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*NOTE* This is not a vs Starcraft 2 League of Legends/Dota2/Hon thread. The purpose of this thread is to point out how much more Blizzard could be doing to promote their game.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/gjI5h.jpg)
I have been following the Starcraft 2 scene and the League of Legends scene for one year now. Both games are great and fun to play, but i have always looked upon League of Legends as a more casual, laid back game, while viewing Starcraft 2 as a more competitive, serious game.
However, now that League of Legends has recently been picked up by some major tournaments, stream numbers show that League of Legends gets almost 3-4x as many viewers. But why is this?
Lets look at the pro-scene of both games...
Starcraft 2:
The starcraft 2 scene has been huge (compared to previous Esports) since BETA, and is continuing to grow at a steady pace, with new tournaments popping up, and players focusing 100% on the game due to teams paying actual salaries, resulting in a very high level of competition. Players are being flown around the world to play tournaments for good amounts of money, which was preveiously unheard of at such a large scale.
This is possible because there are hundreds of thousands of people who enjoy watching the highest level players play against eachother in major tournaments, generating stream viewership. In otherwords, the large amount of starcraft 2 FANS make pro-gaming possible.
The Starcraft 2 Esports scene has always been heaily community focused, and most people who are serious about the game spend large amounts of time browsing through community sites such as Team liquid.
Most people who watch tournaments and follow podcasts such as State of the Game or Weapon of Choice were introduced to the pro-scene through one of the following methods:
* Youtube channels commentating Pro-games such as Huskystarcraft, HD, or Day[9]
* Following the Starcraft 1 pro-scene
* Hearing from a friend
The point is: Blizzard has almost no participation in introducing people to the pro-scene. From what i have seen, they also provide a very small amount of prize money, as well as enforcing a very strict "prize pool cap" set at 5k$, taking 50% of the ad-revenue if prize exceeds that amount (refer to http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=247210 for more details)
This makes it extremely hard for the pro-scene to develop.
Additionally, they provide NEXT TO NO INFORMATION or advertisement for ongoing major tournaments. For example, the [IEM] gamescom Global Challenge is going on right now (18-7-2011), and it is not mentioned ANYWHERE on blizards main page for starcraft 2 (http://eu.battle.net/sc2/en/)
Now lets look at League of Legends, and RIOT
League of Legends:
The league of legends Esports scene, however, started out as a smaller, more casual game, often being made fun of by players of other MOBA games, viewing the game as "noob friendly" and "no-skill".
But recently, League of Legends has EXPLODED, and tournament views are through the roof, reaching numbers never seen before in Esports, even though the game has very little tournament/spectator support (no spectator mode, pause feature, or official replay feature),. What has caused this?
You need only to head over to the main page of League of Legends to find out why...
RIOT Games has to be the singe best game creator at promoting the professional scene of their game. Here is a list explaining why:
* They provide huge prize pools for their tournaments, and announce these prize pools to the community both through the ingame-client aswell as on their front page
* They advertize and hype tournaments FAR in advance IN THEIR INGAME CLIENT as well as on their front page
* They stream pro-level gameplay LIVE themselves, with commentary (outside of tournaments)
* They provide casting THEMSELVES (riot imployees) and large ammount of community interaction at live events, AS WELL AS ON LIVE STREAMS
* They provide HUGE amounts of money to major tournament organizers to give out to winners. Tournaments in season 2 of league of legends is going to have a combined prize pool of 5 MILLION $! And this is RIOT's money alone, not sponsors or companies like GOMtv.
* And perhaps the most important point of all: They provide a link to the stream DIRECTLY from the ingame client, as well as on the front page of their website!
*Note* Contrary to the belief of many, the ingame-client stream link does not count as a view without clicking it
It is impossible to enter a game of League of Legends without having the shiny link to the tournament stream, as shown below in a screenshot of the first thing you see when you log in:
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/9d4I9.jpg)
Valve have done the same thing. When you log into steam, the first thing you see is a banner advertising the DOTA2 tournament:
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/4zevq.png)
In regards to blizzard's participation in the pro-scene:
To be honest, it saddens me to know that a game which is basicly PERFECT for Esports is relying SO HEAVILY on the support and dedication of community members to stay alive (ok, maybe a bit overdramatic here), but my point remains the same.
