MLG secures $10 million in funding

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?

On December 21 2010 05:18 Chronald wrote:
MLG needed the loot that's for sure. Hopefully they put it to the best use possible, aka Starcraft 2 duh.

I'd love to see some seating, maybe a stage for the finals? And a faster stream for the love of gawd

On December 21 2010 05:14 TrainFX wrote:
Looks like financing for operating activities to me...

nothing to get excited about.

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?

On December 21 2010 05:19 JiYan wrote:
imo they should upgrade by like a 10% margin and use the rest of the money to ensure MLG's survival. MLG staying long term and slowly growing > MLG being amazing for 2 years then crashing

On December 21 2010 05:25 Looky wrote:


halo

On December 21 2010 05:27 Erandorr wrote:


Yeah thats what i figured, so maaybe us sc2 fans should accept that Halo players will get more money than the sc2 pros . Its not about the better game its about the amount of fans

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?

On December 21 2010 05:14 Wolf wrote:
NA still needs SC2-only events.

On December 21 2010 05:27 Erandorr wrote:


Yeah thats what i figured, so maaybe us sc2 fans should accept that Halo players will get more money than the sc2 pros . Its not about the better game its about the amount of fans

On December 21 2010 05:32 Eury wrote:


According to SirScoots on a recent LiveOnThree, Starcraft 2 was the most popular game on MLG this fall.

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?

On December 21 2010 05:27 Erandorr wrote:


Yeah thats what i figured, so maaybe us sc2 fans should accept that Halo players will get more money than the sc2 pros . Its not about the better game its about the amount of fans

On December 21 2010 05:56 Stoids wrote:
Good for MLG, glad to see some proper funding. I enjoyed my time at MLG Dallas and most of my complaints (seating, etc) could be solved with a few more dollars. Hope that they ration out some for SC2 instead of Halo.

On December 21 2010 05:57 emythrel wrote:


they already had over 40million to work with over the years, this is just another 10million..... ;p

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?

On December 21 2010 05:14 TrainFX wrote:
Looks like financing for operating activities to me...

nothing to get excited about.

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?

On December 21 2010 05:25 Looky wrote:


halo

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

On December 21 2010 06:15 stalefish wrote:
Are there going to be any MLG event in socal next year?

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

On December 21 2010 06:25 DyEnasTy wrote:



Nothing to get excited about? Rofl, I take it you havent been around esports in america for that long.

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.

On December 21 2010 05:50 SwiftSpear wrote:

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.

On December 21 2010 06:23 ZlaSHeR wrote:
Comments like these make us turn into mlgpro's forums.

On December 21 2010 05:18 TrainFX wrote:



lmao are you kidding me? please stop talking out of your ass. MLG is a private company that does not release financial statements.

On December 21 2010 06:32 branflakes14 wrote:


YOU LOOK LIKE A FOOL WITH THOSE BUNS

On December 21 2010 06:33 Herculix wrote:


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.

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.

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.

On December 21 2010 05:14 Logo wrote:
That entire 10 million is going into the prize pool for a single SC2 tournament!

Ok maybe not, but it's going to be really exciting either way. I wonder if this is part of the big MLG stuff JP has been hyping or if it's just how it's going to be funded.

On December 21 2010 05:18 Chronald wrote:
I'd love to see some seating, maybe a stage for the finals? And a faster stream for the love of gawd

On December 21 2010 05:57 emythrel wrote:


they already had over 40million to work with over the years, this is just another 10million..... ;p

On December 21 2010 05:14 TrainFX wrote:
Looks like financing for operating activities to me...

nothing to get excited about.

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?

On December 21 2010 06:11 tetracycloide wrote:

Aren't building new stands and prize pools operating activities for a gaming league? Why wouldn't Americans be excited about 10 million more dollars being invested in the operating activities of our local Starcraft league?

On December 21 2010 08:02 Manifesto7 wrote:
TeamLiquid for sale.

Price: $10,000,000.00

On December 21 2010 08:02 Manifesto7 wrote:
TeamLiquid for sale.

