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On August 20 2011 01:54 Ysellian wrote:Show nested quote +On August 20 2011 01:46 cory1234 wrote:
Obviously there is a problem when a FREE game is getting 3 to 4 times the number of viewers and larger prize pools at EVERY major tournament where SC2 and LoL is present.
Here's a fact. Blizzard made $1.1 billion in digital revenue in the second quarter of 2011.That is just one quarter! Where is all this money going? Why is a Riot games, a puny company in revenue and size, completely dominating the tournament viewers and prize pools?
Blizzard needs to make Grandmasters into a real league with a real prize pool. I'm starting to think that Blizzard doesn't really care about the community. SC2 doesn't generate $1.1 billion in revenue. You can't just use money which is generated from a different department on funding something with questionable returns. Furthermore increasing prize money is such a cosmetic way of "promoting" stuff, rather it's the small things like providing streams which would help much more.
Bingo. There's really no indicator that Riot's investment in prize money is going to pay off. And companies that made money elsewhere are under no obligation to lose some of that money by making investments with questionable returns.
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On August 20 2011 01:58 tyCe wrote:
So much misinformation in this thread when it's quite obvious that the popularity of the LoL esport scene is primarily due to its playerbase. There's not much that Blizzard can do to make SC2 a more popular esport without expanding its playing fanbase. For instance, even if cycling suddenly got a huge prize pool, football (not handegg) will still beat it in popularity 100% because it is so accessible to people to play and is likewise incredibly popular. LoL is a more accessible game and has lower graphics requirements, and due to a host of other reasons, is a far more popular game than SC2. While it may subjectively not be as exciting as SC2, that doesn't matter when significantly fewer people care about SC2 anyway.
Having said that, Blizzard can still increase the exposure of the SC2 esports scene in some ways. Providing a link to the stream and actively advertising upcoming and recent tournaments through its media outlets will certainly draw a lot of people in. However, at the end of the day, I think it is very unrealistic to expect 200k concurrent viewers for major events as there are simply not that many people who care enough to watch them.
I can pretty much agree with this. Throwing more money just won´t magically make the game more appealing to the people who don´t follow SC2.Could Blizzard do more? Yeah but really we are not seeing the whole picture here.
And LOL @ all the people blaming Activision, Vivendi owns the 2 companies.
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While it's true that the English E-Sport has really exploded, as nearly all events have english shoutcasters, it isn't true for many other countries. Some events have other shoutcasters, but it is rare still...
LoL, Dota 2 have official chinese shoutcasters, and in many other languages. This could -easily- explain the discrepancy in numbers rather than everything you propose making your observation flawed unless this is considered into account. While it's likely intuitively TRUE that everything you suggested would be good for the E-Sport scene, I doubt it would have that massive of an effect as you argue. There are other variables at play here.
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Don't you mean promote instead of support?
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I think you forget that Blizzard = Activision Blizzard; they own MANY, MANY brand names. Starcraft 2 is next-to-nothing for them. World of Warcraft, Call of Duty, etc., those series make them the big bucks. Those are the ones that get the serious global attention. Starcraft 2 is big, but it's not a cash-cow for Blizzard. They don't have subscription-based membership, they don't have multi-platform releases, they don't have DLC, etc.
Long story short: they don't need to market or support SC2, because doing so will make them lose money. It's all about big business.
Valid and good arguments though.
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Seriously when will people learn that Activision has NO influence on Blizzard, VIVENDI GAMES was the parent company of Blizzard and Vivendi SA owns the majority shares in Activision Blizzard.
The Vivendi CEO must be pretty happy that everything negative gets blamed on Activision
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Blizz does mention SC2 going on's in it's Facebook feed every once in a while.
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Well...blizz does promote gsl in sc2 sea site.
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On August 20 2011 00:35 dizzy101 wrote:
TL, as a community, is too focused on pro-players and tournaments. How will you get new pro's when there's no influx of new players? When did you last see a new name rise up through the ranks in NA's pro SC2 scene? It's been a while...
