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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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Calgary25969 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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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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Its pretty simple, blizzard doesn't have to.
Riot is the only group that can spectate and provide a good broadcast of LoL, Valve is trying to launch a game. Blizzard doesn't need to pump millions of dollars of prize money into the game because other entities are already providing the prize money. If blizzard made a million dollar tournament that would be AWESOME but it isn't necessary for the growth of SC2 as an ESPORT.
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Can't really expect them to pour money into SC2 when they have other games on their plate. Having said that a simple in game link to major tournaments would do wonders for exposure. Costs them nothing really that I can think of and the added exposure is win-win for everyone.
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People seem to forget that the GSL is largely Blizzard sponsored. In the first year that's about 1.5 mil in prize pool, and who knows how much in production costs.
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well prolly b/c blizzard makes nothing from sc2 in comparison to wow... money is kinda important to companies
i think blizzard does pretty good for sc2 as it is
but activision business model is prolly something like
![[image loading]](http://img822.imageshack.us/img822/5394/bitchesgetmonet6732.jpg)
User was temp banned for this post.
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I couldnt agree more with the OP.
I've been thinking the same things for awhile now. If only Blizzard took the time to promote tournaments directly in the Lobby's interface or something. They could attract numerous casual players to the streams and solidify greatly expand/solidify the community.
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I think blizzard doing their job pretty well. Starcraft has by far the most healthy growth of any esport. The prizemoney and Player salary (speculation) are rising normaly. I doenst form a esport if you just put money in it. I would also state that the quality of the starcraft viewers in long terms is alot more reliable then lol but i dont know enough about that scene to be sure.
These companys also make it a lot harder for smaller tournaments to provide competition. Who would do a 100Euro cup if you have a 1 / 5 Million Tournament every year.
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Blizzard doesn't have enough interactions with the fans. It's actually really annoying.
some improvements that we desperately need like a mulitplayer replay viewing, deleting chat channels, adding clan support etc...are just being completely ignored by them.
But they are a company that does well without listening to the crowd much. I just hope they actually care more about improving the game, instead of just adding maps and "balancing" the game
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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 have to agree with this, on top of the fact that sc2's community has a much higher ratio of content producers compared to consumers. There are so many streams and tournaments going on at any point that it drastically splits the viewer counts. I don't think Blizzard making their webpage the hub for community-viewing trafficking will actually help at this point where so many personalities have can draw viewers away from a main event by concurrently streaming ladder sessions.
I'm not sure if the more linear approach of LoL's community, or the overly-diversified one of SC2's, is better for the community's longevity. But I am sure that Blizzard is in no kind of relationship with the community to actually do any thing about it - I wouldn't be surprised if a vast majority of the people reading this thread have ever or will ever consider Blizzard's website as a source of SC2 content. Further, even if Blizzard tried, there's no way of satisfying even a slight majority of the community with how much diverse content there is to pick from - they would have to include so many tournaments and streams that it would just be another flood of information, and the community boards (like this one) already offer that.
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On August 19 2011 03:34 zev318 wrote:
why spend money on esports when they can just keep it in their bank accounts?
Nail on the head. I imagine 90% + people who watch starcraft already own the game and have little to no interest in their other games. Its not really casual friendly so they don't stand to gain loads by pumping huge money into it.
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Part of the reason LoL has such high numbers is because everyone logging in to play the game is counted as a view, because of the ingame stream they have. Also SC2 is a more diverse scene. You may not see the biggest numbers ever on one stream, but remember there are always events going on elsewhere. There may be 2 major events and numerous smaller events going on at the same time. Then you also have to take into account timezone separation.
Also I will not include this with the rest because I have no proof or anything, but from what i have seen, the age group who play LoL is younger than SC2 on average. This leads to more SC2 players having jobs/families etc which decreases viewer count. I know many LoL gamers are older though, not saying all LoL players are a less gosu Pokebunny.
Although the numbers from gamescon for Dota 2 are amazing, the first numbers I was gettign were 1.5-2 million UNIQUE views, and apparently that is going up to ~4 million. Still, I would say SC2 has this many or at least close to it viewers, they are just never on at the same time because we are spread all over the world.
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I agree since a simple page in battle.net/forum and game client with the leagues/tournaments and streams would benefit everyone involved
-people would get more involved and learn more about the game
-events/tournaments/streams overall would get more viewers
-Blizzard would eventually get more players
win win situation for everybody
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I think tournament organizers and teams should band together and pressure Blizzard to do more. A unified voice is needed
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Fully agree. It boggles my mind that a game like SC2 doesn't have more viewers given the level of competition and the entertaining quality of it. I'm not saying it's necessarily Blizzard's fault nor is it their imperative to promote the e-sports scene but there's really no downside to them saying "Hey, check out these pros at the highest level of skill duke it out over a huge prize pool!" Blizzard gets more exposure and possibly more sales, the fanbase grows wider and the level of competition will inevitably shoot up with more people joining in competitions as well as more tournaments and money for SC2 e-sports cropping up as a potential result of Blizzard's support.
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omg i would love support from blizzard! it would be such a huge help. they just rarely seem to take part in their games like Riot has done. They make the games, patch them, and thats it
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This IEM starcraft2 had more viewers when I checked today morning.
When it comes to blizzard and riot games, it's quite simple. Blizzard trying to make money while Riot games throwing away money.
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I agree with the part that Blizzard should do more for tournaments they are splitting ad revenue on. They could list it in the client and webpages to maybe get more viewers which only benefits them and build more bridges to getting people into esports.
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On August 19 2011 03:42 Toboe wrote:Show nested quote +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 have to agree with this, on top of the fact that sc2's community has a much higher ratio of content producers compared to consumers. There are so many streams and tournaments going on at any point that it drastically splits the viewer counts. I don't think Blizzard making their webpage the hub for community-viewing trafficking will actually help at this point where so many personalities have can draw viewers away from a main event by concurrently streaming ladder sessions. I'm not sure if the more linear approach of LoL's community, or the overly-diversified one of SC2's, is better for the community's longevity. But I am sure that Blizzard is in no kind of relationship with the community to actually do any thing about it - I wouldn't be surprised if a vast majority of the people reading this thread have ever or will ever consider Blizzard's website as a source of SC2 content. Further, even if Blizzard tried, there's no way of satisfying even a slight majority of the community with how much diverse content there is to pick from - they would have to include so many tournaments and streams that it would just be another flood of information, and the community boards (like this one) already offer that.
i hope you realize that a lot of players on the invited teams to MLG for LoL also stream their games. less people watch the streams only because there's so many casual LoL players that if you don't put a huge obnoxious link on the front page of the client they won't watch. i'm interesting to see if my theory behind that is true with MLG, it's rung true for regular old RIOT streams that don't involve that blatant advertisement
i will say though that RIOT tries A LOT HARDER than anyone else to connect with their community and unite the casual player with the tournament scene. for that i applaud them, i just wish it didn't have to be such a casual game that developers took the extra steps on
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Look at it from the bright side. It's actually an indication that sc2 is the healthiest game, because it boasts such a huge competitive scene without blizzards explicit help.
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I would rather Blizzard spend $5 million on a top-notch development team to make sure the game is good and has all of the features the competitive scene needs (such as robust replay features) than blow it on a prize pool for some tournament to artificially inflate interest in the game for one event.
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On August 19 2011 03:35 Exarl25 wrote:
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.
No offense, but with the viewer numbers on LoL and Dota streams, you don't think that those games are good business investments?
MLG are picking up LoL for a reason, Dreamhack got lots of people interested, not just MLG, people are going to look at those numbers and are willing to invest, and is one of the reasons that Riot is willing to put up 5 million this year, they know it will let the game grow, and start that infrastructure.
If I'm an investor, or work at MLG right now I'm drooling at LoL and MLG, and SC2 is great and all, it's the best e-sport imo, but to say that the other two can't compete???
Blizzard needs to step up to the plate and compete, they can afford 5 million next year in prize pools. Do it. They can afford to have a link for every big tournament on their game, do it.
Obviously don't freaking make one tournament for 5 million, add that prize pool to the other tournaments, make MLG = 200,000 a tournament, why not. Make IEM a lot of money, make some of these other events other than GSL as prestigious, expand their scene.
Having a grassroots scene is great and all, but I'm worried about these investors that might be looking to LoL and Dota 2 in the future instead of SC2.
also Herculix, Im pretty sure MLG will have a link from in game for LoL, IEM does, so don't be shocked at all to see that for all the future tournaments of that size and caliber.
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I have to say that I dont think Blizzard ought to be responsible for or pumping money into events, and further I dont think they need to. However I do think a very obvious link to event streams in game would be fantastic and fairly cheap for them. In fact you'd think it'd actually make money for them to do such a thing given that they take ad revenue..
Has anyone actively tried to make Blizzard aware that this kind of thing happens btw?
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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.
Exactly. Blizzard doesn't need to put it's own money and organize it's own tournaments. Other organizations have interest in doing that "for them." Valve and Riot all put their own money into it in an attempt to market and kick-start an esports movement for it.
However, it's very smart for Riot to stick this kind of stuff right on their front page and EVEN THE GAME CLIENT LOL. US Battle.net site is also slow on the blog entries. Lately, the've been much better about it.
You'd think that taking 50% of the ad revenue would mean they have a stake in the success of these tournaments, I don't think having the janitor make a quick blurb on the blog that takes 10 minutes tops would hurt them. 
Then again, you do have to pick and choose who you promote or otherwise dilute the awesomeness by cramming every tournament onto the front page. In that sense, they've promoted nearly every BIG tournament so far at least for the US site.
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Personally, I think they are doing what they know best: developing the game. At a point where development calms down (after the last expansion), I feel that we can expect a lot more out of them.
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On August 19 2011 03:25 NASAmoose wrote:
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.
I think this is the biggest reason, I think Blizzard wants sc2 to grow on it's own as an e-sport so that it doesn't become a bubble where Blizzard pumps a massive amount of money in and when they stop doing that the whole scene colapses.
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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 dont quite understand you cannot compare blizzard's support of the professional scene to Riot's. Competitive League of Legends used to be nothing compared to sc2, but due to support in the form of advertisement (especially in the in-game client) they are attracting HUGE amounts of viewers. How is it unreasonable to ask blizzard for the same? I dont see how it would be very difficult to do, and it would also earn them money with practically no effort required.
I wonder how you can say that Blizzard and Riot are not on the same magnitude of scale when League of Legends is featured in many of the same tournaments as SC2, while also getting dramatically more viewers.
I aggree that Blizzard might not need to brag to the community by saying "OH LOOK, HERE IS 5m DOLLARS, THIS GAME WILL MAKE YOU EARM 5m!!!", but they are clearly missing out on some huge opportunities
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On August 19 2011 03:25 NASAmoose wrote:
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.
This is a good analogy and given the organic/decentralized nature of SC2 I think it will be around long after the bubbles burst for dota/lol.
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1 word: Activision. "what?!? 5 Million?!? Why are you giving away our money that you earned for us?!?!?!!?"
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The SC2 scene is much more spread out, everyone has their own favorite tournaments and shows to watch while in LoL there is less available so the viewers are more consolidated. It's just a guess but I believe if you were able to add up all the SC2 viewers world wide it would be much higher than LoL.
Also I'm pretty sure that Blizzard has shown MLG, Dreamhack, and GOM on their main page and they definitely advertise them in-game so it's wrong to say they don't advertise for tournaments, OP just picked one tournament that isn't being advertised by Blizzard.
The reason Riot is supporting LoL in a much bigger way is simply because they have to front load it with as much cash as possible to get it off the ground and encourage other investors to jump in. Blizzard and SC2 are a completely different situation and it's not so important how much Blizzard spends promoting when it started right out of the gate with a tournament with high producing quality and a big prize pool (GOM) and continues to grow.
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On August 19 2011 03:25 NASAmoose wrote:
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.
While this is true for the larger sports, i dont believe any of the gaming leages are big enough to attract eyes for themselves. If blizzard just put a simple link in the post log-in screen, I THINK it would make a huge difference
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On August 19 2011 03:19 sluggaslamoo wrote:
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.
Are you trolling? How could Blizzard not understand how everything works. Not catering to the sc2 esports community does not mean they don't understand how everything works, it means much the opposite. If blizzard was still "stuck in the 90's" there main form of sale for all of their games would not be battle.net store.
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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.
And then some...
Riot are getting there, but they are still dreams away from being anything the size of these two.
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LOL has sht ton of people playing the game right now because it is free and thats why they have huge numbers, if starcraft 2 was free , i lot of people would play it and e sport scene will benefit big time but LOL makes all the money by micro transactions , are you willing to support sc2 if it goes free 2 play and micro transactions?, i am not even sure micro transaction can even work with sc2.
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I just want to say that I have been spending time playing the "starter edition" maps in custom games and have run into many people just starting to play starcraft (read about 10). I have asked each player what made them decide to pick up sc2 at this point hoping for one of them to mention something about watching tournaments or esports etc.
Zero out of ten people even knew about TL or even day-9.
I don't think blizzard needs to inject more money, but rather raise awareness, maybe even advertise (i guess that costs money) SC2 as a competitive E-sport. How awesome would it be if HOTS advertising campaign included the pro scene in some way? (what a pipedream we all know it will just be a bunch of CG trailers).
That brings me to my final point, a point that has already been brought up, competition. The moba, fps and even fighting game scene have competition within their genre. RTS does not. While it is good on the one hand that we are almost completely unified, it is also detrimental as there is no other company out there pushing the bounds of a tournament level RTS game with features that everyone wants.
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I thought about this when LoL tournament was announced. They could do better job promoting tournaments little better. or change some of the policies so the growth of competitive scene can be accelerated.
I'm not saying they are doing terrible job but they can do so much better. Right now, sometimes, it looks like they just sit there and collect check while others are doing most of the work. It would be great to see some actions from Blizzard.
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On August 19 2011 04:00 fluffiZilla wrote:Show nested quote +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. And then some... Riot are getting there, but they are still dreams away from being anything the size of these two.
I agree that Riot as a company are not nearly as big as bliz or activision, but that doenst mean that the game doesnt attract more viewers. And at the end of the day, that's what the sponsors are looking for
And in response to the valve thing... The new Dota2 tournament is still advertised in the exact same way as League of Legends tournaments. Ligging into Steam leads you directly to this banner:
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On August 19 2011 03:59 Jerokar wrote:Show nested quote +On August 19 2011 03:25 NASAmoose wrote:
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. While this is true for the larger sports, i dont believe any of the gaming leages are big enough to attract eyes for themselves. If blizzard just put a simple link in the post log-in screen, I THINK it would make a huge difference
Well, as the OP says, Blizzard isn't really supporting SC2 as much as they could, so the big gaming leagues must be attracting a lot of people or the scene wouldn't be so huge. Personally I agree with the analogy. Valve and Riot are going to eventually stop putting money into the scene and those games will die out, but as long as the SC2 scene sustains itself there's no telling how long it will stay around. Just look at BW.
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The only thing I think they should be doing is integrating a big shiny link and/or player on the front page of the Battle.net login so they can abuse the player-base numbers to inflate the viewers, perhaps grabbing the real interest of a few in the process. I'd encourage anyone who meets Blizzard guys at MLG's or Blizzcon to bring it up and find out why they aren't.
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On August 19 2011 03:33 murphs wrote:
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.
I'm so sick of hearing this. WoW players have consistently asked (begged) for such features and Blizzard have denied them. Only until people started saying they'd pay for such services did it come out. There is also the fact that part of the reason why things like server transfers were denied was due to potential abuse by people who earn a bad reputation and go to another server to do the same. Hence the reason why initially there was a 6 month cooldown on transfers... wow Blizzard is so greedy they only allow me to give them $25 every 6 months. Those bastards. And please stop saying some stupid pet or mount is precedent for selling gear. People have been saying that for years and it hasn't happened and Blizzard themselves have maintained it will never happen. Please get your facts straight. And yes, PER CHARACTER transfer is super lame and a large part of the reason why I quit WoW. So I am in the same boat as you.
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Pretty much my feeling on it are that SC2 is an esport by its own merit. Blizz doesn't need to pump money in to prize pools because sponsors do that.
LoL basically only has tourneys with prize pools because riot give the money, eventually maybe companies will sponsor it like they do sc2, but for now... without riot putting up the cash it simply wouldn't have any.
LoL et al aren't self sustaining, SC2 is... mainly because of SC1 being so popular in korea, SC2 was a proven commodity before it was even released
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I think this is the biggest reason, I think Blizzard wants sc2 to grow on it's own as an e-sport so that it doesn't become a bubble where Blizzard pumps a massive amount of money in and when they stop doing that the whole scene colapses.
What if the scene collapses because blizzard takes to much money from the tournaments they can't be profitable? 50% of ad revenue seems like a lot. Do we know if any of the tournaments have made a profit so far or are they still hoping esports will continue to grow until it is profitable? (I wonder if they also take any of the subscription money or if tournaments could offer free vods if the advertising revenue doubled)
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As already pointed out, Blizz doesn't do anything because the community does it for them. It's a real shame, but there's little to no hope things will change.
Blizz does care about the game (they wanna sell add-ons of course) but as long as others do it for free, why would they invest money?
What I think is interesting is that many think that Blizz isn't doing "too bad": I think they do by taking away the ad-revenue. This is what makes it appealing for people to even start leagues/tournaments in the first place. That Blizz just "grabs" 50% even though they do nothing at all is - of course - legal, but I despise such a policy. They should be grateful for gomtv, mlg, ign etc. for making the game succeed. Without them their overall sales (especially when it comes to the add-on) would be WAY lower.
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On August 19 2011 04:13 emythrel wrote:
Pretty much my feeling on it are that SC2 is an esport by its own merit. Blizz doesn't need to pump money in to prize pools because sponsors do that.
LoL basically only has tourneys with prize pools because riot give the money, eventually maybe companies will sponsor it like they do sc2, but for now... without riot putting up the cash it simply wouldn't have any.