If starcraft 2 had the support from blizzard that RIOT is giving league of legends, i believe that starcraft 2 has the potential to become HUGE, larger than anyone could ever have imagined 2 years ago.
Imagine Blizzard trying to show casuals the amount of 25k+ tournaments going on during a season, or if they hyped tournaments like crazy like Riot is doing, just by adding a simple link to the post-login screen. Stream viewers would SKYROCKET, leading to sponsors being much more interested in sponsoring teams, and leading to more ad-revenue for Blizzard.
Starcraft 2 has a much larger community (not player base) judging by sites such as team liquid, onemoregame, etc, as well as (in my opinion /beliefs) a much more dedicated fanbase. Many people watch starcraft / post on forrums / listen to podcasts countless hours each week. It doesnt make sence that blizzard is not supporting SC2 more when it has SO MUCH POTENTIAL!
Blizzard has created such an amazing competitive game. Why not follow it up by promoting it more?
*EDIT* After hearing some of your comments, i aggree that just pumping money into the game is no good. BUT, they could at least mention the prize pools of different tournaments to make people more aware/interested. I would not be surprised if a large amount of the casual sc2 players have NO IDEA that people are actually playing sc2 tournamentsfor 6-digit amounts
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I think Blizzard needs to promote more as you say on this op, but idk they can do whatever they want, they are Blizz T.T
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Because Blizzard has more than just Starcraft. Riot games only have league of legends (which is also free) whereas blizzard have Starcraft, Warcraft, and Diablo 3 to worry about.
Still it would be nice for more support from Blizzard, like a E-sports/ tournament portal with in SC2.
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Calgary26003 Posts
I think it's a great summary thread but you've killed it by basing it around a fruitless question about a corporation's policies. It seems pretty silly to compare Blizzard to Riot, they aren't even on the same magnitude of scale. Compare Blizzard to Valve and things get closer.
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awwh you only have 11 friends you should add me
and in response to thread... i dont know what to say.
Thats just the way Blizzard are and always have been.
They should hire a team just for this purpose, pushing the game the way Riot push theres.
But
Riot is "small" company focusing on one game. Completely different...
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On August 19 2011 03:16 Gardel wrote:
I think Blizzard needs to promote more as you say on this op, but idk they can do whatever they want, they are Blizz T.T
They could throw so much money at it if they wanted. They make like 130 million a month on WoW subscriptions....
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It'd be nice to have a stream link like tht, but i dont think supporting the game with money is all tht good. I think its awesome that the community is self-sustainable without the need for the developer to offer the prizes at every tournament.
Now imagine riot stops funding all these tournaments. What happens to the lol competitive scene?
Do they have a real community to fall back on? You can't create an esports infrastructure if u depend on the developer for everything.
Also i think sc2 isn't casual like lol so it wont appeal to as many people.
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Blizzard is pumping a lot of money into promoting SC2. IIRC GSL prize money, a lot of it started out as capital from Blizzard.
The problem is they just don't understand how everything works so a lot of the money is going down the sink. Their business strategy is still stuck in the 90's when games were sold in cardboard boxes, and hardly anyone had more than dial-up internet.
That's the problem when companies get big, is they also become very slow. Blizzard has done a great job at being as agile as possible for such a large company, but in the end they aren't flexible enough like RIOT is and continue to make bad decisions that don't make any sense.
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The majority of your post seems to be "why doesn't Blizzard give bigger prize money." The "promotion of stuff in-game" doesn't make sense - are you not seeing the same in-game client everyone else does that automatically advertises things like MLG and IEM in the community announcements window? As for casters and streams, imo, we have enough of those, if anything, the fact that LoL's esports is advanced almost solely by its company seems indicative of a bubble.
I honestly don't know how people enjoy watching Dota-type games, one of my friends who plays both watched the Dota 2 stream at IEM and was bored to death.
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They help support a tournament that gave players $80K-$180K in prizes EVERY MONTH.