The game's been out for a year and we've already seen significant rotation of players. I don't even know where CowGoMoo and the like are these days. I don't pay particular attention to the NA scene, but I'd never heard of Gostojiy before Blizzard invitational, for example.
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I didn't scroll through all 17 pages, so it might be here somewhere.. but Blizzard is all over Facebook with advertisements for tournaments and the like.
+ Show Spoiler +The 2011 China Battle.net Invitational kicks off tonight in Shanghai! Tune in to watch as the top eight Chinese StarCraft II players and top four World of Warcraft Arena teams compete for prizes and glory in the gorgeous Shanghai M50 Creative Park.
2011 China Battle.net Invitational
us.battle.net
Have you been keeping up with all the exciting regional action leading up to the Global Battle.net Invitational? The 2011 China Battle.net Invitational kicks off tonight!
^ I copied that from the middle of a deluge of other personal comments, directly from my news feed.
Edit: Don't get me wrong, Blizzard could do so much more to advertise their pro scene.. However, I am thankful there aren't splash pages and/or ads all over starcraft telling me this. I don't like clutter, and just looking at the LoL client gives me a headache. I am content with the box blizzard puts on the mid/top right of my screen, just like I was ok with the banner they put on wc3 bnet.
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Blizzard pushing SC2 e-sports will only make the scene marginally better. 1.6 and BW, became what they were because of the community, not blizzard or valve pumping millions into them. Also i can't see prize money as an indicator of how well a scene is doing. It's an unreliable source of income for the players. The size of guaranteed contracts is a better way to gauge how well a scene is doing.
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On August 20 2011 17:16 kinger256 wrote:
Blizzard pushing SC2 e-sports will only make the scene marginally better. 1.6 and BW, became what they were because of the community, not blizzard or valve pumping millions into them. Also i can't see prize money as an indicator of how well a scene is doing. It's an unreliable source of income for the players. The size of guaranteed contracts is a better way to gauge how well a scene is doing.
I'd say that it's not guaranteed contracts that determine a scene, but simply the number of constant spectators watching/playing the game. At the end of the day, SC2 could have the most number of sponsored teams for their scene, but if it has a 3rd or 4th of the viewer base of Dota2 or LoL, it wont take long for sponsors to pressure teams to close down branches of their team in order to cut costs after realizing that their money is better spent elsewhere. I'd imagine those are the signs of a bad scene.
I mean, there was WoW that didn't do so well as an eSport, but that was simply because PvE and PvP were two different games, with 99% of the population not caring much for Arena, I dont know why people never picked up on that...
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StarCraft is very different from DotA games though. I feel like DotA games have bigger mass appeal because they are more easy to get in to, even though apparently they still have a pretty high skill ceiling. This causes those games to probably have a much greater base audience and larger player base. The microtransaction model these games support also seem to serve to fund these insane price pools, something I'm not sure I want in SC2.
Blizzard could do a better job at promoting tournaments though, though I have my suspicions that they are afraid to alienate the lower tier players by promoting cutthroat competative gaming. They tried to up the difficulty of content in WoW but went back on it because it alienated the majority of the players base who felt "locked out" of a lot of content, and maybe this causes them to be more cautious with SC2.
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On August 19 2011 03:12 Jerokar wrote: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
To be fair, I learned about the GSL when I went to Blizzcon last year. I enjoyed Tastosis's casting so much (and the actual act of watching Starcraft too, I guess) that I made a note in my phone to check out this newfangled "GOM TV" they kept talking about. Yeah, that's not David Kim telling me to go watch the GSL, but it was Blizzard that decided to get Tasteless and Artosis and allow them to plug their show.
I do kind of agree on everything else though. Compared to the game developers you mentioned, they do seem to be doing a lackluster job in promoting SC2. I wonder what Bungie is doing for Halo and Treyarch is doing for Black Ops, if anything.