But the thing is that other companies are attracting huge amounts of viewers. I dont believe that this is only because they are pumping money into the tournament scene. The LOL tournaments were attracting views BEFORE the large prize pools (look at Dreamhack season 1). Advertisement can go a HUGE way, especially a shiny link at the login screen
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Can somebody please give me a general idea how many viewers a major LoL tournament pulls in?
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On August 19 2011 04:19 dukethegold wrote:
Can somebody please give me an idea how many viewers a major LoL tournament pulls in?
Someone said 90000 were watching the IEM stream today in the Day2 live report thread
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Again, the stream isn't actually embedded in the client, when you click that button it opens your browsed to the own3d.tv LoL IEM page.
The fact remains that LoL has 15 million accounts with 450,000 concurrent players each day worldwide.
Starcraft 2 sold what? 4 million copies, there are only 160,000 people ranked on ladder so far in the NA server.
It's not even close, even if Blizzard embedded their stream it wouldn't make a difference.
edit: to poster above, largest I saw was 103k on the lol own3d.tv iem page, day 3 will be even bigger because its the group of death.
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I can't really add anything, so I'll just bump to show my support.
(I hope I don't get banned) )
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On August 19 2011 04:19 dukethegold wrote:
Can somebody please give me a general idea how many viewers a major LoL tournament pulls in?
The last dreamhack got to 220k concurrent viewers, while sc2 only drew in 70k.
Today, i believe they got around 90k during IEM, while sc2 got around 24k
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On August 19 2011 04:16 Jerokar wrote:Show nested quote +On August 19 2011 04:13 emythrel wrote:
Pretty much my feeling on it are that SC2 is an esport by its own merit. Blizz doesn't need to pump money in to prize pools because sponsors do that.
LoL basically only has tourneys with prize pools because riot give the money, eventually maybe companies will sponsor it like they do sc2, but for now... without riot putting up the cash it simply wouldn't have any. But the thing is that other companies are attracting huge amounts of viewers. I dont believe that this is only because they are pumping money into the tournament scene. The LOL tournaments were attracting views BEFORE the large prize pools (look at Dreamhack season 1). Advertisement can go a HUGE way, especially a shiny link at the login screen
LoL has 15million subscribers...... and they get 200k viewers. Hardly anyone that doesn't play dota/lol watches it..... i play LoL and can't watch it.
Compare that to sc2 which has around 1m active players and gets 100k viewers (for finals and big matches)..... a decent proportion of which don't even play or own the game.
Lots of viewers doesn't translate in to a successful esport. Bringing in viewers who don't play the game does, more over 15million players and they can only muster up around 0.01% of them to watch it compared to the 10% of sc2 players that watch pro SC2.....
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Not sure what the OP is thinking with this post. The most successful e-sports have grown organically.
Sure, injecting money into the scene is great for publicity and marketing purposes, but there is high risk involved.
What happens when Riot / Valve stop putting big money down to support these games? There is a good chance that the bubble will burst.
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Keep in mind, the people watching/viewing the games especially if it is because of a link when you log into the game already own the game.
Blizzard doesn't care about the people that already own the game, they want to get people to buy the game that don't own it. They could care less how many people who own it already watch a stream. That means nothing to them.
I believe LoL makes money by having people into the game, buying in game items and such correct? So from their point of view and business model it really helps to keep people logged in and engaged, and cater to the people that are die hards and own the game.
The reverse is true with blizzard. Once you own the game, they made their money, time to move on and start to advertise their next game/next expansion/get new people to buy it.
I'm sorry but the reality is Blizzard doesn't care about you. They already own you, you are invested, you are buying their next game, and next game, and next game. They want the person that doesn't fit that category.
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I completely agree that when you log in they need to do a way better job of advertising tournements; as well as use their website.
Advertising your organization is a good thing, think about how often you're bombarded with football advertisements. Come to this game. Get season tickets. Don't miss this game. (applies to both American and rest of the world football)
If it weren't for TL I would have no idea about 1/2 the tourneys going on.
As for money... Blizzard is pumping quite a bit into prizes; they don't need to pump a 7 digit figure once a year to hype SC2.
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Because as blizzard expressed in one of their quarterly calls already sc2 didn't put up the profit margins they wanted and was a disappointment.
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On August 19 2011 03:17 IMSmooth wrote:Show nested quote +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....
Running Blizzard isn't cheap bro.
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On August 19 2011 04:22 emythrel wrote:
Lots of viewers doesn't translate in to a successful esport. Bringing in viewers who don't play the game does, more over 15million players and they can only muster up around 0.01% of them to watch it compared to the 10% of sc2 players that watch pro SC2.....
I gotta argue with this point. Why on earth do you get the sense that the greater proportion of SC2 views come from people that don't even play.
I'd think that 99 of 100 people that watch SC2 are players. Am I wrong?
Got any stats to back it up?
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On August 19 2011 04:22 Modernist wrote:
Not sure what the OP is thinking with this post. The most successful e-sports have grown organically.
Sure, injecting money into the scene is great for publicity and marketing purposes, but there is high risk involved.
What happens when Riot / Valve stop putting big money down to support these games? There is a good chance that the bubble will burst.
Do you even understand what term bubble means in economy?
Blizzard should be more involved in competitive scene. Good example would be a player selection for Blizzon invitationals.
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If Blizzard is able to make significant ad revenue through SC2 tournaments, they would put more effort into directing SC2 players to sponsored streams.
Nonetheless, advertising SC2 tournaments through the game client is a very cost efficient method. While Blizzard does post announcements in the game clients, even I never bother to look at those tiny texts when I logged in only to play. Not much effort was spent there when it comes to in-game client advertising.
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On August 19 2011 04:22 Modernist wrote:
Not sure what the OP is thinking with this post. The most successful e-sports have grown organically.
Sure, injecting money into the scene is great for publicity and marketing purposes, but there is high risk involved.
What happens when Riot / Valve stop putting big money down to support these games? There is a good chance that the bubble will burst.
I am not talking about injecting money into the game, and i should probably be making that more clear in the OP
My general point is that blizzard does not advertize their game NEARLY enough.
The point about the 5m dollars meant to show how RIOT try to advertise their tournament scene by boasting prize money. Blizzard could do the same thing by pointing out how many tournaments actually have 25k+ prize pools
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Blizzard has become corporate ago.
They are no longer a small gaming development company that is community oriented. They're a massive corporation with tons of games. All they care about is selling games, charging you for Wow / future bnet 0.2 transaction fees, collecting 50% ad revenues from major tournaments, calling potential customers pirates, etc.
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On August 19 2011 04:25 Zorkmid wrote:Show nested quote +On August 19 2011 04:22 emythrel wrote:
Lots of viewers doesn't translate in to a successful esport. Bringing in viewers who don't play the game does, more over 15million players and they can only muster up around 0.01% of them to watch it compared to the 10% of sc2 players that watch pro SC2..... I gotta argue with this point. Why on earth do you get the sense that the greater proportion of SC2 views come from people that don't even play. I'd think that 99 of 100 people that watch SC2 are players. Am I wrong? Got any stats to back it up?
From personal experience I can say I know at least 10times more people who watch sc2 than play it, most have tried it once and didn't care for it but still enjoy watching it, now can I say this is true everywhere, no.
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On August 19 2011 04:27 vnlegend wrote:
Blizzard has become corporate ago.
They are no longer a small gaming development company that is community oriented. They're a massive corporation with tons of games. All they care about is selling games, charging you for Wow / future bnet 0.2 transaction fees, collecting 50% ad revenues from major tournaments, calling potential customers pirates, etc.
But if they could make more money from these 50% ad revenues, why not put in the small amount of effort required?
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Blizzard has nothing to gain by promoting SC2 as an ESPORTS, a lot of people watching the streams don't even own/play the game.
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Looks like it's mainstream today to compare users of f2p MOBA with p2p RTS. MOBA is much more popular than any strategy because of gameplay and payment issues, so that games get more users - add to this giant commercials like banners on Dreamhack website, sponsor on WCH etc. and you'll get huge user pool... but all this will not make game good, just popular.
Maybe Blizzards should do something more to promote SC2... but in another perspective - they don't have any rivals, so there is no need to drop millions just to compete "Omg omg, come to us, we have 1kkk prize pool in one tournament"; "No , come to us, we have 3kkkkk++++ prize pool for 50 years" etc.
So i think Blizz not so bad, just specificity of strategy gaming.
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Blizzard can spend their money only once. I don't think throwing 5 million at a tournament is a wise choice.
I also don't think it's fair to compare both games, as SC2 is a major production with years of balancing, awesome cinematics / sounds / music / design / ... and LoL is basicly a custom map from Warcraft 3.
A 5 million tournament will be exciting for 1 week, and that's it. When Riot will want to recover that money and notices that the 100.000 extra players it got from that event isn't really interested in paying for extra skins, perhaps it'll just start selling +20 damage upgrades, totally ruining any esports potential.
I believe Blizzards best bet is to keep supporting SC2 by keeping the game balanced and patched up, by spending that 5 million in the development of the expansion. By promoting the game through the regular channels, ... Sure, they can throw a big tournament once in a while, like Blizzcon... but as mentioned before, Blizzard cannot sustain the entire e-sport scene. That will have to come from different sponsers, and this is the case for SC2.
And unless LoL / Riot can prove that they can offer/sutain a competitive environment, I still think they are one of the few games out there with this big a scene. But I keep having my doubts that their microtransactions model can be upheld without bringing imbalance into the game.
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On August 19 2011 04:23 FLuE wrote:
Keep in mind, the people watching/viewing the games especially if it is because of a link when you log into the game already own the game.
Blizzard doesn't care about the people that already own the game, they want to get people to buy the game that don't own it. They could care less how many people who own it already watch a stream. That means nothing to them.
I believe LoL makes money by having people into the game, buying in game items and such correct? So from their point of view and business model it really helps to keep people logged in and engaged, and cater to the people that are die hards and own the game.
The reverse is true with blizzard. Once you own the game, they made their money, time to move on and start to advertise their next game/next expansion/get new people to buy it.
I'm sorry but the reality is Blizzard doesn't care about you. They already own you, you are invested, you are buying their next game, and next game, and next game. They want the person that doesn't fit that category.
But they take 50% of the ad revenue so they do get more money if more people watch? And if tournaments get more viewers they can grow bigger and maybe attract more even viewers(more ad revenue) that might buy sc2( I bought broodwar after seeing the GOM classic). Also why did Browder give a talk about designing a game for esports if they don't care how big or small esports is it doesn't make sense.
Blizzard wants people who bought the game to still care about it somebody who quit a year ago is less likely to buy the expansion then somebody who still plays. Once the map marketplace comes out they will have another way to make money from existing customers so they don't want people to quit before then.
Blizzard has nothing to gain by promoting SC2 as an ESPORTS, a lot of people watching the streams don't even own/play the game.
Sounds like a good way to advertise the game to potential costumers while making money off the ad revenue for that view at the same time! But maybe you're right and that the 4.5 million+ broodwar sales in Korea was not helped in anyway by people watching broodwar on tv 10 years it would have naturally sold to 10% of the entire population in Korea without that.
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On August 19 2011 04:15 coolcor wrote:Show nested quote +I think this is the biggest reason, I think Blizzard wants sc2 to grow on it's own as an e-sport so that it doesn't become a bubble where Blizzard pumps a massive amount of money in and when they stop doing that the whole scene colapses. What if the scene collapses because blizzard takes to much money from the tournaments they can't be profitable? 50% of ad revenue seems like a lot. Do we know if any of the tournaments have made a profit so far or are they still hoping esports will continue to grow until it is profitable? (I wonder if they also take any of the subscription money or if tournaments could offer free vods if the advertising revenue doubled)
I agree 50% is a lot but we don't know if blizzard maybe makes arrangements per tournament so that they have to for example pay a fixed amount of money or no money at all. fact is we just don't have enough details to argue on this matter.
I do think tournaments make profit of sc2 though, MLG wouldn't make sc2 as important if not more important than halo if it wasn't. Dreamhack wouldn't fly over Koreans and get a huge day9 tent just for sc2 if they made barely to no profit on it or atleast they have to see a lot of potential in it.
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Maybe my title is a bit misleading... i wanst trying to say that blizzard arent supporting their game, but rather that they are not promoting it enough...
If any mod is reading this, could the title be changed to something along the lines of "Why don't Blizzard promote SC2 more?"
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There is the blizzard invitational+blizzcon tournament which is free to watch via DirectTV stream which was amazing.
I would like to see blizzard run a few more tournaments. How about hosting a major tournament on a biyearly basis? I don't believe in sponsoring other leagues due to the money involved.
I would like to see bnet 2.0 have support for esports.
I believe Blizzard can act as a liaison between tournament organizers and players across the world (similar to what GOM is doing).
On a somewhat longer term-basis. I would like to see blizzard attempt to financially support budding players. To sustain a healthy competitive scene new talents are required.
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Another point to consider is that RTS games have a significant learning curve and not an easy format to enter. Thus SC2 community is mainly consisted of adults.
MOBA is a format that is simple enough to understand rpg format and yet deep enough to have a learning curve and high skill ceiling.
The RTS market is big enough of a market for Blizzard to tap into, but not as large as some of the other more profitable genres such as rpg or fps. If I am the Blizzard CEO, I would put more resources into developing a WoW 2 than developing SC.
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ROI for $$$ invested is to low.
It really is that simple.
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On August 19 2011 04:32 coolcor wrote:Show nested quote +On August 19 2011 04:23 FLuE wrote:
Keep in mind, the people watching/viewing the games especially if it is because of a link when you log into the game already own the game.
Blizzard doesn't care about the people that already own the game, they want to get people to buy the game that don't own it. They could care less how many people who own it already watch a stream. That means nothing to them.
I believe LoL makes money by having people into the game, buying in game items and such correct? So from their point of view and business model it really helps to keep people logged in and engaged, and cater to the people that are die hards and own the game.
The reverse is true with blizzard. Once you own the game, they made their money, time to move on and start to advertise their next game/next expansion/get new people to buy it.
I'm sorry but the reality is Blizzard doesn't care about you. They already own you, you are invested, you are buying their next game, and next game, and next game. They want the person that doesn't fit that category. But they take 50% of the ad revenue so they do get more money if more people watch? And if tournaments get more viewers they can grow bigger and maybe attract more even viewers(more ad revenue) that might buy sc2( I bought broodwar after seeing the GOM classic). Also why did Browder give a talk about designing a game for esports if they don't care how big or small esports is it doesn't make sense.
Because they are at an event with a lot of eSport enthusiast so it is the right thing to say.
And unless the ad revenue is millions of dollars(it isn't, not even close) they don't care. It is a drop in the bucket and wouldn't even offset the prize money they put into it.
It doesn't mean some people won't see the streams and buy the game, and I wish what you were saying was true. But this is big boy business, and the real world and from that point of view they have better things to do with their cash. They still offer plenty of support to eSports but you'll never see them going ridiculously above and beyond.
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On August 19 2011 04:43 pampelmus wrote:
ROI for $$$ invested is to low.
It really is that simple.
Considering the amount of gaming leagues popping up, i dont see how this is true. If the creators of IPL, NASL, etc only get 50% of the ad revenue, i dont see how getting 100% of the add revenue at a potential blizzard tournament can be too low ROI
And as for advertisement goes, they could spend a tiny amount to make such a huge difference
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The viewer count can't be a result of blizzard not promoting their game as much as riot.
Look at it like this, Halo was the biggest competitive video game in NA (mlg) for a long time. Why? Not because of the skill, but because of the audience. Because it is an easier game to play it is played by more people, and the more people that play a game, the more people there are to watch it.
Same goes for LoL. LoL quite simply is a casual game, and has picked up a larger audience becasue there are more fans of casual games than more complex games like starcraft 2. LoL is much easier to understand, and requires little gaming background.
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Well one thing that can change, is when Blizzard gets the Battle.net 2.0 Tournament package patch complete. They might add in a bunch of things that will bring community tournaments to the spotlight in the client. Blizzard admit it themselves, that there is a lot of work left to do and features to bring in while the expansions roll out. It is not that they do not want to do it, but they want to do it correctly and as a completed feature in their eyes.
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I don't know about the bigger prize pool but I agree on advertising the streams or something
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SC2 will always be second to WOW in terms of importance, You can't really compare Blizzard and Riot, Riot has one game that there hole studio is built around where blizzard has many.
They can be doing so much more to promote SC2 but its all about finding the Balance. They can be doing so much more.
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On August 19 2011 03:33 murphs wrote:
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.
I hope they prove me wrong.
They implimented cross realm grouping last patch..for free. I'd like to see a refrence for your claims about these "premium services".
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ya'll are forgetting that SC2 has way more tournaments than LoL.. SC2 fans are picking what they want to watch and what they dont want to watch. If LoL has only 1 tournament then ofc all the fans of LoL will watch that one tournament.
There is basicly everyday a SC2 tournament you could watch and on top of that you have players that stream and blah blah.
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On August 19 2011 04:30 ragealot wrote:
Blizzard has nothing to gain by promoting SC2 as an ESPORTS, a lot of people watching the streams don't even own/play the game.
If you promote your product to a wider audience it's always going to get more people interested in your company, even if the game may not be for them it may get the interested in the other titles blizzard has to offer.
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I think it's pretty clear from all these posts that SC2 > LoL
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Because blizzards focus is on making a better game, not throwing money at the scene and hope it sticks.
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Because they are at an event with a lot of eSport enthusiast so it is the right thing to say.
There are a lot of game esport enthusiasts at the game developers conference and browder decided to have a presentation and make up a bunch of stuff about esports to them because it is the right thing to say?
link
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On August 19 2011 03:23 MrDudeMan wrote:
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.
Very true, but I still think blizzard could do a LOT more to kickstart the scene then they are currently doing. Simply making the big tournies more known with better access to watching them would go a long way towards getting more people watching SC2.
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illsick
United States1770 Posts
I like how the community is dictating how successful sc2 will be and not be so dependent on blizzard. If people are so dependent on blizzard then they will start to be complacent. Maybe LoL doesn't even have a well-knit community like sc2 does now; and just makes their game more volatile or unpredictable if they are here to stay.
