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If the inventor of the sport has to advertise their own sport, it's not really a sport.
Who promotes football? The inventor of the game some odd century ago?
No, it's the NFL and the various franchises. (and of course the TV stations!)
The analogy applies to every other athletic sport in existence.
So following that train of thought, it falls to the leagues we all know and love, and the teams, and even the (~TV) stations.
Thus, it is Blizzard's responsibility to patch and balance the game, and I'm sure there will be plenty more of that to come. But it is up to GSL, MLG (to name a few) to make sure people watch. And the teams. And even Justin.tv, etc.
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This is totally true. I've always been disappointed in the way Blizzard supports Starcraft 2. They seem to want more money for themselves, "enforcing a very strict "prize pool cap" set at 5k$, taking 50% of the ad-revenue if prize exceeds that amount", instead of actually injecting money into the scene and supporting these tournaments.
Starcraft is already pretty big, but it could be even bigger if Blizzard tried a little harder.
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On August 19 2011 03:22 stormchaser wrote:
They take 50% of ad revenue from tournaments that exceed 5k in prize pool? WOW.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/hWXiY.jpg)
User was warned for this post
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I agree with other posters above that Blizzard doesn't need to do $5,000,000 prize pools to support SC2 but I agree with the OP about having better in-game support to watch the streams through the game client. Unfortunately because of the decentralized nature of the SC2 scene there are so many different ways to stream and by extension different problems with each stream type, that Blizz would never put their name on something like that directly.
Even if they did manage to integrate some kind of player into the SC2 client, given the amount of time Blizzard takes to add new features to their games they would likely be so late to the party that no one would notice or care.
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I agree with your point that blizzard should promote the esport scene more ingame, e.g. with streamslinks news etc. ...
But I think the 5 million $ for the league of legends season won't really help the game. The prize pool for starcraft tournaments is much safer because this is only done by sponsors who are independent from the game. The publisher of LoL won't spent this amount of money much longer, I think the starcraft pro gaming scene is much more stable due to the fact that it isn't grown on blizzards shoulder.
But as said, I also think Blizzard should at least promote tournaments ingame.
(small adition: starcraft got a small victory today: there were many more viewers today on the IEM starcraft strream than on the LoL stream)
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League of Legends is making more money than sc2 and therefore they can spend more to support it.
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5003 Posts
Only if Blizzard spent the 30 million of advertising they did in Korea not in painting billboards, buildings, and airplanes, but in the ESPORTS infrastructure... T_T
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On August 19 2011 03:23 Kralic wrote:
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.
You do realize the 5 million is spread over the span of about a year.
You might be thinking of Valve.
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Good writeup, wish they would support sc2 more. However it is not totally absent-- they do have their blizzcon invitationals which sported a fairly decent prize pool for a small number of players, + the blizzcon tourney itself.
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LoL gets more viewers because the stream is built into the game application. It's really that simple. If the bnet invitational was streamed in bnet, I'm sure it'd crack 100k.
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I think it's because SC2 is a bit more niche than games like LoL and Dota, especially among gamers.
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Blizzard doesn't see enough money in it. If you follow the way blizzard has been going over the last few years they have become the greediest game devs in the world. I seriously cannot think of any that comes near.
In world of warcraft it costs $25 to transfer just 1 character between servers. It costs something similiar for name changes (don't know the exact amount), faction changes, race changes etc. Stupidly excessive. The situation I was in was that my server was dead and I was stuck with my characters on it. I would have wanted to transfer at least 4-5 of those characters to a better server but no way in cold hell was I paying $125 for that. So I quit the game instead.
In WoW they said they would never sell in game items for money. They now sell pets and more importantly mounts for $20-25. Only a matter of time until they sell actual gear.
They intend to bring in premium services to WoW granting important feautures such as grouping with friends from other servers. Yes that's right, PREMIUM services in a game with a monthly subscription.
Of course the diablo 3 fiasco which is a license to print money and really nothing more.
Some examples there, ofc in SC2 there is no LAN support, Diablo 3 no offline mode(lol) I could go on all day.
So look. I am just thankful that after every patch blizzard doesn't dumb this game down to make it more "accessible". Actually getting them to go out and support in the same way Riot supports LoL is asking a bit much from these guys.
Should they do more? Probably. Will they? Don't expect it.
I hope they prove me wrong.
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On August 19 2011 03:31 Milkis wrote:
Only if Blizzard spent the 30 million of advertising they did in Korea not in painting billboards, buildings, and airplanes, but in the ESPORTS infrastructure... T_T
Hmm well I can't really judge how good of a decision that was on their part, but I really think it doesn't have to be about throwing money around, at least not at the point they are at now. Why not provide easy access to tournament streams like Riot does, and promote the tournaments on their site. I mean really, would writing a very short article about IEM and offering a link to it with a schedule really be too difficult? They don't need millions of dollars, yet they can help push people who may visit the site but don't watch often, to actually get into it.