Price: $10,000,000.00

On February 25 2009 09:58 Manifesto7 wrote:
TSL really brought people out of the woodwork. I got contacted by a major American sports broadcasting company that has four letters in its name. They had recently invested in a videogame league (relationship now defunct lolz).

They heard about TSL, and without any preamble, they came to me and said:

Donkey- Let's nto beat around the bush. We want to buy your site.
ManifestoCrusher- Um, we play starcraft, not xbox.
Donkey- That's ok. We will make it huge.
ManifestoCrusher- Um, we don't even have a sponsor for the tournament yet. Would you be interested in a sponsorship deal? We could work out some sweet exposure for you.
Donkey- We just want to buy the site. What is your business model?ManifestoCrusher- Our what?
Donkey- How much do you get paid a month?
ManifestoCrusher- Um, nobody gets paid. It is a volunteer site.
Donkey- Yeah but how much do you MAKE?
ManifestoCrusher- We pay our server fees with google ads and sometimes we make shirts. We don't make a profit though.
Donkey- I'll buy your site. You know, I can't pay a lot, ut I could give you a few bucks for the domain and create a paid position.
ManifestoCrusher- But we have about 30 staff. Who gets the money.
Donkey- It could just be between you and me.
ManifestoCrusher- ...
Donkey- So how much for the site?
ManifestoCrusher- One million dollars.
Donkey has left the chat.

On December 21 2010 05:19 JiYan wrote:
imo they should upgrade by like a 10% margin and use the rest of the money to ensure MLG's survival. MLG staying long term and slowly growing > MLG being amazing for 2 years then crashing

On December 21 2010 05:29 Jakalo wrote:


Currently in Kore there are a lot of games (Sudden attack anyone) who are riding on Starcraft Broodwar back for they are not popular enough to warrant a canal of their own.

If that will be the case for SC2 and halo I am happy to accept that.

On December 21 2010 08:54 chenchen wrote:
Imagine the SC2 prize pool getting so big that Korean pros fly over to pwn us up =P

On December 21 2010 08:08 blizzind wrote:


that's kind of interesting because MLG bought up gotfrag for something in the millions. would hate to see TL go the same route though.

On December 21 2010 09:15 zoLo wrote:


After MLG bought GotFrag, that site went downhill slowly...

a private equity firm that invests in, acquires and develops companies appealing to the 16-24 year old male demographic of digital mavericks.

On December 21 2010 08:02 Manifesto7 wrote:
TeamLiquid for sale.

Price: $10,000,000.00

On December 21 2010 07:51 Dave. wrote:
They should buy a shit tonne of bleachers.

On December 21 2010 09:17 Aberu wrote:


Super Smash Brawl paid out 12.5k for first place. I assume Starcraft 2 would be more, so you are probably right.

On December 21 2010 11:54 Nimic wrote:
Super Smash Brawl. Is that the game that didn't even have a stream, just a live blog? How on earth can that be a competitive game when the only audience they get is the on-site people? I kept switching between the streams when bored (I even watched 15 minutes of Halo >.<), and it always surprised and disappointed me that I couldn't actually watch that event.

On December 21 2010 05:14 TrainFX wrote:
Looks like financing for operating activities to me...

nothing to get excited about.

On December 21 2010 09:16 LoLAdriankat wrote:
The first thing I thought was that they could buy sound proof booths so the crowd won't ruin the matches.

Hopefully they don't invest too much money into Halo.

On December 21 2010 08:02 Manifesto7 wrote:
TeamLiquid for sale.

Price: $10,000,000.00

On December 21 2010 11:54 Nimic wrote:


Super Smash Brawl. Is that the game that didn't even have a stream, just a live blog? How on earth can that be a competitive game when the only audience they get is the on-site people? I kept switching between the streams when bored (I even watched 15 minutes of Halo >.<), and it always surprised and disappointed me that I couldn't actually watch that event.

On December 21 2010 06:33 Herculix wrote:
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.
.