Blizzard of course does their fair share of helping the game out as well like supporting GOM (gsl) and with blizzcon tournaments. I think they even set up the meeting between MLG and GSL for the exchange program.
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Simply answer. Blizzard doesn't have to do more.
With their two eSports titles SC2 and WoW(yeah I know), Blizzard is the undisputed champion of their genres. No other titles even come close to these titles in respect to fanbase, sales, or sheer rabid enthusiasm for these games.
The other companies do not dominate their genres. Valve and Riot are gearing up for a no holds barred battle for the hearts and minds of gamers in the MOBA genre. They are throwing around tons of money to gain publicity and market share in a very competitive market. That's why they are pouring tons of money into the scene.
Blizzard doesn't have to pour money into the scene. People are knocking down their door to play their games.
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You should probably correct two things:
1. go to eu.battle.net, click on sc2, click on the correct box of the news feed (the changing banner on top) and you get to this page: http://eu.battle.net/sc2/en/blog/2788372#blog
The same page is parsed in the game client (first stuff you see on the right in a little box). The only problem with this is that it takes a while to get the information from the server. Something Blizzard should fix.
2. Blizzard does the Blizzcon tournaments with something like 40k $ prize pool, complete with casting, streams and replays. Free of charge. This tournament corresponds more to the LoL sponsored by Riot.
Other points:
As far as I know the Dota 2 stuff was horrible. Audio quality abissimal, constant lag und drops. And of course commentators who are pro Dota players commentating for pro Dota players. I at least had a horrible experience. Starting with hero select screen, which I didn't recognize, no audio and the little audio there was, didn't help me at all to understand what was going on.
And like many other people said, is it really that good if Blizzard would give millions of price pool around? Would this scene then sustain itself? Or would Blizzard just "ruin" everything if they are the main community point?
But this all doesn't mean that Blizzard does everything. They could do a lot more. Bigger tournament advertisement in client, streams in client, more replays in client and a lot more. I hope they do it.
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Because Blizzard (Activision) doesn't make any recurring revenue from Starcraft II. They only make money from the initial sale of the game, and then they have to pay for servers forever.
This is my theory as to why BNet 2.0 is so bad. They want people to BUY the game, but they don't actually want people to PLAY it, because playing it costs Blizzard (Activision) money in server costs. They want you to quit SC2 and go back to playing WoW which generates recurring revenue for them.
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Only scanned the first few pages so I'm not sure if this has been said yet or not.
Riot only has one game to look out for, Blizzard have many. Riot make a large amount of money from League of Legends for very little content added. Blizzard make very little money from Starcraft 2 outside of buying the game and expansions/ad revenue.
Riot have made a killing with LoL, they bring out a champ and make it 6300 IP, which let's be honest takes like 40+ games atleast to get if you don't spend money. So people buy it because it's the easier option. I played LoL casually on the NA server and I tallied up how much I spent on skins/champions after 1 year of playing, it came to around £300 and the same with all 7 of my real life friends who play. We don't own every champ, or every skin. Now imagine that across 13 million players. They can put money into their 1 game because since League of Legends has been released they have put very little effort into developing the game and alot of effort into making money via skins/champions. Blizzard don't do this.
At the end of the day, they're both businesses and they're in it for the money. Blizzard make less from SC2 than Riot do from LoL, plus announcing that huge of a prize pool from Riot will be a massive PR boost to their game, meaning more money.
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in summary, they don't have to...if there would've been only one commerical and just a release date put on battle.net it still would've sold and made them millions. If riot hadn't promoted LoL it would've died very fast long story short blizz is big enough to not care
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On August 19 2011 03:33 murphs wrote:
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.
Just wait until patches are swapped to the DLC method, with small fees.
Wait until all of BNET 2.0 is changed to be a subscription service, similar to steam but with a monthly fee
Sound crazy?
"In responding to why Activision Blizzard chose not to publish certain games following the Activision/Blizzard merger, he stated that focusing on franchises that "have the potential to be exploited every year on every platform with clear sequel potential and have the potential to become $100 million franchises"
"Kotick was challenged over his "comfort level" around high prices attached to "new games that have some expensive controllers" and said, "if it was left to me, I would raise the prices even further."
"The goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks into Activision about 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making video games."
Everyone in this thread nailed it, about there being no ROI for Blizzard on promoting E Sports.
What's more...I didn't even know about that 50% prize cut cap b.s.
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More money != better promotion.
Like there are many many many tournaments with bigger prize pools then MLG but MLG smashs them all in prestige, hype and fanbase.
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On August 19 2011 03:32 Gescom wrote:
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.
Can we start banning people who are still saying this?
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On August 19 2011 05:25 Blennd wrote:Show nested quote +On August 19 2011 03:32 Gescom wrote:
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. Can we start banning people who are still saying this?
It's actually funny that this rumor has lasted this long, every time someone posts it, it gets refuted with evidence to the contrary, but a few pages, or a few threads later, it still pops up, and it seems like there are people who just never bothered to read past someone saying it -_-.
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On August 19 2011 03:12 Jerokar wrote: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.
Your entire argument is based on the flawed idea that this is a bad thing. The competitive scene being sustainable on it's own through sponsorship can only be a good thing.
It should also be noted that the SC2 US Battle.net site probably doesn't get as much traffic as TL.net. So promotion on that site is a drop in the bucket, but it is helpful.
On August 19 2011 05:25 TheButtonmen wrote:
More money != better promotion.
Like there are many many many tournaments with bigger prize pools then MLG but MLG smashs them all in prestige, hype and fanbase.
Yeah, I'm not sure what Valve is hoping to achieve. My best guess is they want to attract pro, semi-pro, quasi-pro, and pro wannabes to their game and hopefully others will follow. LOL and DOTA2 will be competing for the attention of the MOBA crowd. Not sure how 1 invite tournament with a big prize pot will do that. If it was an open tournament I can see that happening. But 1 tournament, funded by the developer, isn't any indication of a healthy competitive scene. But it could help kick start it. If the DOTA2 tournament goes well other third-parties might be interested in organizing their own tournaments if the views are there.
Also people should be reminded that before SC2 was even released, Blizzard released "sneak peaks" in the form of shoutcasted in-house matches. (TERRIBLE TERRIBLE DAMAGE!!!)
So Blizzard has done their fair share. But could they do more? Probably.
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Starcraft 2 has a large community that already runs events etc. so does not need direct dev support. Also the dota games are all fighting for #1 in that category so the large prize pools are no more than marketing.
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Huge factor is that also more people play LoL. SC2 is just too competitive (even when played casually, or even more then) for some people. 8 of my friends bought SC2 and none of them have played for 8weeks even single game rly. They basically say it takes too much dedication (meanwhile playing WoW).
SC2 also is not free like LoL.
These are big enough reasons for me so I can live with facts like LoL has more views than SC2. (TBH I couldn't care less about LoL, I'm more of DotA guy[even then]).
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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.
What are you talking about,? In terms of corporation, a huge Chinese company hold a huge stock for Riot games. It might started as a smaller company but its bigger than you think.
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Starcraft 2 would have to become monthly pay as there is no other reason for blizzard to promote the game through large tournaments.
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On August 19 2011 03:35 Odyssey wrote:
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.
Blizzard has stated many times they do not wish to have Diablo 3 turn into an esport, and it wont be balanced as such.
Basically they are making the game imbalanced so it will never actually turn into an esport. They want it to be a casual game.
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no competitors
low profits on the game
It's blizzard
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They didn't support brood war at all, and nobody complained. We're just spoiled now.
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If support by Blizzard means tournaments like Blizzcon stuff with their horrible map pool I actually don't want any more of that.
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If Sc2 was free to play, I doubt many more people would be playing it. It's just not casual friendly. Blizzard got their money when you purchased the game, I don't think they care at all how many people are playing it. Activision/Blizzard will probably never truly support and advertise their competitive scene, doesn't give them enough money (which is all they care about pretty much). Not that I blame them, they are a business.
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OP has a point. The Battle.net client imbedded into SC2 would open a lot people's eyes if all the big tourneys, showings, etc were shown just by logging into the game. Now wouldn't that be something special? It's true.
Instead there's really not a whole lot to see.
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On August 19 2011 05:07 Narfinger wrote:
Other points:
As far as I know the Dota 2 stuff was horrible. Audio quality abissimal, constant lag und drops. And of course commentators who are pro Dota players commentating for pro Dota players. I at least had a horrible experience. Starting with hero select screen, which I didn't recognize, no audio and the little audio there was, didn't help me at all to understand what was going on.
The audio has improved (still pretty bad imo though), and while there isn't a list of champions in-game as they choose, its a 1:1 port of DotA so WYSIWYG. You can check hero specifics below the game stream (I remember it having little descriptions of the heroes and such)
As to the lag/drops, that was not because of the game/client. It was because they weren't prepared to handle 2.7million viewers. That's why after awhile all but the english streams were shut down, and some people were split onto Own3d streams as well.
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On August 19 2011 06:12 Pufftrees wrote:
If Sc2 was free to play, I doubt many more people would be playing it. It's just not casual friendly. Blizzard got their money when you purchased the game, I don't think they care at all how many people are playing it. Activision/Blizzard will probably never truly support and advertise their competitive scene, doesn't give them enough money (which is all they care about pretty much). Not that I blame them, they are a business.
But SC2 is free to play, via Starter Edition.
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The thing is,blizzard already has our money.
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On August 19 2011 05:04 Aurdon wrote:
Simply answer. Blizzard doesn't have to do more.
With their two eSports titles SC2 and WoW(yeah I know), Blizzard is the undisputed champion of their genres. No other titles even come close to these titles in respect to fanbase, sales, or sheer rabid enthusiasm for these games.
The other companies do not dominate their genres. Valve and Riot are gearing up for a no holds barred battle for the hearts and minds of gamers in the MOBA genre. They are throwing around tons of money to gain publicity and market share in a very competitive market. That's why they are pouring tons of money into the scene.
Blizzard doesn't have to pour money into the scene. People are knocking down their door to play their games.
This is the main reason. Like promoting major tournies on their site and in game seems like a low effort, low cost thing, but beyond that, why sink money into it?
Blizzard gains little. No amount of money is going to spur a sizable enough rush to buy the game (the main revenue stream). Increasing the prize pool isn't going to sudden cause a ton of large, $5k pool+ tournies to come up so they can get income through the advertising sharing.
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And don't look at amount of players watching or playing game - it will not make your game worse or other game better.
Btw i remember wc3 time, when words "go play dota noob" was like taunt on player with bad game and micro control. Sometimes i think that f2p Moba games are like filters, that take players who don't like hard games. And i don't remember any of my friends, who came from dota to wc3, not from wc3 to dota... so, play sc2 , be 1337 :3
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Tychus' face on the post log in screen. Its important.
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You just have to ask yourself, is it better for a child to stand without the help from their parents or a child who is spoon fed and held up every step of the way from their parents.
but i do think you have a good point. however i think it's better for the community to do these things.
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On August 19 2011 06:15 Keifru wrote:Show nested quote +On August 19 2011 05:07 Narfinger wrote:
Other points:
As far as I know the Dota 2 stuff was horrible. Audio quality abissimal, constant lag und drops. And of course commentators who are pro Dota players commentating for pro Dota players. I at least had a horrible experience. Starting with hero select screen, which I didn't recognize, no audio and the little audio there was, didn't help me at all to understand what was going on.
The audio has improved (still pretty bad imo though), and while there isn't a list of champions in-game as they choose, its a 1:1 port of DotA so WYSIWYG. You can check hero specifics below the game stream (I remember it having little descriptions of the heroes and such) As to the lag/drops, that was not because of the game/client. It was because they weren't prepared to handle 2.7million viewers. That's why after awhile all but the english streams were shut down, and some people were split onto Own3d streams as well.
I just want to reply to this shortly, even if this is slightly offtopic.
Yeah they could have improved it but the first impression is always the one that last. Furthermore, I have no clue about the genre at all. I did never play Dota, LoL or HoN. And my simple question is: Why didn't they want me in their Dota2 boat? Is this big tournament only for the people who will anyway switch? I guess so.
But I should mention, I am not really interested in this game. I had an evening to spent and looked if this is perhaps something interesting to watch.
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bw did sooooooooooooo well in korea without help from blizzard. bw scene at its prime was bigger than all of current esports put together.
now blizzard has ties with all of broadcasts and whatnot and because of that i guess its not as good as it can be
get out blizzard!
:3
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On August 19 2011 06:12 Pufftrees wrote:
If Sc2 was free to play, I doubt many more people would be playing it. It's just not casual friendly. Blizzard got their money when you purchased the game, I don't think they care at all how many people are playing it. Activision/Blizzard will probably never truly support and advertise their competitive scene, doesn't give them enough money (which is all they care about pretty much). Not that I blame them, they are a business.
W-what? SC2 has a "casual" mode for their single-player campaign (which is easy as balls to complete), a lot of easy-to-achieve achievements, many community-made (and now even some Blizzard-made) custom games for casuals, and even their competitive ladder is designed to give players an even match, no matter their skill level.
The only non-casual part of SC2 is attempting to reach the top of the ladder, which is the most competitive aspect that the game delivers. You can't have "casual competitive" -- that doesn't even make sense. If that isn't your cup of tea, there's a billion other casual aspects to SC2 that you can enjoy. o_O
As for supporting and advertising the SC2 competitive scene, Blizzard is a direct partner for the GSL (notice their logo over everything), the SC2 blog posts I linked to in my previous post, and even the Battle.net Invitational, which includes prize pools just for the regional qualifiers.
You guys aren't making any sense to me.
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On August 19 2011 06:38 jinorazi wrote:
bw did sooooooooooooo well in korea without help from blizzard. bw scene at its prime was bigger than all of current esports put together.
now blizzard has ties with all of broadcasts and whatnot and because of that i guess its not as good as it can be
get out blizzard!
:3
Compare the popularity of the SC2 pro-scene right now compared to one year after SC1 was released. I'll give you three guesses as to which one is bigger, and the first two don't count.
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LoL is not steady like SC. When they first started SC1 i don't think prize pool is big at all. But look at the growth of esport and SC2, I think it's better to grow this way. But a lil bigger prize pools can make it more interesting
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I think it's because Blizzard doesn't really need to put their own money into it because it's already become incredibly popular. The eSports of Starcraft 2 is arguably better than LoL's and HoN's, so why should Blizzard need to put any more into the scene. Maybe in the coming years if the MOBA games start taking over eSports, and leave Starcraft 2 behind (which I don't think will happen), then Blizzard will put in their own money. As of now, it's not necessary.
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They are already organising a tournament for it (huge prizes, amazing casters,etc. ) which I feel is already alot.You have to remember that this isn't their only game and that they aren't trying to create a competitive scene, so this isn't as important to them as it is to Riot/Valve. Hence I think they should do a little more but not too much, simply because they have other things to promote.
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On August 19 2011 06:46 stormfoxSC wrote:Show nested quote +On August 19 2011 06:38 jinorazi wrote:
bw did sooooooooooooo well in korea without help from blizzard. bw scene at its prime was bigger than all of current esports put together.
now blizzard has ties with all of broadcasts and whatnot and because of that i guess its not as good as it can be
get out blizzard!
:3 Compare the popularity of the SC2 pro-scene right now compared to one year after SC1 was released. I'll give you three guesses as to which one is bigger, and the first two don't count.
are you seriously making that comparison?
hmmm how about, how long would sc2 needed to take off if there was no bw pro scene?
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On August 19 2011 06:46 stormfoxSC wrote:Show nested quote +On August 19 2011 06:38 jinorazi wrote:
bw did sooooooooooooo well in korea without help from blizzard. bw scene at its prime was bigger than all of current esports put together.
now blizzard has ties with all of broadcasts and whatnot and because of that i guess its not as good as it can be
get out blizzard!
:3 Compare the popularity of the SC2 pro-scene right now compared to one year after SC1 was released. I'll give you three guesses as to which one is bigger, and the first two don't count.
It's not surprising when you consider the hype wave SC2 rode in on. Hell, all SC2 is doing is standing on SC1's shoulders.
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i really don't think there are that much people who would watch sc2 who already don't. almost everyone who still plays sc2 on the ladder knows about gsl, mlg, blabla. i think it's just more people playing lol, so obviously there will be more people watching lol. i don't think blizzard can do anything, it's just the nature of the game. it's a harder, more competitive game, and it's therefore less fun, sc2 will never have that many players, but it doesn't have to imo.
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Oh come on guys, It's not like Blizzard is made of money.
ohwait
But yeah I agree with what someone said a few pages back that SC2 really has no competition as an RTS game, compared to the MOBA games.
+ It's not like these million dollar tournaments are going to be a regular thing, they're just hyping their game up and giving it attention. SC2 is starting to have regular 50k-100k tournaments.
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On top of everything said here Riot can't balance a game well for their lives since Season 1 lol.
At least Blizzard got BW to great balance, SC2 will be the same in due time ( and is already well balanced as is).
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Because they don't give a fuck about their game being played competitively. They will do low-cost maintenance - like patches, and will advertise the occasional tournament on their website, but nothing beyond that. I'm not even talking about tournaments here, last Blizzcon SC2 tournament was pretty bad for stream watchers anyway. The scene has enough tournaments without their involvement.
However, the lack of proper cross-region play, shared replay viewing, a better system for handling lag and disconnects, and a variety of other BNet 0.2 deficiencies, do make the lives of players and tournament organizers alike a lot harder. That's what hurts the most. When I read about the things Valve have planned for DotA2, it just makes Blizzard look extremely bad in comparison. Don't actually like DotA, and don't care for their 1 million $ tournament, but their pro-esports features sound pretty awesome. At the same time Blizzard can't even produce a good basic interface for custom games or an invisible mode.
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My computer science class organized an online gaming night and had about a dozen titles such as some fighting games, mario kart, age of empires, hon/lol. No Starcraft II, though; most are aware of it, but haven't really given online play a try. I think there's a very good reason for this, as from what I learned, most have maybe tried playing a few times and found the experience frustrating and unclear.
