that point was at least aware of what MLG was. on top of that, Bungie is a sponsor for MLG and MLG also has presence in the XBL market place for their team logos and shit like that, so their presence in the average gamer community increased immensely for Halo 3. there were more MLG fans every year for Halo because of that playlist pretty much; it acted as a gateway to competitive gaming.
if (and i'm just pulling numbers out of my ass right now, but just to show you how huge the jump is between the games) at most 10k or so people played Halo CE competitively, then about 50k-100k+ played Halo 2 competitively, and now multiple 100k people play Halo 3 competitively. it's still an extremely small portion of the main Halo community, which is in the millions, but it's there. i can definitely believe that SC2 has more viewers for MLG, but if i had to guess, it's more like 65/35 SC2/Halo rather than some disproportionate number you're imagining. Dr. Pepper, Red Bull, Doritos, Hot Pockets, all of that shit was around before SC2 was ever announced on the circuit, so you're fooling yourself if you think MLG wasn't big before SC2. though of course, with SC2 it's now about twice as big (or more) since it's the main circuit in the US for both the most competitive console game and PC game as well.
and that's a very short story of how a bunch of 'nubby rageful xbox kiddies' came to flock to MLG. i don't play Halo or console gaming in general anymore, so i don't know what effect Reach has on it or anything, but that basically covers everything up to this point in general.
edit: sorry if words get cut off randomly, my post got skewered for some reason. maybe because of tl;dr or something, idk.
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On December 21 2010 06:23 ZlaSHeR wrote: Comments like these make us turn into mlgpro's forums. I wouldn't paint the mlgpro forums with such a wide brush. There are many, many good folks over there - and a lot of douches - like you would find on pretty much any set of forums with a bazillion folks posting on it.
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On December 21 2010 05:18 TrainFX wrote:Show nested quote +On December 21 2010 05:16 Thorantham wrote: With $52MM invested a decent valued exit has to be in the $150MM+ range. How will MLG generate revenues that are worthy of a $150MM valuation? I suppose it might be plausible at say $25MM in revenue and a 6 multiple or something like that. Anyone know what kind of revenue MLG has?
lmao are you kidding me? please stop talking out of your ass. MLG is a private company that does not release financial statements.
Obviously, everyone knows that, that wasn't my question. The question was if anyone had any ideas on the revenue, the only thing I could find was from November 2009:
"The four-year-old company will generate about $50 million in revenue this year from sponsorships, and face-to-face and online tournaments that broadcast live online in high definition (HD), according to Matthew Bromberg, the company's president and CEO. "
The number from this quote probably varies as their sponsorship money goes up and down somewhat.
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On December 21 2010 06:32 branflakes14 wrote:Show nested quote +On December 21 2010 06:30 arterian wrote: MLG should put ads in the SC2 UI like EG did in the tourny this weekend to help generate more money to increase prize pools. Just little stuff like that goes a long way. YOU LOOK LIKE A FOOL WITH THOSE BUNS
well played sir, made me laugh out loud at work hahah.
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On December 21 2010 06:33 Herculix wrote:Show nested quote +On December 21 2010 05:50 SwiftSpear wrote:On December 21 2010 05:32 Eury wrote:On December 21 2010 05:24 Erandorr wrote: whoa if there are more than 600,000 viewers sc2 cant be that big compared to other games or am i mistaken there? Because , if you look at the Eg masters cup, there were around 10k on wheats channel . Of course MLG has a far bigger audience but Starcraft seems not to be the main focus of MLG. Where the hell do the 600k viewers come from? According to SirScoots on a recent LiveOnThree, Starcraft 2 was the most popular game on MLG this fall. I haven't seen statistics, but this would be my suspicion. Halo has alot of history in MLG, they are the most established platform, but does anyone seriously believe that 100,000 nubby rageful xbox kiddies leave the safety of their glowing televisions to use the internet to watch competitions? How does Halo even form a coherant community? You can't link your friends to the MLG website in game in halo, let alone any other halo related website. Maby there are ingame adds for MLG in halo? But even then I think it's a stretch that most players would give a crap, plus, blizzard could start doing that too if one of the competitive companies grew to the point they could afford to buy a little bit of advertising space on battle-net, especially if blizzard gives them preferential treatment (which I think they damn should) I would be surprised if starcraft 2 competition wasn't, in terms of viewer numbers, the biggest competitive gaming scene in the world right now. I don't even play any more, but I keep up to date with the competitive scene as if this game were hockey. every time i read MLG threads, it