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why spend money on esports when they can just keep it in their bank accounts?
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Blizzard could do a much better job in promoting sc2. With games like LoL and DotA offering large prize pools for their tournaments, I feel that if blizzard doesn't do something, sc2 could potentially fade in obscurity.
Somehow, I feel that activision may have something to do with blizzard's apathy towards the development of sc2 as an esport, although I could be wrong.
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Riot games is LOL. Blizzard on the other had probably makes more in 1 month of WOW subscriptions then they do off SC2 in 6 months with the exception being the actual release. This is speculation of course I don't actually have numbers.
I do know that LOL does get record settings stream viewers every time they are in a tourney. Do I think LOL is a better game then SC2? No. Do I think Riot does a better job then Blizzard(with sc2)? Yes.
Business is business and I think that WOW and Diablo 3 will be the money makers. SC2 is the best competitive game out and is easy to watch for the casual fan or even someone that doesn't even play. LOL is difficult to watch. I enjoy it but I know every champ and ability which takes months of playing to learn almost 80 champions and all their ability's.
Riot has done a sick job with pushing LOL but it is really all they do. Blizzard on the other hand is more likely to put 5 million into D3 then SC2 at this point in terms of prizes etc etc. Simply because they will make more money off of D3 then SC2 probably a lot more. Even with the expansion for SC2 I think D3 will blow it away probably. I personally don't like Diablo and don't plan to get it but I know it will be huge. They would make more money doing PvP tourneys or something related to Diablo then SC2.
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More advertising from Blizzard would be great. A very large percentage of the people who play SC2 don't have a clue about the pro scene, when tournaments are happening, how to watch them. LoL style in client stream links would do a lot to spread awareness of ongoing tournaments to a wider audience.
As for throwing money at the scene like Riot and Valve are doing, I'm not too sure that's the best move. SC2's tournament scene right now is entirely self sufficient. All the money comes from company sponsors, organisations like MLG are building a business around it. If Blizzard backed out right now and decided not to have anymore involvement with SC2 as a competitive game, would it really make a difference? Probably not. What if Riot and Valve do the same? Can their games competitive scenes survive? What else do they have to fall back on?
What if Blizzard were to host a $5 million tournament every year? All that would do is render every other tournament out there completely irrelevant. Who would give a fuck about MLG's 5k first place prize when there is that kind of money up for grabs? It would just destroy all the progress over the last year. With Blizzard in the picture, how the hell could anyone else possibly compete?
SC2 as an eSport is growing organically. Tournament prize pools are increasing because the viewer numbers exist for this to be a good business investment, pro teams are getting sponsors and giving their players salaries because these are good business investments.
With the current state of LoL and DOTA as eSports, they are little more than developer funded charities. SC2 is actually growing into a sustainable, profitable business model. That's the big difference.
Blizzard throwing millions around could do more harm than good in the long term. But as for advertising? Hell yeah, make more of an effort please Blizzard.
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It's an interesting breakdown for sure. The more important points about Blizzard promoting tournaments really struck a chord for me. I periodically see a banner in SC2 when I first log into Battle.net promoting Blizz invitational or mentioning GSL, but they sure don't do much to hype up tournaments or community events (TL Attack, TSL, etc.).
TeamLiquid.net is, in my opinion, THE place to go for foreigners interested in tournament and professional games. It's an outstanding community, the news is always up-to-date, and there are always links to streams of tournaments. This being said, you also have to ask, would TL suffer if Blizz had a website or community that did basically the same thing as TL?
I feel like I'm having trouble explaining my point, so I'm sorry if this didn't come across as intended. Blizz could definitely step it up in terms of promoting this amazing game.
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On August 19 2011 03:19 LlamaNamedOsama wrote:
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?.
I dont see half as many thing on my in game client that people do on their NA client, at least from what I see in streams.
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Because people have to realize that the eSport side of SC2 is a great bonus to blizzard, but it isn't where they make their money. In fact, they make hardly anything off of it.
Blizzard games sell strong no matter what, the casuals aren't into eSports so it doesn't matter to Blizzard enough. They want box sales, and after that they don't care. They want to support it enough to keep it relevant but if Blizzard doesn't support eSports at all their next games will still have record sales.
This is why a game like LoL does it. They have to do something to differentiate themselves where a big giant like Blizzard doesn't have to. Also the formats and how they make money are very different. You can see with the pay format of LoL how them promoting the eSport side will help them make more money. That same connection isn't the case as much with SC2.
So it really just comes down to dollars and cents. Blizzard does enough for the eSport community that they don't alienate it, but it just isn't a money maker for them.
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