Ask yourself what incentive some random gamer has to learn the very uncompromising SCII multiplayer if he isn't already acquainted with, say, the pro-scene - or at least the notion it's fun to play it competitively. I don't think there is, because SCII is not a good RTS to play online if you don't prescribe to the idea playing to win is fun. And that's something of an acquired taste to be honest.
We all tried to do so in WC3 and Brood War back when we were young and we didn't have any better online games, but nowadays you have so many worthwhile FPS and DotA games that as an RTS you will have a hard time to getting a lot of market share. They're just too old-fashioned.
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Blizzard already supports SC2 as an e-sport in many ways except monetarily. The game is balanced around professional level play, they advertise tournaments, blizzcon. SC2 can flourish on it's own. Valve and Riot are creating massive bubbles around DotA 2 and LoL which will inevitably pop if other outside organizations don't invest.
OP's point is insane.
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On August 19 2011 07:02 Tyrant0 wrote:
Blizzard already supports SC2 as an e-sport in many ways except monetarily.
GSL?
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On August 19 2011 07:04 Novalisk wrote:Show nested quote +On August 19 2011 07:02 Tyrant0 wrote:
Blizzard already supports SC2 as an e-sport in many ways except monetarily. GSL?
GSL now has many more sponsors. I don't know if Blizzard still pays for their prize pool, but if they do it only furthers the ridiculousness of this thread.
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Sigh.
Despite the cute disclaimer, this thread is still a "WAAAAA why can't Blizzard be as good as Riot"
Seriously, I think people should be grateful that Blizzard doesn't have to promote SC2 as much because the community for the most part has stepped in to that role and does a much better job of it.
Look to your right at the ridiculous amounts of online tournaments and tell me that Blizzard needs to help SC2 from growing. They don't.
Besides, they hosted their battlenet invitationals on their websites. Good enough for me.
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they let other ppl do it for them, and dont take any risks. if the game dies, they make another one.
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On August 19 2011 07:02 Tyrant0 wrote:
Valve and Riot are creating massive bubbles around DotA 2 and LoL which will inevitably pop if other outside organizations don't invest.
.
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On August 19 2011 06:55 branflakes14 wrote:Show nested quote +On August 19 2011 06:46 stormfoxSC wrote:On August 19 2011 06:38 jinorazi wrote:
bw did sooooooooooooo well in korea without help from blizzard. bw scene at its prime was bigger than all of current esports put together.
now blizzard has ties with all of broadcasts and whatnot and because of that i guess its not as good as it can be
get out blizzard!
:3 Compare the popularity of the SC2 pro-scene right now compared to one year after SC1 was released. I'll give you three guesses as to which one is bigger, and the first two don't count. It's not surprising when you consider the hype wave SC2 rode in on. Hell, all SC2 is doing is standing on SC1's shoulders.
no sc2 is standing on the shoulders of blizzard. blizzard could make a new franchise rts game and it would sell millions. cause blizzard now has a reputation of making amazing games.
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if blizzard makes 50% of the ad revenue from tournaments/events that are over 5k prize pool, then they should be advertising the tournaments even more. like what the op said
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On August 19 2011 07:02 Tyrant0 wrote:
Blizzard already supports SC2 as an e-sport in many ways except monetarily. The game is balanced around professional level play, they advertise tournaments, blizzcon. SC2 can flourish on it's own. Valve and Riot are creating massive bubbles around DotA 2 and LoL which will inevitably pop if other outside organizations don't invest.
OP's point is insane.
massive bubbles? they said the same about sc2 back then (and some still do). anyways, let's judge after mlg raleigh, when we have the viewer counts. if it ends up like dreamhack i can see sc2 losing the mainstage again next season.
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Dont put dota2 here. This is the first thing valve has ever done for compettive gaming. Trust me, theyre only ever in it to destroy great competitive games and have never cared about esports.
Putting dota2 as a link to the tourny is just another hype factor for their marketing of the game. Theyre not promoting esports.
Yes i wish blizzard could do more but im just happy that theyre at least doing SOMETHING like attending mlg events etc and listening to feedback. Its only riot that are outliers who try their best to promote their game as an esport title.
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Also, they are creating 2 expansions to SC2. don't know how much more support you expect them to give.
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Allright, A new thread, i'll just explain my view on this again.
Blizzard does support the E-sports scene, they do announce tournaments on their website and in the gameclient. It just isn't as 'in your face' as LoL does.
They also have their own tourneys, 4 regionals with a 21K pricepool and the actual Blizzcon tourney which will have a far far bigger prizepool.
The viewership doesn't have much to do with promotion.
U want to compare LoL viewership to SC viewership? allright let's do it.
LoL has far more players then SC, according to them they peak @ 500k players at the same time per day. 1,4million unique players.
So it isn't so strange the MOBA genre has more viewers, because it has more players.
They have more players because the games are indeed more casual, which attracts more people.
Most gamers really dislike playing 1v1 starcraft because of the 'hardcore' focus required for it, guess why it attracts less players.
So, yes Blizzard does support their own game well enough, but u can't expect to be bigger then others with a smaller playerbase.
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On August 19 2011 07:18 stangstang wrote:
Also, they are creating 2 expansions to SC2. don't know how much more support you expect them to give.
haha, that's funny
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On August 19 2011 07:14 tztztz wrote:Show nested quote +On August 19 2011 07:02 Tyrant0 wrote:
Blizzard already supports SC2 as an e-sport in many ways except monetarily. The game is balanced around professional level play, they advertise tournaments, blizzcon. SC2 can flourish on it's own. Valve and Riot are creating massive bubbles around DotA 2 and LoL which will inevitably pop if other outside organizations don't invest.
OP's point is insane. massive bubbles? they said the same about sc2 back then (and some still do). anyways, let's judge after mlg raleigh, when we have the viewer counts. if it ends up like dreamhack i can see sc2 losing the mainstage again next season.
Theres a monumental difference between the possibility of a bubble around SC2 e-sports, and injecting millions of dollars into tournaments in the face of very little support else where. Take away that money from Riot- then LoL, in it's current form is dwarfed by SC2.
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On August 19 2011 07:21 Tyrant0 wrote:Show nested quote +On August 19 2011 07:14 tztztz wrote:On August 19 2011 07:02 Tyrant0 wrote:
Blizzard already supports SC2 as an e-sport in many ways except monetarily. The game is balanced around professional level play, they advertise tournaments, blizzcon. SC2 can flourish on it's own. Valve and Riot are creating massive bubbles around DotA 2 and LoL which will inevitably pop if other outside organizations don't invest.
OP's point is insane. massive bubbles? they said the same about sc2 back then (and some still do). anyways, let's judge after mlg raleigh, when we have the viewer counts. if it ends up like dreamhack i can see sc2 losing the mainstage again next season. Theres a monumental difference between the possibility a bubble around SC2 e-sports, and injecting millions of dollars into tournaments in the face of very little support else where. Take away that money from Riot- then LoL, in it's current form is dwarfed by SC2.
that's right, but it's because it's at the beginnig. it just recently exploded as an e-sport. if you just look at the player base, it has more potential to attract sponsors than sc2 had at the beginning. all i'm saying is that time will tell if it can stand as an e-sport, but i just don't get why people are so certain that it will fail.
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blizzard makes games multiplayer is just a bonus.
More seriously ... if creators supports their game the community sees no need to move a muscle ... so the community dies super fast once the creator moves on. Now with the success of free 2 play games, the download content for normal games arrived, allowing the creators to stick around a lil longer. So the game will live on a lil longer, as long as there is nothing new shiny where people can spend their money on.
So yay for the blizzard way ... but yay for the riot way making lots of money and not getting hated for it heh.
And this viewer thingie mistery was solved the last tournament with LoL and sc2 ... no reason to warm it up.
The more a creator does the faster the game dies :3 . Since that happened in 90% of the time, i am happy that blizzard keeps it that way. You can't be always blessed with a good community like the 10%
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On August 19 2011 07:28 tztztz wrote:Show nested quote +On August 19 2011 07:21 Tyrant0 wrote:On August 19 2011 07:14 tztztz wrote:On August 19 2011 07:02 Tyrant0 wrote:
Blizzard already supports SC2 as an e-sport in many ways except monetarily. The game is balanced around professional level play, they advertise tournaments, blizzcon. SC2 can flourish on it's own. Valve and Riot are creating massive bubbles around DotA 2 and LoL which will inevitably pop if other outside organizations don't invest.
OP's point is insane. massive bubbles? they said the same about sc2 back then (and some still do). anyways, let's judge after mlg raleigh, when we have the viewer counts. if it ends up like dreamhack i can see sc2 losing the mainstage again next season. Theres a monumental difference between the possibility a bubble around SC2 e-sports, and injecting millions of dollars into tournaments in the face of very little support else where. Take away that money from Riot- then LoL, in it's current form is dwarfed by SC2. that's right, but it's because it's at the beginnig. it just recently exploded as an e-sport. if you just look at the player base, it has more potential to attract sponsors than sc2 had at the beginning. all i'm saying is that time will tell if it can stand as an e-sport, but i just don't get why people are so certain that it will fail.
I nor anyone (that I've read within the last few pages) is arguing Riot's strategy for attracting sponsors is incorrect, or that LoL is doomed to fail because of its bubble. The OP is saying that blizzard needs to be more active in promoting e-sports like Riot, which is BS.
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Eh, I doubt Blizzard is making much of anything from SC2 sales anymore, promoting some more events isn't going to get many newer players into the game if they haven't taken interest already. They might pump it up a bit closer to the release of the expansion packs, but they really have bigger fish to fry in terms of money gained.
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You should also remember that LoL and DotA's (which will carry over to DotA 2 presumably) communities are quite different to the SC scene. Have you been to the LoL forums? The publicity style Riot and Valve uses is a lot more viral than Blizzard has ever used for Starcraft 2.
This is a good thing IMO, for all companies involved. It promotes variety in the way people percieve the games. To use a sport analogy: I'd say that LoL, and by extension, DotA2, are alot like whatever your country's overall most popular sport is (rugby for Australia, arguably), and SC/SC2 is more like the soccer of the e-sports world.
Of course, that's heavily opinionated, but I feel that if Blizzard were to throw as much publicity for SC2 around like Riot does for LoL, it would somehow make the games seem more similar, and at this point what we don't want is to lose variety in the gaming scene.
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On August 19 2011 03:22 Chicane wrote:Show nested quote +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.
his point is scope of the company.
Blizzard is a megacorporation, Riot is a small game developer that has essentially put all of their eggs in 1 basket (LoL), they need it to work, they need it to grow. They have no real brand recognition outside their one successful game.
I believe he is saying to use Valve because Valve on the scale of gaming companies, more resembles Blizzards size/success. The size/success of the company and how diversified the company relates to a lot of business strategy with the need to support/not support a certain title.
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i think blizzard needs to take advantage of the koreans to sell more copies. more copies of bw sold in korea than the rest of the world combined(i assume) because of their culture of how fads can spread like wildfire. they tried and failed, they should perhaps try again with a different approach, even changing how sc2 works so that its easier to approach in pc bang and more open environment in game modes because at the moment its 1v1 or 3v3 with random people regardless of skill and race vs random 1v1 ladder.
its still baffling why they took out custom game lobbies over the current static custom game mode.
i'd say this does play a big role for casual gamers.
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On August 19 2011 04:55 bunnymuncher wrote:
I think it's pretty clear from all these posts that SC2 > LoL
this is the SC2 general forum what do you expect ??
But why would you compare 2 different games that operate in esports completely differently
Its like sayign football is better than basketball because more people watch the world championship....
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100% agree that Blizzard needs to promote the game more:
- Advertise tournaments in big banners on the main Bnet screen
- Embed tournaments live streams and GSL vods inside battle.net
- Advertise tournaments on the official SC2 website
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LOL blizzard is terrible, Valve is the best company ever. EVER. I mean they always try to make team fortress 2 better and always listen to the community. And they made half life 2, best game EVER. EVER. And counter-strike.
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Yes Blizzard could do much more for the scene... But they would probably not gain more money from it =/...
On August 19 2011 08:11 koolaid1990 wrote:
LOL blizzard is terrible, Valve is the best company ever. EVER. I mean they always try to make team fortress 2 better and always listen to the community. And they made half life 2, best game EVER. EVER. And counter-strike.
Terrible is way to harsh. Your talking about the company that has made to this day the greatest games.
WC1/2/3, SC/BW, SC2, Diablo 1/2 and WoW....
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On August 19 2011 08:11 koolaid1990 wrote:
LOL blizzard is terrible, Valve is the best company ever. EVER. I mean they always try to make team fortress 2 better and always listen to the community. And they made half life 2, best game EVER. EVER. And counter-strike.
You know that you are posting on site that got its existence thanks to this terrible company right?
Irony at its finest.
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If you've been watching some of the DOTA2 vods on youtube, you'll notice the ones without commentary have very smooth camera movement. Apparently, Valve has implemented an AI observer that's programmed to follow the most interesting places on the map, such as when opposing heroes get close to each other or to showcase other clutch moments in the game. Not only this, but word is there's a commentate function that lets audio channels be recorded in the replay, so you can follow the commentary in-game and even choose which commentary you want to listen to. I got really excited when I saw this screenshot of the UI for this game, it seems Valve is going all out with the community features.
Seeing all that I can't help but feel disappointed with Blizzard. If they would only put more time into the small things in Battle.net that the community has been asking for so long. Being able to watch replays with other people and some sort of tournament feature. Just those things would go such a long way to help the community organize and advertise for their game.
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If you want money invested by the developer, I think you should wait for Blizzcon. Aside from that, GomTV is funded by Blizzard, isn't it? They already invested a few millon dollar into SC2 E-Sport. Don't forget that hosting the GSL costs lots of money, it's not just the prizepool. I wouldn't be surprise if Blizzard has already spent way more than their competition.
What I'm trying to say is that a prizepool on its own isn't everything. It needs proper production to be enjoyable.
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I don't think any of the reasons you listed for the larger viewership are the main reason. I don't think it hurts but in all honesty the places you mentioned are all directed at people that if they are not watching at least know about it. Lets face it SC2 is a year old, if you don't really like the game, you are done with it until HotS, What I'm saying is I'd venture to say anyone that still plays SC2 or still visits the SC2 web homepage knows about the SC2 competitive scene, and they either already watch or don't care to.
The prize pool is intriguing but again I think only to people who are already fans of competitive gaming, to someone who is a huge fan of PGA Golf for instance, 1 million is not a lot of money. It's interesting to me because to me, it's a huge number compared to the events I normally follow (GSL, MLG, NASL etc)
The reason for the viewership is the free client and MOBA popularity in China.
I've heard it theorized that BW popularity in Korea was largely helped by the fact that it was an old game, and even someone with a shitty computer, or a computer at a pc cafe was perfectly capable of playing the game at full settings (did game back then have graphic settings?). weather or not that was true, it is true for dota1(old) and LoL(free) worldwide I for one tried LoL (having heard of but never tried dota) specifically because it was free and turned out to like it quite a bit.
I might be wrong, it might just be my experience, and I'm not suggesting sc2 move to a free client platform, but this is my theory on the moba viewership.
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Blizzard gains little from esports other then some community goodwill. They don't care if the GSL champion is me or MMA, that is just one box sale each. Besides, the real money maker for Blizzard is World of Warcraft. Esports may be growing and we all love to see SC2 become mainstream, but at the end of the day, we are a niche community (like professional wrestling).
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Blizzard is part of activision, and are a publicly traded company. They have a lot more limitations and need to do what's best for the shareholders, which unfortunately means they probably can't throw out lots of money for esports. They are doing what's profitable.
That said, they should be doin way more.
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On August 19 2011 08:11 koolaid1990 wrote:
LOL blizzard is terrible, Valve is the best company ever. EVER. I mean they always try to make team fortress 2 better and always listen to the community. And they made half life 2, best game EVER. EVER. And counter-strike.
Valve listens to the casual gamers. You clearly have no idea how bad they are at listening to the competitive community.
Oh yeh they made tf2 better with hats yeh?
CS:GO is their horrible idea of a competitive game. Thats valve for you. They make great games for sure but theyre the bane of existence in the eyes of the competitive community
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Netherlands45349 Posts
On August 19 2011 07:21 Tyrant0 wrote:Show nested quote +On August 19 2011 07:14 tztztz wrote:On August 19 2011 07:02 Tyrant0 wrote:
Blizzard already supports SC2 as an e-sport in many ways except monetarily. The game is balanced around professional level play, they advertise tournaments, blizzcon. SC2 can flourish on it's own. Valve and Riot are creating massive bubbles around DotA 2 and LoL which will inevitably pop if other outside organizations don't invest.
OP's point is insane. massive bubbles? they said the same about sc2 back then (and some still do). anyways, let's judge after mlg raleigh, when we have the viewer counts. if it ends up like dreamhack i can see sc2 losing the mainstage again next season. Theres a monumental difference between the possibility of a bubble around SC2 e-sports, and injecting millions of dollars into tournaments in the face of very little support else where. Take away that money from Riot- then LoL, in it's current form is dwarfed by SC2.
The Dota 2 stream(which is also getting injected with a milion) had 1.4 million constant viewers.
Fairly certain sponsors like that, even though alot of the viewers were chinese.
Valve is taking huge steps to make the best spectator mode available, and it looks very promising.
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On August 19 2011 03:12 Jerokar wrote: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)
Well that's not entirely true. I keep seeing esports events advertised on the battle.net website as well as in-game in sc2. You know the home area where it shows news? As soon as I log into SC2 I see an advertisement about some tournament. I don't see how it's very much different from what Valve and Riot are doing right now, Blizzard is advertising esports because they care very much about it.
Just seems like you are generalizing and throwing shit out there expecting to be right. I definitely think blizzard could do a better job but I think they are more focused on creating the game than anything right now, especially with HotS. If they get HotS wrong, they'll never hear the end of it and this forum will become bash central where it's WoL vs HotS elitists and it will be BW vs SC2 all over again.