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On August 20 2011 17:01 Mr. Elusive wrote:I didn't scroll through all 17 pages, so it might be here somewhere.. but Blizzard is all over Facebook with advertisements for tournaments and the like. + Show Spoiler +The 2011 China Battle.net Invitational kicks off tonight in Shanghai! Tune in to watch as the top eight Chinese StarCraft II players and top four World of Warcraft Arena teams compete for prizes and glory in the gorgeous Shanghai M50 Creative Park.
2011 China Battle.net Invitational
us.battle.net
Have you been keeping up with all the exciting regional action leading up to the Global Battle.net Invitational? The 2011 China Battle.net Invitational kicks off tonight! ^ I copied that from the middle of a deluge of other personal comments, directly from my news feed. Edit: Don't get me wrong, Blizzard could do so much more to advertise their pro scene.. However, I am thankful there aren't splash pages and/or ads all over starcraft telling me this. I don't like clutter, and just looking at the LoL client gives me a headache. I am content with the box blizzard puts on the mid/top right of my screen, just like I was ok with the banner they put on wc3 bnet.
If you go to the official Starcraft 2 portal on battle.net it shows the same type of information about the tournaments like when it's happening, who is playing, etc. Hell, I just logged into SC2 and the first thing I see is a story about MLG Raleigh being almost here on the news and community side along with the B.NET invitational. So I assume the OP is complaining about the tournaments not being "in your face" enough and with this I'm going to have to disagree with the OP.
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I think it makes sense that blizzard promote their game but from what I understand, they're already sponsoring the GSL - which I assume means paying for it. I also wouldn't be surprised if they are secretly funding other events like the NASL - but it probably looks better when it's not a developer paying people to play their games.
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On August 24 2011 12:18 TortoiseCa wrote:
I think it makes sense that blizzard promote their game but from what I understand, they're already sponsoring the GSL - which I assume means paying for it. I also wouldn't be surprised if they are secretly funding other events like the NASL - but it probably looks better when it's not a developer paying people to play their games.
This right here.
I think it looks very unprofessional for EVERY LoL tournament to be sponsored by Riot.
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On August 24 2011 15:09 VirgilSC2 wrote:Show nested quote +On August 24 2011 12:18 TortoiseCa wrote:
I think it makes sense that blizzard promote their game but from what I understand, they're already sponsoring the GSL - which I assume means paying for it. I also wouldn't be surprised if they are secretly funding other events like the NASL - but it probably looks better when it's not a developer paying people to play their games. This right here. I think it looks very unprofessional for EVERY LoL tournament to be sponsored by Riot.
Unprofessional? Are you kidding me? SC2 pros are jealous of all that prize money and blizzard is jealous of valve for taking the first dive into moba genre. If that makes valve unprofessional then I guess Blizzard having cash auction houses in D3 is the lowest of the low.
Edit- Oh and I want to make another point, when DotA Allstars filled up the custom game list in W3TFT, and the majority of dota games were played via a channel matchmaking system, there were pleas for Blizzard to add support into their game for DotA through a patch and you know what their response was? They said most people who play War3 don't even play on B.net. I remember a similar response when fans asked for more closed b.net support on D2. Blizzard has been behind on game and community support before they even had to answer to Bobby Kotick. They are very shortsided if the only community they are willing to truly support is the one paying a monthly fee.
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Riot only has to worry about League of Legends, and can put money into the tournaments, as in the grand scheme they aren't as many as StarCraft 2 tournaments.
I would also argue that LoL is a more hardcore game and you will have core (follow streams, watch tournaments) players then StarCraft 2, where you have super casual players (just playing campaign and practice league or something)
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It wouldn't make Blizzard broke to advertise the eSports scene on their own website and within the game client.
They don't even need to pay for the advertising space, it's their space.
Blizzard is doing an abysmal job promoting SC2 as a eSports.
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