The $1 million and $5 million prizes are there just to attract attention to the game's competitive scene. Blizzard didn't need to put out a 7 digit prize pool because Starcraft already has such an established pro scene. The two games are just trying to get more eyes right now so that other companies will become advertisers and sponsors. Personally I think a pro scene is healthiest if it DOESN'T depend on the publisher's money to maintain.
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Dustin Browder is too busy thinking up ways of giving Reaper jetpacks to Zerglings in the expansion to advertise his own game.
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I don't think Blizzard is ignoring the scene... they'll def want to propel SC2 as far as it can go... but right now there really is a grassroots (far more than grassroots I suppose at this point) movement to provide interesting and far-reaching tournaments. If Blizzard stepped in and started taking a substantial "chunk of that pie", they may actually hamper other tournaments. Blizzard is the brand name, if they host tournies... People would naturally flock to them.
That being said, Blizzard is slow to act generally (this has always been the case... but they generally do the right thing in the end), and they are starting to provide some info on tournies like MLG and GSL within the client itself. Could they do more? Yes... but I don't think they want to throw their weight behind anything yet... I think they may be waiting to see what major Tournaments really define the scene, and then support from there? Hard to say, but this is definitely an interesting topic, well posted.
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I think a link to major streams ingame would be awesome. I know many players who only play team games and if there was a link to a 1v1 tournament with an awesome crowd cheering and everything else thats awesome about 1v1 maybe more people would get into "esports" and the competitive scene of Starcraft. 
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On August 19 2011 03:17 Chill wrote:
I think it's a great summary thread but you've killed it by basing it around a fruitless question about a corporation's policies. It seems pretty silly to compare Blizzard to Riot, they aren't even on the same magnitude of scale. Compare Blizzard to Valve and things get closer.
I don't understand what you are getting at. Valve in the past has actively decided not to get involved with CS to not help or harm it. With Dota 2 that is clearly not going to be the case, and they will support it. It also seems it will be the case with CS:GO. So with these new generations of games that are getting serious attention from being an esport, Valve is looking to jump in on the action more so than Blizzard.
I must be missing the point though, because I don't see why you would need to compare Blizzard to Valve and not Riot. Either way Blizzard should be trying to support the game by doing things as simple as promoting it on their own sites imo.
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They take 50% of ad revenue from tournaments that exceed 5k in prize pool? WOW.
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On August 19 2011 03:17 nooboon wrote:
Because Blizzard has more than just Starcraft. Riot games only have league of legends (which is also free) whereas blizzard have Starcraft, Warcraft, and Diablo 3 to worry about.
Still it would be nice for more support from Blizzard, like a E-sports/ tournament portal with in SC2.
how is having multiple games an excuse? with the kind of revenue blizzard brings in, they could easily afford to have a team to do this, same as having a team to make bnet good.
blizzard always talked about having an "esports team". but we havent seen shit from em
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Talked to a friend about this, and we came to an agreement that Blizzard just don't have to. There is NO RTS game on the market right now that's even close to rival Starcraft. LoL has HoN and now Dota2 to compete with for players, Blizzard has no competition what so ever. The only other RTS games other than sc2 being played on a "pro"-level right now is BW and WC3, all Blizzard games.
However I still think it is in their best interest to invest more into the competitive SC2-scene, being the number one game in E-Sports is still important for them to keep their players IMO. Lets just hope Blizzard figures this out, cause the scene could be soooooooo much bigger if they would.
They don't even have to throw money into it, as you said if they only would announce major tournaments on their site and in the client itself that would give the community a big boost.
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Well....e-sports is meant to be sustained by the players and fans, not the company that makes the game. Blizzard already has a huge hand (relatively) in promoting the game via 1) carefully analyzing game balances and making changes at a reasonably quick and consistent rate, 2) timely server patches and updates, 3) punishing hackers, etc. TL;DR - they already have a lot on their plate, and they are doing what they can.
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I dont think that the way RIOT is providing the prize money is sustainable to be honest. I think sc2 is in a much better position because the pro scene can survive on its own and does not require funding from blizzard.
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Blizzard can do better, but they are not doing terrible either.
Riot is using this tournament as a marketing tool. 5 million into something that will generate a lot of buzz around your only product is a smart choice. Expecting them to host tournaments with this prize pool all of the time will not happen.
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EPT