Besides, Blizzard has made it clear they want the community to take over with Blizzard merely there to watch their game played and make adjustments if they need to. Just go watch the GDC design philosophy from Dustin Browder, he tells us that leagues like GSL need to be using their own maps because the blizzard maps are made for all audiences. Statements like these lead me to suggest that Blizzard clearly wants the community to take over.
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Cayman Islands24199 Posts
microtransaction potential is still being explored
at this point, what counts as industry leadership is no longer game design (let's face it, lol etc are using recycled stuff) but the monetarizing model.
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Size of player base.
LoL has roughly 1.5 milion daily users, with peak numbers of 500k concurrent users. (Acc. to #s released by Riot not too long ago.)
Starcraft 2 doesn't come even close. I don't know the exact #s, but occasionally the client will say something like 20-30k games worldwide. That's less than TF2 or Counterstrike.
Starcraft 2 is a more viewer-friendly game, tho. That's why the pro-scene thrives while the player base stays relatively small. (Or perhaps laddering is just too stressful.)
I think in the end SC2 is somewhat commercially disappointing for Blizzard. Sure, they sold a couple million (Blizz reported 4.5 mill as 'sell-through' number. Real sales are prolly less.) But it doesn't have a subscription nor in-game purchases (which seems the way of the future). Expansions will be bought by the hardcore, but will they broaden the player base? Hard to say.
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On August 19 2011 07:00 Grumbels wrote:
My computer science class organized an online gaming night and had about a dozen titles such as some fighting games, mario kart, age of empires, hon/lol. No Starcraft II, though; most are aware of it, but haven't really given online play a try. I think there's a very good reason for this, as from what I learned, most have maybe tried playing a few times and found the experience frustrating and unclear.
Ask yourself what incentive some random gamer has to learn the very uncompromising SCII multiplayer if he isn't already acquainted with, say, the pro-scene - or at least the notion it's fun to play it competitively. I don't think there is, because SCII is not a good RTS to play online if you don't prescribe to the idea playing to win is fun. And that's something of an acquired taste to be honest.
We all tried to do so in WC3 and Brood War back when we were young and we didn't have any better online games, but nowadays you have so many worthwhile FPS and DotA games that as an RTS you will have a hard time to getting a lot of market share. They're just too old-fashioned.
I bought this game back in August 2010 and got into the ladder matches a month later. I am a complete fucking noob to multiplayer RTS in every sense of the word. I never even watched a single game of competitive Brood War. I can honestly say that it has been the most refreshing experience that I have had with games in several years. 99% of games on the market have degenerated to the lowest common denominator in their challenge as well as their overall entertainment.
Maybe you're right for all we know... maybe the vast majority of gamers would prefer call of duty or Dota over an RTS. I can only speak for myself as a long time FPS and MMO gamer that after playing this game I have never looked back, not even for a second. To me this is the most dynamic and rewarding genre by far as well as the most entertaining to watch.
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Let's be honest you think most tournaments wanted to pick LOL up or do you think it was because of a lack of a better game. No league will lever pick up a game like LOL because you have servers going down and update patches every week. I quit playing LOL because when the EU servers go down all the EU players rush to the NA server and lag everything up and make traffic jams on the client servers.
SC2 presents itself differently. It's a game that is meant to last. Last as long as SC:BW did. It will. Game has only been out for one year and it has grown huge already and has a steady base of professional players. You need professional players and teams to back the game but a game like LOL is going to lose most of their teams when DOTA2 comes out and it will become a casual game to many.
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What more do you want, they have their own tourney (Blizzcon), advertise tournaments in the SC2 news section (I remember seeing GSL, MLG and Dreamhack there) and support the most prestigious league in SC2, GSL. SC2 is a year old now and it's going strong without major influence from Blizz
For everyone saying Blizz doesn't advertise tourneys, it's just that they don't put a huge article with a link in your face, take a look at this:
http://eu.battle.net/sc2/en/search?a=eSports Team&q=eSports Team&f=article
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This seems like a pointless post, the answer is extremely simple. The number of people that play LoL compared to SC2. LoL is waaaaaaaaaaay more popular and played waaaaaaaaaaaaay more. Larger pie means more for each portion of the community. Larger casual base and a larger eSports base.
Now obviously there would be many other contributing factors. But if you think anything other then the size of the player base is the main reason then your wrong.
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On August 19 2011 10:45 dizzy101 wrote:
Size of player base.
LoL has roughly 1.5 milion daily users, with peak numbers of 500k concurrent users. (Acc. to #s released by Riot not too long ago.)
Starcraft 2 doesn't come even close. I don't know the exact #s, but occasionally the client will say something like 20-30k games worldwide. That's less than TF2 or Counterstrike.
Starcraft 2 is a more viewer-friendly game, tho. That's why the pro-scene thrives while the player base stays relatively small. (Or perhaps laddering is just too stressful.)
I think in the end SC2 is somewhat commercially disappointing for Blizzard. Sure, they sold a couple million (Blizz reported 4.5 mill as 'sell-through' number. Real sales are prolly less.) But it doesn't have a subscription nor in-game purchases (which seems the way of the future). Expansions will be bought by the hardcore, but will they broaden the player base? Hard to say.
yea but lets not forget league of legends is basically free to play.....thus more ppl are inclined to play it,thus more users, whereas with starcraft 2 you have pay 50 bucks. The fact that league of legends gives direct links to these tournaments in the game client with free to play policy, means there would be alot of viewers, Now the problem is, are these ppl genuinely interested in watching league of legends ? or are they just curious, because dota type games are really boring to watch. Even my friend who is the biggest dota addict ever said he does not enjoy watching the game, he only wants to play it. All these sources that quote "huge viewing numbers" might be true, but what are we basing this off from? 1 single dream hack???????? god ppl love to blow things out of proportion.There is zero proof league of legends is actually a good esport, Most ppl are silently going WTF?? how can this be, cause we all know something is not right in the background.
Now the thing is, are we forgetting that starcraft 2 also comes with a single player campaign? not everybody wants to play melee, Some just purchased the game for the solo campaign and to play a few custom games every now and then. Does that mean starcraft 2 has failed? nooo . Its still a phenom with a very large viewing audience and it has the sales to back it up. Alot of ppl myself included find ladder very stressfull, so i take very long breaks, but starcraft 2 is always the "come back 2 game", whereas when i play other games, as i am done with them thats it , i never come back to it.
when starcraft fixes the casual scene better, thats when even more players will be on, right now the custom map system is in shambles, and the team games are matching you up against arrange teams when playing random teams, i cant imagin how many players rage quit for life after playing such bullshit. Basically starcraft 2 is saying only solo is worth playing. If they fix the expansion, then i see only growth for this game.
There is a very sustainable amount of ppl left on battlenet that still
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LoL is so popular because of its free to play yet it's still a high quality product this is such a obvious fact that the OP didn't focus on. SC2 costs $60 and has a more difficult learning curve as well. It's not hard to figure out why it is so popular. The more popular game will attract the most viewers in the end for obvious reasons. I wouldn't want SC2 to be dumbed down even more to make it more popular, but getting Activision Blizzard to start offering a free to play model would be the biggest boost it can offer. This won't happen of course.
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On August 19 2011 04:22 emythrel wrote:Show nested quote +On August 19 2011 04:16 Jerokar wrote:On August 19 2011 04:13 emythrel wrote:
Pretty much my feeling on it are that SC2 is an esport by its own merit. Blizz doesn't need to pump money in to prize pools because sponsors do that.
LoL basically only has tourneys with prize pools because riot give the money, eventually maybe companies will sponsor it like they do sc2, but for now... without riot putting up the cash it simply wouldn't have any. But the thing is that other companies are attracting huge amounts of viewers. I dont believe that this is only because they are pumping money into the tournament scene. The LOL tournaments were attracting views BEFORE the large prize pools (look at Dreamhack season 1). Advertisement can go a HUGE way, especially a shiny link at the login screen LoL has 15million subscribers...... and they get 200k viewers. Hardly anyone that doesn't play dota/lol watches it..... i play LoL and can't watch it. Compare that to sc2 which has around 1m active players and gets 100k viewers (for finals and big matches)..... a decent proportion of which don't even play or own the game. Lots of viewers doesn't translate in to a successful esport. Bringing in viewers who don't play the game does, more over 15million players and they can only muster up around 0.01% of them to watch it compared to the 10% of sc2 players that watch pro SC2.....
it's 15 million FREE ACCOUNTS ffs, LoL doesn't even ask you for your e-mail verification.
Personally i have 2 accounts that i've barely used.
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On August 19 2011 10:57 Mojar wrote:
This seems like a pointless post, the answer is extremely simple. The number of people that play LoL compared to SC2. LoL is waaaaaaaaaaay more popular and played waaaaaaaaaaaaay more. Larger pie means more for each portion of the community. Larger casual base and a larger eSports base.
Now obviously there would be many other contributing factors. But if you think anything other then the size of the player base is the main reason then your wrong.
ofc if you make your game free (accounts) and casual you can just lure a huge crowd into sinking hours playing it, then put a shiny stream link in the front page of the client, it doesn't matter the age/ interest in ESPORTS, they'll just click it, wether they actually liked it is impossible to figure out.
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sc2 has massively declining numbers of actively laddering accounts each season. Unless blizz finds a way to fix that and add microtransactions, I wouldn't even expect them to support sc2 after the 2 expacs. Truth of the matter is, hardly anybody actually plays sc2. It's hard to accept, but it's the truth.
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On August 19 2011 11:30 Fission wrote:
sc2 has massively declining numbers of actively laddering accounts each season. Unless blizz finds a way to fix that and add microtransactions, I wouldn't even expect them to support sc2 after the 2 expacs. Truth of the matter is, hardly anybody actually plays sc2. It's hard to accept, but it's the truth.
I can't wait for HoTS ^_^.
Edit: On topic: I have friends that wanted to understand why Sc2 was so hyped everywhere and I let them play my copy. They typically gave up after like 1-2 games of testing out the game even with me pointing out what to do and what not. The only reason I play it is because I played it so much when I was younger. Also, its fun as hell.
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I think a lot of Blizzard's advertising and money support is going towards Korea. If I remember they had a TON of ads up there, as well as the GomTV support.
Great article, it would be nice to see more blizzard involvement into the foreign SC2 scene.
PS: I do remember a ton of SC2 TV advertisements during big events, but nothing since release really.
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Being F2P exponentially increases LoL's playerbase
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Blizzard has other things to promote and work on. I do agree, though. Blizzard could do a better job at promoting tournaments, the way Riot is going about it is very smart.
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On August 19 2011 11:30 Fission wrote:
sc2 has massively declining numbers of actively laddering accounts each season. Unless blizz finds a way to fix that and add microtransactions, I wouldn't even expect them to support sc2 after the 2 expacs. Truth of the matter is, hardly anybody actually plays sc2. It's hard to accept, but it's the truth.
Can I have some source and links on these statements
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^ Yeah, the number of active players in SC2 is disappointing, which is surprising considering the healthy pro-scene. I wonder whether growth or sustainability in the pro-scene is possible, given the shrinking player numbers. Can SC2 be a spectator sport only?
How many of the ppl who bought SC2 will buy the expansion? How many new ppl will be drawn into the game? I don't expect huge growth for those expansions.
Sure, LoL is free to play, which means lots of ppl sign up. But what is the average amount of $ spent by the average active player? You bet it's at least 10 bucks, allowing Riot Games to fill their koffers with shitloads of cash.
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On August 19 2011 11:39 dizzy101 wrote:
^ Yeah, the number of active players in SC2 is disappointing, which is surprising considering the healthy pro-scene. I wonder whether growth or sustainability in the pro-scene is possible, given the shrinking player numbers. Can SC2 be a spectator sport only?
How many of the ppl who bought SC2 will buy the expansion? How many new ppl will be drawn into the game? I don't expect huge growth for those expansions.
Sure, LoL is free to play, which means lots of ppl sign up. But what is the average amount of $ spent by the average active player? You bet it's at least 10 bucks, allowing Riot Games to fill their koffers with shitloads of cash.
the average person in LOL does not spend a dime. Dunno where you get those ideas . Only the true hardcore buy stuff.
anyway, starcraft 2 does not need huge playing numbers to be a successfull esport, why are mlgs getting bigger and bigger with declining player base? answer yourself that. starcraft is more viewable because of the fact its not a dumbed down piece of crap like league of legends, Whereas LOL will have more players, but less interested viewers, the guys that watch league of legends only want to see how to play thier particular hero and dont give a damn about what teams or players are playing. Whereas in sc2 we have viewers that watch the game with no sole intention of improving their game, They genuinely care who wins and follow their favorite players.
At the end of the day, whether a game is played/still keeps players or whatever does not matter . As long as the game can sell on release date to millions, then its a success. Alot of ppl will buy Heart of the Swarm, which will give rebirth to the scene. I hear also blizzard Allstars is getting released with HOTS (confirmed, "blizzards dota im refering to") so that will keep some players also., since its alot of custom models they bringing in, which will help out the custom game scene as a whole, since my map "zealot frenzy" could get alot of these nice models.
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i think theres some fundamental differences
1. SC2 has a HUGE GIANT ENORMOUS AMAZING community, like team liquid and the Bnet forums to a lesser extent if anyone wants to watch/get ito esports its very easy
2. Blizz does advertise, they may not advertise every tournament but the ones like NASL, MLG, GSL .e.t.c are all over the site and the in game news section
3. there are proffessional casters, why should blizz pick an in-company caster when there are already tons of casters willing to do cast for them? the casters with fan bases and good experience?
4. SC2 is huge, unlike LoL SC2 literally started its life as a global e-sports phenomina blizz didnt need to do anything to get SC2 to be huge because SC/BW did it all for them
5. Blizz is a huge company, theres no need to focus so much on SC2 when people worldwide are already doing it for them, there producing great casters, there producing great tournaments, there advertising, there casting there doing everything riot does for LoL but better and without costing blizz anything
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Canada11303 Posts
Well I doubt Blizz needs to throw as much money at tournaments as Riot does as SC2 seems to be generating some pretty high paying tournaments. But I fully agree with the lack of promotion. A while back I made this thread: Battlenet: Promoting Esports Suggesting more or less the same thing and others have suggested it. I reminded again as I just logged into LoL to find a nice shiny button and pic saying to watch the stream.
I really do wish that Blizz would do something similar. Obviously they need to be choosy on which ones they highlight because there is a lot of them, but even just a few of the big ones would be awesome. People are lazy and one really has to stumble upon some of these tournaments unless you frequent Team Liquid. And I guarantee many of the casual base of SC2 wouldn't know about it.
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Did anyone here play Guildwars?
They had a channel in the game that would just broadcast 2 of the top level teams that were playing and let you hop in at any time as any observer. It was so awesome and made the sport aspect of the game really exciting.
If Blizzard just added an easy way in the client to watch a randomly selected GM level game in observer mode in real time, I think it would get people unfamiliar with esports way more in to the idea watching games.
Obviously they could provide commentary by hiring casters if the wished for a pretty small price.
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If Blizzard just added an easy way in the client to watch a randomly selected GM level game in observer mode in real time, I think it would get people unfamiliar with esports way more in to the idea watching games.
Abuseable. Rather they could simply promote streaming SC2 games and making it more accessible within bnet. I feel like a stream tab within or next to the community tab would do it justice. They could even go further and develop their own stream client within battle net and cash in on advertising.
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On August 19 2011 12:13 Tyrant0 wrote:Show nested quote +If Blizzard just added an easy way in the client to watch a randomly selected GM level game in observer mode in real time, I think it would get people unfamiliar with esports way more in to the idea watching games. Abuseable. Rather they could simply promote streaming SC2 games and making it more accessible within bnet. I feel like a stream tab within or next to the community tab would do it justice. They could even go further and develop their own stream client within battle net and cash in on advertising.
Guildwars just played it on a 20 minute delay or something. I don't think its really abusable.
I agree that just a stream tab might be sufficient. Just was remembering how fun guildwars GvG was.
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I definitely think that blizz could do more to support the scene. I think a big start would be to relax the rigid rules they have on tournaments and prize pools, and do a better job of promoting tournaments that are happening.
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blizzard is working VERY hard on SC2, havent you noticed all the recent patches? SC2 is a work in process, and they have not and WILL not stop supporting it until it is perfect 
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I think the reason why Blizzard does not seem to put as much into promoting their game as an eSport compared to a couple of other companies, like Riot, is simply because they don't have the time to right now. There are still two expansions to come and a lot of work they need to do and from what they've said, it sounds like their pretty backed up as it is. Once the last expansion comes out and is running smoothly I think you will see a lot more eSport related things coming for Blizzard, but for right now I think it is just a matter of priorities. First they need to finish making a bad ass game before they put everything into promoting it as an eSport. Yeah, for now it kinda sucks, but I think that with time it will come.
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I don't feel like Blizzard even needs to do more to promote SC2, I just wish they weren't standing in the way of it so much. The lack of LAN and the 50% fee for big tournaments seem like really big hinderances for the competitive scene, as well as to the development of the fanbase. LAN play and the spawn copies thing really helped SC1 become popular. With SC2, the vast majority or parents aren't going to buy their kids two copies of the game so that they can play against each other - I know kids like this who still play SC:BW multiplayer because they only have one copy of SC2. And it hurts them in Korea in the PC Bangs as well, which hurts the games popularity there.
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This is not Blizzard's fault, it's activision.
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OP is like some weird version of a conspiracy theorist.
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On August 19 2011 12:11 tarath wrote:
Did anyone here play Guildwars?
They had a channel in the game that would just broadcast 2 of the top level teams that were playing and let you hop in at any time as any observer. It was so awesome and made the sport aspect of the game really exciting.
Wait a minute you could watch those games!?!?!!?!?!?!?!
Shit.......
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I think the fact that the competitive scene is doing well without Blizzard support is a good thing, not a bad thing. If anything, it gives it a staying power as the scene can remain active for longer than the "lifetime" of the game itself. The reason there is still a very active BW scene while Bliz has stopped supporting that game about 5 years ago shows that.