really amazes me how ignorant people are of MLG and Halo and console gaming and basically everything involved between the two. i'll try to answer all of your various questions and correct your various assumptions, since even though i was never really big on Halo, i've been around MLG since 06-07 and by now know about a lot of what's happened. i normally just let people be ignorant but it bothers me a lot that so many people in this community don't know anything at all about what's probably going to become a major part of SC2 for a few years. i figure most people don't care but you should at least know what you're talking about and how things got to this point before SC2 came along since most people seem very confused as to how MLG is even big in the first place. so, first of all, MLG IS Halo. SC2 is the first game in MLG that has made an impact even worth mentioning in MLG circuits in the many years i've been watching it. every other game is just them trying to support a game that could be competitive, but for various reasons, it doesn't work. MLG is really mostly just a Halo circuit that tries to give every game that looks reasonably competitive a chance with both their LAN circuits and their online events through Gamebattles. that's the reason they bother to pick up a game like Starcraft 2 in the first place. it's a very simple common sense thing that doesn't go much further than "Brood War was popular competitively, there's plenty of fans in the US and we think we can get enough people to attend a LAN and get a reasonable amount of invest ent back, let's give this one a chance." to understand how a rather lame game like Halo gets such a huge circuit and following, you have to know the beginning. the first ever "MLG" was basically just a Halo: CE LAN and nothing special at all, you could probably compare it to Brood War LANs where prize pools are pretty laughable and no one ever made money playing. Sundance and Sepso (founders) were Halo fans, saw the LAN, asked some pros about how to set up a LAN with some more money behind it, and about 5-10 or so years later you have what we have now. now, the community. Halo is and has been since the first game very LAN-based. it was the first game that came out for XBox that people were setting up LANs for, iirc. the original community came about because of those LANs. there was NO Xbox Live until Halo 2. every single time Bungie (the developer) released a new Halo game, an insane surge of fans, always small relative to the entire populous of Halo but nonetheless thousands of people, found MLG and played it competitively. in Halo 2, Bungie had a really awesome community set up for custom games, and so through word of mouth many people found out about MLG Halo 2, which was when MLG actually started to grow into something big, or something bigger than when it was very comparable to the lack of popularity for foreigner BW scenes (from what i've noticed) at least. that's how i first found MLG and got into competitive gaming. in Halo 3, after a year or 2, i can't remember, Bungie added in a playlist, "MLG," where you could use the matchmaking instead of purely custom games (which was significantly poorly set up compared to Halo 2, and word of mouth was not as effective) to play Halo with whatever settings MLG currently had for the games, including custom made maps that MLG rotated into their circuit. Bungie cooperated with MLG so that each time MLG updated their settings, Bungie updated the playlist within a few weeks. so, you could play MLG settings with match making and not knowing shit about what MLG actually is, and basically anyone who still played Halo at that point was at least aware of what MLG was. on top of that, Bungie is a sponsor for MLG and MLG also has presence in the XBL market place for their team logos and shit like that, so their presence in the average gamer community increased immensely for Halo 3. there were more MLG fans every year for Halo because of that playlist pretty much; it acted as a gateway to competitive gaming. if (and i'm just pulling numbers out of my ass right now, but just to show you how huge the jump is between the games) at most 10k or so people played Halo CE competitively, then about 50k-100k+ played Halo 2 competitively, and now multiple 100k people play Halo 3 competitively. it's still an extremely small portion of the main Halo community, which is in the millions, but it's there. i can definitely believe that SC2 has more viewers for MLG, but if i had to guess, it's more like 65/35 SC2/Halo rather than some disproportionate number you're imagining. Dr. Pepper, Red Bull, Doritos, Hot Pockets, all of that shit was around before SC2 was ever announced on the circuit, so you're fooling yourself if you think MLG wasn't big before SC2. though of course, with SC2 it's now about twice as big (or more) since it's the main circuit in the US for both the most competitive console game and PC game as well. and that's a very short story of how a bunch of 'nubby rageful xbox kiddies' came to flock to MLG. i don't play Halo or console gaming in general anymore, so i don't know what effect Reach has on it or anything, but that basically covers everything up to this point in general. edit: sorry if words get cut off randomly, my post got skewered for some reason. maybe because of tl;dr or something, idk.