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all the people here saying blizzard does not support esport scene is ridiculous. Go watch dustin browders gdc presentation, the frickin game was designed to be an esport first then single player. GSL is directly supported by blizzard. i think in a year they have probably pumped more than 2 million in prize pool.
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I saw the picture of NaDa and was disappointed that this wasn't the 2nd coming of the NaDa's body thread.
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On August 19 2011 12:43 tychusfuddley wrote:
all the people here saying blizzard does not support esport scene is ridiculous. Go watch dustin browders gdc presentation, the frickin game was designed to be an esport first then single player. GSL is directly supported by blizzard. i think in a year they have probably pumped more than 2 million in prize pool.
Ya after watching that video my views have changed a bit.
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Blizz should create player profiles for the top 5 grandmasters, so when people are curious about rankings, they can click on their names on the ladder and get a short summary about the person behind the alias, accomplishments/rivalries/equipment/etc. Of course make it optional so people can retain privacy if wanted.
Also no reason not to advertise tournaments more, but please, more than a short sentence telling people to tune in to GSL finals. The main selling point should be the players who are playing, give a bit of background story, while letting people know these guys are the best of the best. Have pictures of them at least, as well as a stream link (preferable embedded).
I am envisioning myself as a noob, a year ago. What captivated me? I wanted to know more about high level starcraft and see what a perfect game looked like. Blizz better get grackin, because the casual playerbase isn't getting any higher.
edit: Also do you have a higher definition of that picture to share?
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I think MOBA games are a temporary hype in the esports scene.To each his own but I think SC2 will ultimately be the pillar on which Esports is build.
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Blizzard doesn't take as much interest in SC because they have 3 games to deal with. They also do not host these tournaments and therefore do not make the money from them. And why would you promote a game that is a buy once and they never make anything else from you when they have WoW which is 15$ a month instead of 60$ lifetime. It just makes more sense to put money into things that will make more money for you.
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Your points are great and extremely relevant. Though, the caps don't really add anything to the write-up. I completely agree with you. Blizzard does seem to take the pro scene lightly. Without proper support from the developer, it's easy to let the scene fail. I mean this in the sense that growth will halt at a certain point. I believe if Blizzard made an actual effort, equal to what sites like TL have made, to actually grow the scene it would explode to a proportion that we have yet to see. There are still a ton of casual viewers and players that don't necessarily follow the pro scene, and Blizzard is definitely the key.
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The ability to stream being built into the game client would be amazing.
It would solve bandwidth issues as well, since they basically wouldn't have to stream more data than a normal battle.net game or a replay. + the voice of the casters.
I am waiting for a company to implement a "view" mode like this, it will be a huge boon to esports. I really wanted Blizzard to do this for the longest time in WoW, personally I think arenas would have exploded if this was possible within the WoW client.
Imagine being able to watch + listen pro games and tournaments at the full resolution of your monitor/in game settings, for a fraction of the bandwidth that streaming video takes. There are 500,000 people on Battle.net, and it's getting to be the middle of the night. Those are all potential viewers.
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Blizz is already doing plenty for the pro-scene.
It's the casual scene that needs help, given the not-too-impressive number of daily SC2 players on battle.net. You can't really have a healthy pro-scene without a sizeable userbase that plays the game. Where will the next top players come from if there is no huge userbase?
Going free-to-play was a smart choice, more important than implementing pro-oriented features, or making ladder maps more like GSL's maps. But maybe the F2P move was a bit late.
(Sure, occasionally people will pick up a game because they saw a pro play it. But that's the exception; the rule is that players rise up through the ranks. The base of the pyramid supports the elite at the top, so to speak.)
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I don't think Blizzard has implemented any in-game streaming, simply because they haven't thought of it or thought of it being worth doing. I surely hope they do because it's an awesome feature of LoL, and it would fit very easily into the front-screen design of Starcraft II.
From a purely profit and marketability point of view Blizzard should definitely put a team onto expanding e-sports. Purely from the increased traffic and therefore revenue of streams would most likely pay for the investment in itself, and then they've got an even larger following than before. I think it would easily be a win-win for Blizzard.
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MOBA - games.
Sc2 - eSports.
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I would say that it's fine for blizzard to take the backseat in promotion if it wasn't for the fact that they actually take a lot of money out of the pro scene. And I agree that they could be adding to the popularity of the game hugely by just adding a few links in game. That would be a costless way of promoting their own game and thus selling more. It's just a no brainer from their perspective.
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Pretty sure Blizz invitational was advertised on facebook. Was for me anyway.
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Blizzard do promote their tournaments on the first page of starcraft 2. I don't know what more do you expect.
They don't have to have a link to the stream or an embedded stream on their site to show support.
They give enough information on the big tournaments to watch out for on their web page. What more do you want?
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On August 19 2011 15:47 papaz wrote:
Blizzard do promote their tournaments on the first page of starcraft 2. I don't know what more do you expect.
They don't have to have a link to the stream or an embedded stream on their site to show support.
They give enough information on the big tournaments to watch out for on their web page. What more do you want?
people are lazy. If you have banner that says "MLG coming up soon", most people just ignores it and treat it as an ad.
you put "MLG Playing NOW" with a shiny embedded stream right in the middle of your login screen, then people are tempted to click on it to see the hype.
Obviously though this wouldn't impact starcraft2 as heavily because barely anybody logs on to play sc2 anymore.
Blizzard should really consider options to make starcraft2 more friendly to new players and casual players. Easiest one that spring up my mind would be having different mode type that players can enjoy. Maybe one to make macro not so important (similar to style back in wc3) since I suspect that macro might not be the easiest nor the funniest thing for casuals to learn
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Starcraft2 is a side project for Blizz. Took them like 12 years for a reason never makes large paper for them like other games.
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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?
From what I've seen it is completely false. First, there is not a lot of big tournament/stream on LoL. It's obvious that an IEM LoL stream should have more viewer than sc2 because LoL players wouldn't want to miss a stream as oppose to sc2 where we have big stream almost everyday.
Now even with that, from the times I checked, sc2 stream numbers at IEM were way bigger than LoL. So I wouldn't worry too much about sc2 if I were you.
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On August 19 2011 16:17 DertoQq wrote:Show nested quote +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? From what I've seen it is completely false. First, there is not a lot of big tournament/stream on LoL. It's obvious that an IEM LoL stream should have more viewer than sc2 because LoL players wouldn't want to miss a stream as oppose to sc2 where we have big stream almost everyday. Now even with that, from the times I checked, sc2 stream numbers at IEM were way bigger than LoL. So I wouldn't worry too much about sc2 if I were you.
no. league stream numbers were much higher than starcraft.
IEM stream when I was still up had 40k viewers before the break, while sc2 had 8k. I don't know how much they've peaked
But their embeded stream system had a drastic effect on the viewer counts. When it wasn't up, they have around 10k-20k viewers. It instantly jumped up to 40k the minute they added the stream on their LoL client. Its definitely a smart marketing idea by riot
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feel the same way as OP posted, Very good read!
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It wont matter if they promote starcraft tourneys in the game itself.
The game is not very casual firendly and most of the players that bought the game are not playing anymore. SC II has low player numbers compared to LoL I think and is simply to unfrgiving to play and attract the people to play.
LoL is easy to learn and hard to master.
SC II is cheesy to learn, therby frustrating and hard to master.
If blizz promoted SC II tourneys in D3 (if it will evar be !!!!) or in WoW maybe they will get some viewer numbers up, but thats cheating
Problem is the game and the ammount of people playing it if you want to compare viewer numbers imho.
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On August 19 2011 16:20 iky43210 wrote:Show nested quote +On August 19 2011 16:17 DertoQq wrote: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? From what I've seen it is completely false. First, there is not a lot of big tournament/stream on LoL. It's obvious that an IEM LoL stream should have more viewer than sc2 because LoL players wouldn't want to miss a stream as oppose to sc2 where we have big stream almost everyday. Now even with that, from the times I checked, sc2 stream numbers at IEM were way bigger than LoL. So I wouldn't worry too much about sc2 if I were you. no. league stream numbers were much higher than starcraft. IEM stream when I was still up had 40k viewers before the break, while sc2 had 8k. I don't know how much they've peaked But their embeded stream system had a drastic effect on the viewer counts. When it wasn't up, they have around 10k-20k viewers. It instantly jumped up to 40k the minute they added the stream on their LoL client. Its definitely a smart marketing idea by riot
I can imagine plenty of tournaments do not want to be advertized by blizzard, because if the ad revenue jumps over 5000$, you have to give half of it to blizzard. I.e. ad revenue 4000$? Keep 4000$ to yourself (and possible reinvest it in the next tournament like TotalBiscuit)! Ad revenue 6000$? Oh, too bad, you only get to keep 3000$ to yourself.
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Good read. It's really sad that Blizzard doesn't support the game more.
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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.
isn't that the point? That Blizzard is Bigger and has the recources or are you talking about that Riot only has 1 game while blizzard has 3 to focus on.
(riot has more but, none that are popular obviously)
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On August 19 2011 03:12 Jerokar wrote:Valve have done the same thing. When you log into steam, the first thing you see is a banner advertising the DOTA2 tournament:
All I see is motherfucking Red Orchestra 2!
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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.
Word.
I also think it's a bit to early to compare viewer counts. League of Legends has been to how many large tournaments now? There are moderate to large SC2 tournaments every other week, compared to a similar sized LoL tournament being every other month, if that, so viewers don't have much of a selection. I believe Blizzard is doing enough for the scene, upon logging into SC2 it always shows the lastest GSL/MLG/IEM link etc, so not quite sure what you're comparing the LoL or Steam links too, apparently you haven't logged in for quite some time.
Example
+ Show Spoiler +
Blizzard knows how well of an e-sport SC2 makes, so they don't need to funnel all their capital into an already flourishing product when they could be better used for new titles, and development/changes to SC2. To be honest it appears you have an agenda to show how amazing League of Legends is or something of the like; saying how it's exploded and has record breaking viewers. What about DotA 2 having over 3 million concurrent viewers 2 days ago? or Valve putting up 1.7 million in a single tournament?
All in all, Riot is making one game, Blizzard's creating/managing 5 at the moment, pretty large difference. Blizzard's doing fine imo.
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If Blizzard manages multiple games, then they should also have more people than a company who only manages one game. What I'm saying is that having multiple ongoing titles (or titles in planning) is no excuse to not supporting one of the titles properly, which some people think it is the case.
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the shocking part is we all know blizzard must be 10 times as rich as riot..
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Blizzard could do a better job advertising tournaments ingame, but as far as prize money goes the simple, sad truth is MOBA games are much more popular than SC2 because they are easy to play on a "decent level", SC2 takes some dedication from the start (I just introduced a friend to sc2 multiplayer and is a major step).
Also LoL for example constantly generates money because people buy skins and other stuff for real money and I'd bet that LoL generated more revenue than SC2. It'll be the same with Dota, just look at TF2 and the hats. If Valve starts selling shit for Dota2 their earnings will go through the roof, Blizzard however is stuck with 30 bucks a copy right now. As dumb as it sounds: Blizzard would do good selling baneling capes as DjWHEAT suggested
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On August 19 2011 17:14 Lamphead wrote:
the shocking part is we all know blizzard must be 10 times as rich as riot..
Activision-blizzard's market cap is only 12.24 billion dollars
Tencent's market cap is only 38 billion and is the third largest company behind amazon and google (circa 2010).
+ Show Spoiler +
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Judging from LoL forums, i'm pretty sure nothing would make LoL players happier than having blizzard instead of riot. Some of you should stop complaining : D
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Blizzard can definitely do better in this regard and it is awesome to see Valve and Riot Games promoting their game so much. What Blizzard can do is trying to support other leagues like GSL, NASL, IPL, etc by giving them some extra money. I'm not saying they should add a lot like $1 million, but just some. Besides money, they can do other ways of promoting SC2 like adding in what Riot did, which is having a stream of a live tournament/league match when you log in.
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On August 19 2011 03:23 MrDudeMan wrote:
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.
you are totally right but you missed the part where sc2 esports will grow having this and become sustainable, obviously if they had a scene like sc2 it wouldnt be needed
but well, I reeeeally prefer the way RIOT is making esport grow, it seems a lot of players don't watch high level tournaments cause they simply don't know about it (yea there are lot of people who dont read team liquid, sadly, believe me)
I really feel blizzard could make it much bigger, dota2 is coming, LoL becoming bigger, will sc2 community be smaller? )>:
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One thing to consider, they still have 2 expansions. (Sorry if this has been mentioned) So they will still have 2 chances to promote SC2 again. I think its something to look at again AFTER the 3rd expansion. If they don't continue support after I would question, but the game technically isnt even complete yet.
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On August 19 2011 17:52 Akhee wrote:Show nested quote +On August 19 2011 03:23 MrDudeMan wrote:
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. you are totally right but you missed the part where sc2 esports will grow having this and become sustainable, obviously if they had a scene like sc2 it wouldnt be needed but well, I reeeeally prefer the way RIOT is making esport grow, it seems a lot of players don't watch high level tournaments cause they simply don't know about it (yea there are lot of people who dont read team liquid, sadly, believe me) I really feel blizzard could make it much bigger, dota2 is coming, LoL becoming bigger, will sc2 community be smaller? )>:
LoL/Hon already have a bigger community than SC2. Lol beats SC2 in viewer numbers on every tournament.
Even terrible LoL players watch the tournaments for LoL because they see where they can find them as soon as they turn on the game launcher on the login screen, and thats how they join the scene.
And LoL and HoN and soon Dota2 will always have more players and more "competitive" (Not necessarily pro players, but players who are interested in tournaments at least to watch, and people who care a lot about their Rating and such... like plat-masters players who consistantly grind games) players, because its just an easier game to be good at. People who are silver-diamond can easily get high MMR in Dota/Hon/Lol because its controlling 1 unit vs control 200 and u dont have to macro at all.
I have sc2 in my HoN name and i get a lot of "O u play sc2? im terrible at it" whereas the same people can casually play HoN and DOta and LoL and still pwn on people.
Its hard to compare them imo cause MOBA's cater to a more casual gaming crowd. To be a competitor in Sc2 you have to put in some serious time to get good. To be good in HoN, it takes about 1/10 as much effort.(And i mean good, not pro or anything)
But i agree with OP and most people on here, that Riot and S2 are doing a WAY better job of getting their casuals interested in Esports. Both put HUGE notices about tournaments and how to watch pro-games every other page.
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Everyone keeps talking about the prize pool not being sustainable. It's as if you don't read the other points. How would a simple stream link, and link to incoming tournaments be prohibitive i ask you? They don't do it because they don't want to, for some reason, not because it's costly, which it isn't.
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While I completely agree with you that blizzard should support he game more I should like to point out that blizzard isnt' making money off of us anymore. If Blizzard didn't have World of warcraft to pay the bills they would be broke a long time ago. So it would not surprise me to find out that the only reason why they don't support SC2 is because its not profitable..
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On August 19 2011 17:22 zex66 wrote:Show nested quote +On August 19 2011 17:14 Lamphead wrote:
the shocking part is we all know blizzard must be 10 times as rich as riot.. Activision-blizzard's market cap is only 12.24 billion dollars Tencent's market cap is only 38 billion and is the third largest company behind amazon and google (circa 2010). + Show Spoiler +
and Tencent is not riot, it's a shareholder.
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It's not Blizzard. It's ACTIVISION-Blizz. I'm pretty sure all this aspect of community management is far from the original Blizzard mind. From a business point of view, I'm not sure it's very profitable : the games have already been sold !
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Sigh on of thies stupid topics again, just get over it LoL is a free game and its all riot has so they need to put everything into it to keep it alive and make a name for themselves, blizzard dosen't need to do anything.
Just because riot holds one 5million tounry dosen't mean they will do it again (probebly wont) and saying blizzard dosen't do enough cos they don't aimlessly throw money at sc2 is just stupid and idiotic.
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Activision is doing a 1million dollar cod competition for x360 and had a 200 million dollar budget for MW2. Im guessing blizzard could do something similar but I would rather have a scene such as MLG or GOM grow independant from developer support so that when the next game comes out the pros dont get screwed over.
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On August 19 2011 18:32 jeppew wrote:Show nested quote +On August 19 2011 17:22 zex66 wrote:On August 19 2011 17:14 Lamphead wrote:
the shocking part is we all know blizzard must be 10 times as rich as riot.. Activision-blizzard's market cap is only 12.24 billion dollars Tencent's market cap is only 38 billion and is the third largest company behind amazon and google (circa 2010). + Show Spoiler + and Tencent is not riot, it's a shareholder.
Plus it doesn't matter how big they are it matters how much money they put into a game.
Also sorry for maybe being ignorant because I don't follow the scene much but didn't iem already get way less viewers then at dreamhack?
Also a more fair comparison between sc2 and LoL would be their biggest tournament which would be comparing DH and GSL I doubt GSL gets less viewers than LoL at DH.
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On August 19 2011 17:22 xlep wrote:Blizzard could do a better job advertising tournaments ingame, but as far as prize money goes the simple, sad truth is MOBA games are much more popular than SC2 because they are easy to play on a "decent level", SC2 takes some dedication from the start (I just introduced a friend to sc2 multiplayer and is a major step). Also LoL for example constantly generates money because people buy skins and other stuff for real money and I'd bet that LoL generated more revenue than SC2. It'll be the same with Dota, just look at TF2 and the hats. If Valve starts selling shit for Dota2 their earnings will go through the roof, Blizzard however is stuck with 30 bucks a copy right now. As dumb as it sounds: Blizzard would do good selling baneling capes as DjWHEAT suggested
Indeed, the business model of the companies behind Dota and Lol just is superior to blizzards. While they target casual gamers who want to buy cosmetic stuff to get a steady income, blizzard targets larger tournaments which in itself creates negative publicity.
However this is just the advantage the genre MOBA has over RTS, selling download content for RTS multiplayer just sounds outright stupid. Nevertheless, Blizzard could think of selling additional campaign missions (not relevant to the main story line, though, else that would also look like ripping people off). But even this is far inferior to what LoL is doing, considering that a campaign mission takes far longer to create and far fewer people are willing to buy it, considering you just play it once and then its over, compared to permanent cosmetic changes to the character you are playing.