Thank you very much, very informative 
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you're welcome. <3
and to the original topic, i really do hope that a large portion of that money, maybe not majority, but something significant goes to SC2 because i'm pretty convinced that SC2 is MLG's gateway to an even bigger... something. and they are severely lacking in a couple areas for SC2 that really need to be filled, things like seating and sound-proofing and a nice stage like Halo's which has already been mentioned. SC2 deserves all of these things, the game is huge for MLG.
i've never seen a game effect MLG the way SC2 has. like i said in my wall of text, every other game has been mostly inconsequential. unlike SC2, most games MLG picks up are huge in terms of how many people play them, but small in terms of how many people play them competitively, and miniscule in terms of how many people will watch people play them competitively. SC2 is basically even bigger than Halo already after years of growth from the Halo competitive community.
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10 millions is just massive So thankful MLG picked up SC2, 2011 is going to be HUGE!
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It's funny. The similarities between the halo and sc2 communities. granted, I've been a part of sc2's for only a couple months now while ive been playing halo for years. Herculix's post was very good and accurate and I'll just expand on it. Like he said Halo is and most likely always will be the top game, flagship, of MLG. There are people like SwiftSpear, who say the most stereoptypical things and think that he/she is right, then there are people like Herculix, who are intelligent and think before they speak/post in every community.
To criticize what SwiftSpear said: "100,000 nubby rageful xbox kiddies leave the safety of their glowing televisions to use the internet to watch competitions? How does Halo even form a coherant community? You can't link your friends to the MLG website in game in halo, let alone any other halo related website"
That first line is as ignorant as it can get. I can say, "man how can 200 slant-eyed koreans leave the saftey of their basement and drive a car to play in a GSL tournament." Halo has a coherent community because of the fact it has been around for so long, much like SC. Everyone knows who Walshy is in the Halo community, and everyone knows who Boxer is in the SC community. On Xbox MLG has multiple advantageous ways to spread. Most of the followers who play Halo/and MLG related game on Xbox has a gamerpicture of MLG or his/her favorite team, and/or MLG in his/her profile. Also, since Halo 3 MLG has had a playlist of their rules and maps in the game which brings many new followers to the scene. Hopefully MLG continues to use their investments wisely like they have been doing. Everyone complained last year because the prize money had only a tiny increase from the previous year, what people don't realize is that for MLG to grow it has to do slowly and to drastically increase prize money would be like what many other failed gaming companies have done.
One more thing, the amount of spectators who watch the game affects MLG's decision more than the amount of competitors that show up to play. There have been games like Shadowrun, GoW an RB6 that have had an amazing turnout player/team wise, but since spectators and viewer streams were low they have been since gone from MLG.
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On December 21 2010 06:49 Herculix wrote: you're welcome. <3
and to the original topic, i really do hope that a large portion of that money, maybe not majority, but something significant goes to SC2 because i'm pretty convinced that SC2 is MLG's gateway to an even bigger... something. and they are severely lacking in a couple areas for SC2 that really need to be filled, things like seating and sound-proofing and a nice stage like Halo's which has already been mentioned. SC2 deserves all of these things, the game is huge for MLG.
i've never seen a game effect MLG the way SC2 has. like i said in my wall of text, every other game has been mostly inconsequential. unlike SC2, most games MLG picks up are huge in terms of how many people play them, but small in terms of how many people play them competitively, and miniscule in terms of how many people will watch people play them competitively. SC2 is basically even bigger than Halo already after years of growth from the Halo competitive community. Have to agree with you on the bolded point. Although SC will always be my first love, I started following MLG in '06 and haven't seen a game affect the MLG landscape like SC2 has. Up until this year, it's basically been MLG = Halo + 2-3 other games. And it's pretty amazing how much MLG has developed the competitive Halo scene despite Bungie's half-hearted interest in it (as compared to Blizzard or Capcom, for example).
I can really only see good things from a strong MLG which has something to offer every kind of competitive gaming fan, no matter which community they come from.
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If the Starcraft scene does pick up, I wonder if Koreans will come over here to play... :o
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Nice, looking forward to MLG next season even more now
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United Kingdom16710 Posts
Hopefully they'll use the money to set up some sound proof booths and get some decent headsets for the players. Players being able to hear the commentary is simply not acceptable. Also, a healthy boost to the prize pool would be awesome as well.
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On December 21 2010 06:32 branflakes14 wrote: Show nested quote +
YOU LOOK LIKE A FOOL WITH THOSE BUNS
well played sir, made me laugh out loud at work hahah.
haha, my experience exactly. Now all I need is a little kiss... of cherry.
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wow this is so nuts.. I remember when you had to bring your tvs and xboxs to MLG lol and now they're fuckin huge.
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