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Maybe its because LoL is more fun to play, of course if you make mistakes in LoL you are gonna loose but simply playing makes fun even if you are gonna loose and the games dont end so instantly. Its like oh I forgot a detection tower or whatever now I am doomed and lost the game I have been playing just 7 minutes or so.
Or what you see so often in pro games X is not paying attention for a split second -> results in -> all Mutas or unit X dead. Humans simply cant pay attention to everything all the time, even if you are good and this stuff happens more then often in pro games. Its simply not fun to play this way.
You have to race all the time and if you slipp you are probably dead already and chances to get back in the game are an exception that dont work often and not on a regular bases.
The game should be more forgiving and allowing for better chances of comback, also scouting should be improved.
If the game would be more friendly, more people would play it activly and therfore more people would watch the streams and get interested in it. Many people bought starcraft and stopped playing, and a lot of people are watching the streams without really playing because SC II is not fun to them or intimidating or simply too stressfull.
For the standard casual player SC II is:
*to stressfull, its a permanent race;
*they are playing in the dark because scouting options feel bad to them;
*cheese is very dominant because of this and it is frustrating
*because they play in the dark they react wrong and suffer defeats that just feel wrong
*game mechanics are not *noobfriendly*
@businessmodell
SC II could also sell ingame unitmodells like that thor thing for the SC II special edition or sell avatars or other things.
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what i want to know is What tournaments do people keep sighting league of legends to getting more views, because as far as i know only dream hack has said they got alot of views, and thats 1 tournament!!!! ,let me say again, 1 tournament!!!!!! then all of a sudden we have a bunch of turds shitting on sc2 saying "o look sc2 pawned as an esport by LOL" ..
Both league of legends and Dota 2 have set themselfs up in pretty big shitholes , what is going to happen after the initial dota 2 hype dies down? is valve going to throw another million dollars into the scene?, why do you think league of legends announced 5 millions dollars recently, why not announce that before dota 2 announced the 1 million dollar tournament?
People are so fucking stupid, both of these so called prize pools are 2 games battleing out eachtotther with marketing gimmicks. Put it this way, if league of legends didnt announce a huge prize pool , they would have been left in the dust from dota 2 because of the 1 million dollar announcement.
my point is, both of these things are not sustainable, What happens after this dota 2 tournament? is valve throwing another million in for some random tourney? i dont think so. There comes a point where valve will be loosing alot of money just to sell the game .
im not convinced by any of these dota marketing gimmicks , Starcraft 2 is where its at ,
P.S for the ppl saying blizzard is still pouring money into GSL i'd advice yall to stop talking out of your ass, blizzard only sponsored the first 2 gsls, every other gsl has been independently sponsered from companies like G-skill/Pepsi/Razer Etc. Enough with the bullshit.
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Because they don't need to for the scene to flourish.
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On August 19 2011 20:05 dibbaN wrote:
Because they don't need to for the scene to flourish.
Pretty much this. Starcraft didn't need those million dollar tournaments at the start to be successful.
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On August 19 2011 20:08 Kuni wrote:Show nested quote +On August 19 2011 20:05 dibbaN wrote:
Because they don't need to for the scene to flourish. Pretty much this. Starcraft didn't need those million dollar tournaments at the start to be successful.
I dont think pricepool money influences player numbers or stream viewer numbers, why should they ?
Do you think more people would watch if GSL price money was 5 million doolars instead of 1 ? (just pulling numbers out of my arse) It is the game that matters nothing else.
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On August 19 2011 19:52 Holy_AT wrote:
@businessmodell
SC II could also sell ingame unitmodells like that thor thing for the SC II special edition or sell avatars or other things.
I feel like the map marketplace is Blizz's plan for long-term monetizing of the SC2 fanbase: Sell things like Left 2 Die 2: Left to Die Harder for $1.99, etc. Take cuts of custom maps other people sell. Lots of tiny, delicious pies to have their tiny thumbs in.
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On August 19 2011 03:17 arthur wrote:
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...
As opposed to a large company focussing on only three that require little hype to begin with. Blizzard has gone downhill since acquired by Activision. Activision were always an absolutely terrible company that always pushed shit on consumers.
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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.
Which just makes it weirder. Riot has a much more limited budget and connections compared to Blizzard but still take their time and money to make huge prize pool tournaments and to link or share information about a tournament.
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You're asking the wrong question. Most game publishers aren't offering $lots to people to get them to watch tournaments of the games they put out. Riot (and Valve) are the exceptions. The real question is 'Why is Riot Games pumping money into getting people to watch their game?'.
And the answer to that is fairly easy. Starcraft 2, say, does rely in part, on the esports scene for its popularity, but if you watch competitive RTS games at all, you watch Starcraft 2 (or maybe BroodWar). Blizzard has all the mindshare it needs. Blizzard could totally screw up the balance, wreck the graphics, and introduce massive program instability with a duff patch tomorrow and people would still play Starcraft 2. And watch it.
League of Legends is just one MOBA of many. They've got HoN and classic DotA fighting over the exact same playerbase, and there's also -half a genre hop away- the likes of Bloodline Champions or WoW or Diablo 3's arena mode. And the elephant in the room is Dota2. In order to be the game at the top of the pile when the dust settles, Riot has to get people to play and watch LoL, and keep them playing and watching LoL, even after DotA2 comes out. Otherwise, it's dead. That's why Riot and Valve are so spendy at the moment.
It's the nature of the competition that's deciding how these companies behave.
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Well ideally a company needs to pour money into promoting the game while at the same time allowing the community as much freedom as possible in developing the game as an E-sport.
But if we told Blizzard we wanted them to raise prize pools and put more money into advertising, but at the same time interfere less in the map pools and game balancing and all the other things we want the pro community to have more control over, we'd probably sound like a bunch of spoilt brats. But that is actually the best recipe to promote an E-sports growth.
Not many companies would be able to set aside their ego like that though, and pour money into something while at the same time resist being control freaks about it
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On August 19 2011 20:12 Holy_AT wrote:Show nested quote +On August 19 2011 20:08 Kuni wrote:On August 19 2011 20:05 dibbaN wrote:
Because they don't need to for the scene to flourish. Pretty much this. Starcraft didn't need those million dollar tournaments at the start to be successful. I dont think pricepool money influences player numbers or stream viewer numbers, why should they ? Do you think more people would watch if GSL price money was 5 million doolars instead of 1 ? (just pulling numbers out of my arse) It is the game that matters nothing else.
It matters a great deal, because huge prizepools draw more attention and more players to the new game.
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On August 19 2011 16:17 DertoQq wrote:Show nested quote +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? From what I've seen it is completely false. First, there is not a lot of big tournament/stream on LoL. It's obvious that an IEM LoL stream should have more viewer than sc2 because LoL players wouldn't want to miss a stream as oppose to sc2 where we have big stream almost everyday. Now even with that, from the times I checked, sc2 stream numbers at IEM were way bigger than LoL. So I wouldn't worry too much about sc2 if I were you.
I would like to add into this. If you recall LoL big boom and push into e-Sports arrived shortly after summer began.
Once all the kids go back to school i'de be hard pressed to believe League can pull the same amount of viewers as they do now, since it is marketed to mostly children. And then add in DotA 2 on the horizon doesn't look good for LoL as an e-Sport.
Even if they do /shrug SC2 pulls like 700k concurrent viewers and DotA 2 1.5 million on record. Both are more appeasing to me so no biggie.
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Are you sure League of Legends does a better job advertising overall? Are there as many streamers, individuals such as Husky who get millions of views for their music videos and continuously stream the most hyped up games? Sure they have many links from their site...but think of how many worldwide tournaments there are for Starcraft 2...I just can't see the argument that advertising is somehow lacking just because Blizzard isn't involved directly.
It seems like you've ignored a very significant possibility; people simply like League of Legends more than Starcraft 2 - and that SC2 is more of a niche game because it generally appeals to more hardcore gamers. Sorry if others mentioned it...but it seems worthy to bring up again anyways. I thought I read a post on Team Liquid about how the number of players who were dropping off from the game was overwhelming, and that a large proportion was from bronze league or similar levels. I can see why...the game is actually nerve-wracking to play for a lot of people (I don't know how many posts I've seen from people who say they're too scared to play, and that the only solution is to play hundreds of games. Think how frustrating that would be for the beginner)
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Blizzard does promote esports alot imo, running like 5 esports tournaments per year with all the regionals + blizzcon, advertising esports tournaments like NASL and GSL aswell as sponsoring the GSL.
Although I do belive they should remove the prize pool cap thing.
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On August 19 2011 03:12 Jerokar wrote:
* They provide casting THEMSELVES (riot imployees) and large ammount of community interaction at live events, AS WELL AS ON LIVE STREAMS
what exactly is an imployee?
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"But recently, League of Legends has EXPLODED, and tournament views are through the roof, reaching numbers never seen before in Esport."
Couldn't be any more wrong, Riot claim these 'huge' numbers before the SC2 stream figures come out and every time they do they dwarf LoL's numbers. Go hunt around for some more sources before you write shit that is simply inaccurate.
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On August 19 2011 22:21 WinteRR wrote:
"But recently, League of Legends has EXPLODED, and tournament views are through the roof, reaching numbers never seen before in Esport."
Couldn't be any more wrong, Riot claim these 'huge' numbers before the SC2 stream figures come out and every time they do they dwarf LoL's numbers. Go hunt around for some more sources before you write shit that is simply inaccurate.
When has SC2 ever had 200k+ viewers?
Also, IEM LOL peaked at 100k yesterday
IEM SC2 peaked at 25k
so... could you please explain these "sc2 stream figures" that dwarf League of Legends numbers?
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On August 19 2011 22:28 Jerokar wrote:Show nested quote +On August 19 2011 22:21 WinteRR wrote:
"But recently, League of Legends has EXPLODED, and tournament views are through the roof, reaching numbers never seen before in Esport."
Couldn't be any more wrong, Riot claim these 'huge' numbers before the SC2 stream figures come out and every time they do they dwarf LoL's numbers. Go hunt around for some more sources before you write shit that is simply inaccurate. When has SC2 ever had 200k+ viewers? Also, IEM LOL peaked at 100k yesterday IEM SC2 peaked at 25k so... could you please explain these "sc2 stream figures" that dwarf League of Legends numbers?
i'd like a quote where you got those numbers also, saying 100 k and 25 k?? wheres the source
for instance right now IEM league of legends has 5430 viewers.. I'd love to see where this 100k is coming from.
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On August 19 2011 22:28 Jerokar wrote:Show nested quote +On August 19 2011 22:21 WinteRR wrote:
"But recently, League of Legends has EXPLODED, and tournament views are through the roof, reaching numbers never seen before in Esport."
Couldn't be any more wrong, Riot claim these 'huge' numbers before the SC2 stream figures come out and every time they do they dwarf LoL's numbers. Go hunt around for some more sources before you write shit that is simply inaccurate. When has SC2 ever had 200k+ viewers? Also, IEM LOL peaked at 100k yesterday IEM SC2 peaked at 25k so... could you please explain these "sc2 stream figures" that dwarf League of Legends numbers?
GSL season 1. 700k+ viewers
also I don't believe IEM lol peaked 100k yesterday. somewhere between 40-80k is what i'd believe, but I could be wrong.
But there are some concern in this thread about starcraft. How can starcraft maintain healthy esport title if there's no newer player coming in/playing the game.
Blizzard needs to somehow address the casual fanbase in HOTS, or there'll be problems in the future
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On August 19 2011 22:31 jinixxx123 wrote:Show nested quote +On August 19 2011 22:28 Jerokar wrote:On August 19 2011 22:21 WinteRR wrote:
"But recently, League of Legends has EXPLODED, and tournament views are through the roof, reaching numbers never seen before in Esport."
Couldn't be any more wrong, Riot claim these 'huge' numbers before the SC2 stream figures come out and every time they do they dwarf LoL's numbers. Go hunt around for some more sources before you write shit that is simply inaccurate. When has SC2 ever had 200k+ viewers? Also, IEM LOL peaked at 100k yesterday IEM SC2 peaked at 25k so... could you please explain these "sc2 stream figures" that dwarf League of Legends numbers? i'd like a quote where you got those numbers also, saying 100 k and 25 k?? wheres the source for instance right now IEM league of legends has 5430 viewers.. I'd love to see where this 100k is coming from.
http://iemgamescom.leagueoflegends.com/ 75k viewers atm was 80k 10 minutes ago but a game just ended
and sc2 has 12k? if i add up both streams on the TL sidebar
Thanks for asking
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On August 19 2011 22:41 Pratoss wrote:Show nested quote +On August 19 2011 22:31 jinixxx123 wrote:On August 19 2011 22:28 Jerokar wrote:On August 19 2011 22:21 WinteRR wrote:
"But recently, League of Legends has EXPLODED, and tournament views are through the roof, reaching numbers never seen before in Esport."
Couldn't be any more wrong, Riot claim these 'huge' numbers before the SC2 stream figures come out and every time they do they dwarf LoL's numbers. Go hunt around for some more sources before you write shit that is simply inaccurate. When has SC2 ever had 200k+ viewers? Also, IEM LOL peaked at 100k yesterday IEM SC2 peaked at 25k so... could you please explain these "sc2 stream figures" that dwarf League of Legends numbers? i'd like a quote where you got those numbers also, saying 100 k and 25 k?? wheres the source for instance right now IEM league of legends has 5430 viewers.. I'd love to see where this 100k is coming from. http://iemgamescom.leagueoflegends.com/ 75k viewers atm was 80k 10 minutes ago but a game just ended and sc2 has 12k? if i add up both streams on the TL sidebar Thanks for asking
No clue what IEM is for LOL, but for SC2 its not really a major tournament. I've seen 75k+ streams for MLG and TSL3 for SC2, if I remember correctly. And/or the NASL finals...
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On August 19 2011 22:45 Smackzilla wrote:Show nested quote +On August 19 2011 22:41 Pratoss wrote:On August 19 2011 22:31 jinixxx123 wrote:On August 19 2011 22:28 Jerokar wrote:On August 19 2011 22:21 WinteRR wrote:
"But recently, League of Legends has EXPLODED, and tournament views are through the roof, reaching numbers never seen before in Esport."
Couldn't be any more wrong, Riot claim these 'huge' numbers before the SC2 stream figures come out and every time they do they dwarf LoL's numbers. Go hunt around for some more sources before you write shit that is simply inaccurate. When has SC2 ever had 200k+ viewers? Also, IEM LOL peaked at 100k yesterday IEM SC2 peaked at 25k so... could you please explain these "sc2 stream figures" that dwarf League of Legends numbers? i'd like a quote where you got those numbers also, saying 100 k and 25 k?? wheres the source for instance right now IEM league of legends has 5430 viewers.. I'd love to see where this 100k is coming from. http://iemgamescom.leagueoflegends.com/ 75k viewers atm was 80k 10 minutes ago but a game just ended and sc2 has 12k? if i add up both streams on the TL sidebar Thanks for asking No clue what IEM is for LOL, but for SC2 its not really a major tournament. I've seen 75k+ streams for MLG and TSL3 for SC2, if I remember correctly.
not trying to argue that sc2 doesn't get those kind of numbers was just trying to show that LoL actually does get larger numbers for the most part and to say IEM isn't a big event for sc2 isn't really true the finals will probably reach somewhere in the 50k range its just that atm its Friday at 9:47 am for a large part of the audience.
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On August 19 2011 22:48 Pratoss wrote:Show nested quote +On August 19 2011 22:45 Smackzilla wrote:On August 19 2011 22:41 Pratoss wrote:On August 19 2011 22:31 jinixxx123 wrote:On August 19 2011 22:28 Jerokar wrote:On August 19 2011 22:21 WinteRR wrote:
"But recently, League of Legends has EXPLODED, and tournament views are through the roof, reaching numbers never seen before in Esport."
Couldn't be any more wrong, Riot claim these 'huge' numbers before the SC2 stream figures come out and every time they do they dwarf LoL's numbers. Go hunt around for some more sources before you write shit that is simply inaccurate. When has SC2 ever had 200k+ viewers? Also, IEM LOL peaked at 100k yesterday IEM SC2 peaked at 25k so... could you please explain these "sc2 stream figures" that dwarf League of Legends numbers? i'd like a quote where you got those numbers also, saying 100 k and 25 k?? wheres the source for instance right now IEM league of legends has 5430 viewers.. I'd love to see where this 100k is coming from. http://iemgamescom.leagueoflegends.com/ 75k viewers atm was 80k 10 minutes ago but a game just ended and sc2 has 12k? if i add up both streams on the TL sidebar Thanks for asking No clue what IEM is for LOL, but for SC2 its not really a major tournament. I've seen 75k+ streams for MLG and TSL3 for SC2, if I remember correctly. not trying to argue that sc2 doesn't get those kind of numbers was just trying to show that LoL actually does get larger numbers for the most part and to say IEM isn't a big event for sc2 isn't really true the finals will probably reach somewhere in the 50k range its just that atm its Friday at 9:47 am for a large part of the audience.
and also the fact that GSL is on right now.
and IEM has terrible services for sc viewers
IEM doesn't care about sc2
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On August 19 2011 22:50 iky43210 wrote:Show nested quote +On August 19 2011 22:48 Pratoss wrote:On August 19 2011 22:45 Smackzilla wrote:On August 19 2011 22:41 Pratoss wrote:On August 19 2011 22:31 jinixxx123 wrote:On August 19 2011 22:28 Jerokar wrote:On August 19 2011 22:21 WinteRR wrote:
"But recently, League of Legends has EXPLODED, and tournament views are through the roof, reaching numbers never seen before in Esport."
Couldn't be any more wrong, Riot claim these 'huge' numbers before the SC2 stream figures come out and every time they do they dwarf LoL's numbers. Go hunt around for some more sources before you write shit that is simply inaccurate. When has SC2 ever had 200k+ viewers? Also, IEM LOL peaked at 100k yesterday IEM SC2 peaked at 25k so... could you please explain these "sc2 stream figures" that dwarf League of Legends numbers? i'd like a quote where you got those numbers also, saying 100 k and 25 k?? wheres the source for instance right now IEM league of legends has 5430 viewers.. I'd love to see where this 100k is coming from. http://iemgamescom.leagueoflegends.com/ 75k viewers atm was 80k 10 minutes ago but a game just ended and sc2 has 12k? if i add up both streams on the TL sidebar Thanks for asking No clue what IEM is for LOL, but for SC2 its not really a major tournament. I've seen 75k+ streams for MLG and TSL3 for SC2, if I remember correctly. not trying to argue that sc2 doesn't get those kind of numbers was just trying to show that LoL actually does get larger numbers for the most part and to say IEM isn't a big event for sc2 isn't really true the finals will probably reach somewhere in the 50k range its just that atm its Friday at 9:47 am for a large part of the audience. and also the fact that GSL is on right now. and IEM has terrible services for sc viewers IEM doesn't care about sc2
very true i almost forgot about gsl had my gom player muted D:
gogo F. United
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On August 19 2011 22:28 Jerokar wrote:Show nested quote +On August 19 2011 22:21 WinteRR wrote:
"But recently, League of Legends has EXPLODED, and tournament views are through the roof, reaching numbers never seen before in Esport."
Couldn't be any more wrong, Riot claim these 'huge' numbers before the SC2 stream figures come out and every time they do they dwarf LoL's numbers. Go hunt around for some more sources before you write shit that is simply inaccurate. When has SC2 ever had 200k+ viewers? Also, IEM LOL peaked at 100k yesterday IEM SC2 peaked at 25k so... could you please explain these "sc2 stream figures" that dwarf League of Legends numbers?
Dota 2 peaked at 1.4 million
Does that mean both LoL and SC2 are inferior?
Of course not.
SC2 is a spectator sport. Crowd could have never played the game before and still go wild because it is easy to understand. LoL/DotA are both very hard to watch if you have never played the game before
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They dont have to advertise more. They have social media sites that do alot of the work for them,
Casters and streamers who support the game, and themselves by showcasing there talents, and the features of the game.
Community sites like Reddit and Team Liquid both actively report on ongoing events, tournaments and news, and drama that bring more people in.
Bloggers who actively research and write about upcoming events.
Leagues are created around this game in at least 3 different continents offering tens of thousands of dollars, not to mention the small tournaments that go on.
Blizzard doesnt need to promote their game more. We do it for them.
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you could also compare chess to a soccer match being viewed online ... thats as effectiv as comparing the viewers of LoL and SC2. (comparing 2 different genres yay ... as if an rts that costs money would attract as many people as a pvp games for no money :3 ... )
Anyway the LoL people are actually planning ahead by pumping money into their game ... because they make their money of selling those cute shiny things. And who buys cute shiny things, thats right people that watch pro games and want to feel just like the pro as soon as possible heh. So at the end of their calculation its +-0 or a lil + .
sc2 has no competition thats right LoL has, thats also a point.
But the viewer numbers say nothing ... as the mmpog/rpg genre is massivly bigger then the rts genre.
And i for myself can't watch LoL longer then 45 seconds before getting bored because i only see a dota clone. People that actually playing LoL are enjoying to watch the games ... and the same applys to starcraft, someone with no idea will probably stop watching after 1 game, if it didn't reached epic level. Only the ones playing the games are watching really. And because the rts genre is basically dead in terms of games if you compare them to the mmpog (people who love pvp in mmos are playing LoL because the pvp in the mmos aren't as fair and less fun that way, so thats were the player base comes from). Its only natural that something like LoL gets more viewers, especially if the creator treat it like the event and you can't even click anywhere without hitting a link to the stream heh.
So who cares if the viewer numbers are higher, the people watching LoL won't actually buy esports gaming gear as fanatically as the sc2 viewers, so the sponsors are on the right side if they support sc2.
So in general 25k sc2 viewers > 200k LoL viewers in terms of money gain for sponsors . Especially since the sponsors know how f2p works. Its dead as soon as the company gets out their better version.
Well back to the real question why blizzard doesn't support their game more. They are supporting it like a creator should. fix the game when there are problems... get rid of evil doers. And make the game speak for itself.
And they done that with every game until now, except of this superman game once, yeah blizzard that will never stop to follow you! Well they messed up with bnet this time, but thats because they had to release it a lil early, after scrapping the bnet part to often completly.
Atleast i hope Blizzard will stick to what always worked for them, making a great game that grows by itself, without the need of any help. Because that is the best support you can give your game. Be so damn good that it sells without the need to milk casual gamers. (like all the games with dlc are doing right now). Of course blizzard would get way more money that way, but i am really happy they don't do it (atleast not more then they have to).
Hope they will do a space sim next after diablo3 *g*.
And well blizzard made games in 3 genres more or less the last years ... and looking at where those games stand i would say, they are supporting their game just in the right way :3. (though their games are so good they kinda kill all the competition, which is a lil bit sad at the same time)
The way blizzard does it makes a long living community and that supports the game better then blizzard could ever do it.
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Starcraft community is split in two parts: one is supporting SC2 and the other one is sticking with SC:BW.
Until community unites I doubt we can compare with League of Legends community. Maybe expansion will do the trick.
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I expect a high profile tournament when the expansion hits, along the lines of the dota 2 1M tournament. It's a bit different, but they certainly have the money to do that.
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You're hurting eSports by trying to decide "which one is better" based off of stream numbers.
Did you know it is entirely possible to be a fan of both SC2 and LoL? Moreso there may be a matchup or player a sc2 player doesn't care to see and may switch to LoL or vice versa! For instance I don't care to watch a match-up that isn't involving a zerg - I don't learn from a TvP or PvP or TvT.
Now I kinda forgot about LoL cause frankly to me the whole DotA thing seems boring with randoms, I assume with a team or a arranged team it could be fun - but playing with randoms can be very boring. Also those built in client streams - of course they'll have 1million+.. the game is free and it's built in the browser, after you pick your character what else are you oging to do? nothing for 5 minutes or watch a stream?
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Did you know that stream numbers are not a reliable indicator of how many people care about/spectate matches?
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On August 19 2011 23:53 fds wrote:
Starcraft community is split in two parts: one is supporting SC2 and the other one is sticking with SC:BW.
Until community unites I doubt we can compare with League of Legends community. Maybe expansion will do the trick.
what??
no offence to the brood war community but the bw foreigner scene is essentially dead with most of the bw fans only following the korean scene and even then that is only a small fragment of the community compared to the massive foreigner audience that follows sc2.
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Two main reasons why I think Blizzard doesn't "support" Starcraft more than the other games mentioned:
- Blizzard doesn't need to because they make the best games in the world and everybody's going to play them anyway.
- Blizzard is mostly a development company. They're focused on the games they make more than the community surrounding them. They let other communities (i.e. the players, TeamLiquid, MMO-Champion, etc.) decide what to do with the game they make.
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On August 19 2011 21:47 sohighandmighty wrote:Show nested quote +On August 19 2011 03:12 Jerokar wrote:
* They provide casting THEMSELVES (riot imployees) and large ammount of community interaction at live events, AS WELL AS ON LIVE STREAMS
what exactly is an imployee?
you know exactly what he meant
what exactly do you accomplish by being a douche to him?
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While it wouldn't hurt if Blizz put up links in the client to major tourneys its not Blizz's responsibility to make sure SC2 succeeds as an e-sport. BW became the biggest e-sport title by far without ANY support from Blizz. What Riot's doing for the game is cool and all but what happens when they stop promoting the shit out of their game and throwing millions of dollars at tourneys? Is the community gonna pick up the slack? Or will they just fade away cause they're used to having Riot do everything for them? What Riot's doing (and Valve now to compete with them) is not sustainable in the long term in any shape or form. There needs to be a model like BW developed and SC2 is now trying to build on if you want long term sustainability.
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On August 19 2011 22:54 Dommk wrote: Dota 2 peaked at 1.4 million
Actually, Dota 2 peaked at 2.8 million during the last few days. All due to China. (Source.)
I'll repeat a point I made before. SC2 is lagging behind the moba's in terms of casual player base. Blizzard has an incentive to increase the player base, because even tho the pro-scene is healthy, a game's bread and butter ultimately comes from the Joe Blow's who play it daily. Making it free to play was an important step in that direction.
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...
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On August 19 2011 23:33 wingweaver415 wrote:They dont have to advertise more. They have social media sites that do alot of the work for them, Casters and streamers who support the game, and themselves by showcasing there talents, and the features of the game.
Community sites like Reddit and Team Liquid both actively report on ongoing events, tournaments and news, and drama that bring more people in.
Bloggers who actively research and write about upcoming events.
Leagues are created around this game in at least 3 different continents offering tens of thousands of dollars, not to mention the small tournaments that go on.Blizzard doesnt need to promote their game more. We do it for them.
Your basically saying its okay to continue preaching to the converted.
These community shows and sites don't have much outreach, I think it is fair to say that the majority of Starcraft 2 players are not involved with the community or maybe even aware of it.
I believe adding an attractive, regularly updated and easily noticable esports round up to the main client of Starcraft 2 would do wonders for the Scene.
How about sample games from the GSL embedded in the client, so that new comers could see a great game with commentary, one that could also double as a tutorial so nubs could understand what's going on more easily via on screen text or freeze frame explanations.
There is definitely alot more Blizzard could do, but they would need to hire a team to handle this.
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Canada1169 Posts
If i'm being completely honest, i dont believe in such high prize pools, but it would be nice of Blizzard to give more exposure to the pro-scene. I'm not sure the exact amount but i'm pretty sure SC2 has around 50x more people who play and dont watch then people who do both. I feel that THIS could be encouraged more by posting things in game and on their site. This would help the e-sports community for sc2 because i feel there would be a drastic increase in viewers. Blizzard could also help inject some money into the scene which i feel would definitely help but I feel Blizzard should atleast help their own game's pro scene to get some more attention.
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On August 20 2011 01:26 InsidiA wrote:
If i'm being completely honest, i dont believe in such high prize pools, but it would be nice of Blizzard to give more exposure to the pro-scene. I'm not sure the exact amount but i'm pretty sure SC2 has around 50x more people who play and dont watch then people who do both. I feel that THIS could be encouraged more by posting things in game and on their site. This would help the e-sports community for sc2 because i feel there would be a drastic increase in viewers. Blizzard could also help inject some money into the scene which i feel would definitely help but I feel Blizzard should atleast help their own game's pro scene to get some more attention.
What does this even mean? You don't believe it exists?
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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.
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On August 19 2011 20:24 hypnoxide wrote:Show nested quote +On August 19 2011 03:17 arthur wrote:
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... As opposed to a large company focussing on only three that require little hype to begin with. Blizzard has gone downhill since acquired by Activision. Activision were always an absolutely terrible company that always pushed shit on consumers.
Activision never acquired Blizzard. Vivendi, Blizzard's parent company, is the one with a majority stake in the Activision Blizzard merge with Blizzard in full control over everything they do. Blame someone you blame Blizzard, hell not even Activision is as brutal in their DRM as Blizzard are.
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To the e-sports be a great sport, I don't think that is a problem of Blizard, but we don't have a entity like "FIFA" for soccer to the e-sports, we need it! And every professional tournament registred by it..
With it every game that wants to be an e-sports needs to be registred by the entity and every company that develop an e-sport game will be winning too, because the game will gain a another level to users.
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On August 20 2011 01:45 hypnoxide wrote:
What does this even mean? You don't believe it exists?
It means he doesn't believe high prize pools are desirable. One of the many ambiguities of the English language is that "I don't believe in X" can mean either the speaker doesn't believe that X exists, or that he doesn't support X.
Compare and contrast "I don't believe in fascism" and "I don't believe in Santa Claus"
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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.
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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.
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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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On August 24 2011 19:33 paralleluniverse wrote:
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.
Which is why they do that.
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On August 24 2011 19:52 Ribbon wrote:Show nested quote +On August 24 2011 19:33 paralleluniverse wrote:
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. Which is why they do that.
sounds like a fail advertisement if most people don't see it.
They do advertise it, but its pretty badly done. Almost no one realize its there, and its crap compare to riot's embedded stream.
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Blizzard is like a/the god. Ignite the spark of life and let it be. C'mon OP of all the games Blizzard has created from Starcraft 1 to statcraft 2 to WOW and to Wc3 there have been a pro scene.
They have Blizzcon, battle.net, game updates and pro gaming news.
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Blizzard can do better. I feel they can hire a larger marketing team if they don't have the people, but they really need to step up their game because I for one want SC2 to be the biggest esport out there.
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On August 24 2011 19:56 iky43210 wrote:Show nested quote +On August 24 2011 19:52 Ribbon wrote:On August 24 2011 19:33 paralleluniverse wrote:
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. Which is why they do that. sounds like a fail advertisement if most people don't see it. They do advertise it, but its pretty badly done. Almost no one realize its there, and its crap compare to riot's embedded stream.
It's on the login page! Every time you log in, there's a news post, and well over half the time it's an e-sports one.
Go to the Official SC2 page. What articles are there?
- Nestea and MVP in Bnet invitational
- China bnet invitational
- New fanart
- MLG Raleigh Preview
- VODs for bnet invitational
- Comm-link online
- Bnet invitational wrap-up
- Fanfiction contest
- Bnet invitational day 2 recap
- Bnet invitational steam
- Bnet invitational recap
I mean, it's hardly team liquid, but it's there
Edit: Went back a few pages, so it wasn't all Bnet Invitational stuff.
- We want your comics!
- EU Bnet Invitational day 2 roundup
- New fan art
- Comm-Link Online
- GSTL Venus Week 6 preview
- National E-sports event
- Art Gallery update
- MLG Anaheim recap
- Blizzcon Virtual Ticket
- GSL July Champion crowned
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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.
How do you know they are sponsoring/paying for the GSL and I have a source please? Why is blizzard taking money from foreign tournaments and Kespa and giving money to the GSL there must be a purpose to that instead of taking money from everything they would get more money if they did that.
Also if they are paying for it what is the purpose of the GSL subscriptions if they already have blizzard plus other sponsors and ads? Whats the purpose of sponsoring a big tournament for your game and then putting it behind a paywall so only your most hardcore viewers see it? Isn't the point of developers supporting esports basically to advertise your game with lots of people watching and trying to attract new customers through it?
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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.
This might be true. I became interested in MOBAs because I saw a League of Legends tournament last year and the game looked a lot of fun. So far I've been playing SOTIS a lot more than SC2BW which I play more than SC2 and SOTIS from the opinions of others is a crappy clone of Dota's earlier iterations.
It's unknown if stragners new to either genre would find Moba more compelling than Starcraft style 4x RTS but for myself I personally find it more enjoyable.
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On August 24 2011 19:52 Ribbon wrote:Show nested quote +On August 24 2011 19:33 paralleluniverse wrote:
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. Which is why they do that.
It's nowhere near pervasive enough. More importantly, it's not in the game, which is where it will get the most exposure.
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Blizzard advertises GSL and MLG right on the front page when you log into SC2...
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On August 24 2011 20:07 Ribbon wrote:Show nested quote +On August 24 2011 19:56 iky43210 wrote:On August 24 2011 19:52 Ribbon wrote:On August 24 2011 19:33 paralleluniverse wrote:
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. Which is why they do that. sounds like a fail advertisement if most people don't see it. They do advertise it, but its pretty badly done. Almost no one realize its there, and its crap compare to riot's embedded stream. It's on the login page! Every time you log in, there's a news post, and well over half the time it's an e-sports one. Go to the Official SC2 page. What articles are there? - Nestea and MVP in Bnet invitational - China bnet invitational - New fanart - MLG Raleigh Preview - VODs for bnet invitational - Comm-link online - Bnet invitational wrap-up - Fanfiction contest - Bnet invitational day 2 recap - Bnet invitational steam - Bnet invitational recap I mean, it's hardly team liquid, but it's there Edit: Went back a few pages, so it wasn't all Bnet Invitational stuff. - We want your comics! - EU Bnet Invitational day 2 roundup - New fan art - Comm-Link Online - GSTL Venus Week 6 preview - National E-sports event - Art Gallery update - MLG Anaheim recap - Blizzcon Virtual Ticket - GSL July Champion crowned
I know its there, I said its fail advertising because MOST people don't know its there. Aka why it failed in comparison
I guess you have never seen how league advertise the tourney in their clients, have you? Its nearly impossible to miss.
Oh, and moba is definitely more fun to play for most people. Starcraft 2 is actually fairly stressful and unforgiving to play. But esport wise, sc2 is actually fun to watch with drastically more shorter games, easier spectator option (1v1), easier units to understand, and constant harassment/action all game.
While watching leagues is comparable to watch paint dry. average games are 40min-1hour long, which most of it consists of farming. And viewers must have deep understanding of each champion to really understand what is going on
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Its nice to see threads atm. Sc2 is nice to watch, its sad to see that more watch sc2 then play. And then think back to the beginning where it was said, sc2 is horrible to watch.
And if someone doesn't see the news in the sc2 client there is something wrong with their eyes . But its nice that its not that big, since i want to play right now, not get a popup with news that i have to scroll through in order to play. (not refering to LoL here, but the most annoying news system in a game i know :3)
And what to say about dota like games, they feel like an 1 hour to reach max level mmo with pvp. So a dream for every mmo pvp fan that can't play 24/7 since they can be on top. Just have to observe when there is a new server opened in a mmo, all that have failed move on to the new server in order to get lucky and be on top heh. (those are dota players for you)
Don't mean that negativly, i myself am a bit annoyed if someone gets the 0.01 drop from the ffa boss that makes themself immune to magic attacks after a month of hunting, while i am after it since 2 years :3 .
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I hope blizzard releases a proper trailer for SC2:HotS. A cinematic is nice and all, but it doesn't really show the game has an appealing single-player campaign, and great multiplayer with tons of player-made custom maps.
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EPT![[image loading]](http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/814/mlgn.png/)
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