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If anyone is familiar with the Alexa ranking, it pretty much tracks how popular sites are, and how they change over time. So for people who are not aware I'd like to share some statistics as a sort of reality check to an extent.
We like to think SC2 is exploding and getting bigger, and that everyone has high hopes for the future. Although let's take a quick look at a graph to see Teamliquid's popularity.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/EUa8P.png)
As you can see, the steep rise about a quarter into the graph is when SC2 came out, then we see a continuous increase in visitors, until maybe April or May of 2011. Since then the visitor increase of teamliquid stagnated, and actually appears to be on the decline. Is it a coincidence that there haven't been any new groups to start new tournaments? We have MLG, IPL, NASL, GSL, Dreamhack, but all those were founded before May 2011, and now we have what we have, but nothing new is coming out. Coincidence? I think not.
These numbers on their own are slightly misleading. Take a look at this graph.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/Iuot2.png)
This is the percent of visitors that arrive from search engines like google. As you can see, this graph indicates that initially many people didn't know about SC2, and stumbled upon the site using search engines, and at the beginning of the SC2 life Teamliquid had many possible players to attract, but in a year this number went from 20% to 5%. The player pool has been exhausted, and there is nowhere to attract a new audience from. For example if you go on battle.net and you ask someone if they know what Teamliquid is they all do.
I'm not sharing this information to scare people, but to make them understand how fragile this scene is, and try and help people understand the importance of attracting new players if they wish for the scene to succeed. Many seem to have this mentality "Oh HotS will fix everything, although I think that is a poor misconception, sure the HotS will bring in some new players, but expansions don't just magically double, triple, or make the player base go 10 fold.
If anyone has been here for a while, do you guys remember the HDH Invitational in BETA? It's finals peaked at nearly 30k views if my memory serves right, how about TSL3? Nony vs Strelok in ro32 having 60k+ viewers? These events were not the large scale events we have now, but they attracted a huge audience... Where did all these players go? Events like NASL being way below that, Dreamhack keeping on par with TSL3 numbers, and I'm going to take MLG numbers with a grain of salt because those figures are often exaggerated.
So hopefully you guys better understand the scope of size of SC2, and if you share a passion for it, you'll do what you can to keep it alive.
More graphs:
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/pU48u.png)
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/LgTom.png)
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/90SUO.png)
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/0hyuZ.png)
Poll: What direction do you think SC2 is going into?Constant (110) 45% Decline (75) 31% Increase (47) 19% Sharp Decline (7) 3% Sharp Increase (3) 1% 242 total votes Your vote: What direction do you think SC2 is going into? (Vote): Sharp Increase
(Vote): Increase
(Vote): Constant
(Vote): Decline
(Vote): Sharp Decline
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There are more websites where you can get SC2 info than before so it`s pretty misleading to do a size of sc2 analysis based on 1 website..
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Anyone that's been on BNet knows that more than half their friends list doesn't go on anymore since Season 3.
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Thanks for the info? It speaks for itself really, don't know what else to say.
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did the bubble already burst?
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On December 31 2011 06:01 Kammalleri wrote:
There are more websites where you can get SC2 info than before so it`s pretty misleading to do a size of sc2 analysis based on 1 website..
Are you saying the info Alexa gives is incorrect?
If you need more evidence, you can check the amount of players on Sc2ranks (lots less people play with each new season)... Or just look at the number of people on TL on the top left, this number RARELY dropped to below 10k, now in the evenings here in NA it's often at 7k-9k for just a few examples.
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I think SC2 will more or less stabilize in 2012. 2011 was the year of growth, and in 2012 we'll get a chance to settle down. Viewership might decline slightly, but I think that will be mostly negligible. Then when HotS is released, there will be another sharp growth. If Korean BW legends switch to SC2, there will probably be another spike.
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On December 31 2011 06:02 adrenaLinG wrote:
Anyone that's been on BNet knows that more than half their friends list doesn't go on anymore since Season 3.
See the way many many hobbies in life work is that yes, people will leave, but new blood comes, the problem with SC2 is very few new players are coming into the scene.
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Troubling statistics indeed.
However, I believe it all depends on the money: If tournaments are in the green in terms of finances, and have stable sponsor relations, then tournaments can continue to host events. If players can make a living from SC2, whether from salaries, winnings, or streaming, or a combination.
Finally, I feel if GSL is financially solvent and the Korean market is maintained or growing, SC2 will always have the fallback. If major tournaments like Dreamhack, MLG and IPL can become sustainable, then the scene can survive. SC2 does not have to necessarily become as large as football, but just large enough where the scene becomes sustainable.
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+ Show Spoiler +On December 31 2011 05:59 FiWiFaKi wrote:If anyone is familiar with the Alexa ranking, it pretty much tracks how popular sites are, and how they change over time. So for people who are not aware I'd like to share some statistics as a sort of reality check to an extent. We like to think SC2 is exploding and getting bigger, and that everyone has high hopes for the future. Although let's take a quick look at a graph to see Teamliquid's popularity. As you can see, the steep rise about a quarter into the graph is when SC2 came out, then we see a continuous increase in visitors, until maybe April or May of 2011. Since then the visitor increase of teamliquid stagnated, and actually appears to be on the decline. Is it a coincidence that there haven't been any new groups to start new tournaments? We have MLG, IPL, NASL, GSL, Dreamhack, but all those were founded before May 2011, and now we have what we have, but nothing new is coming out. Coincidence? I think not. These numbers on their own are slightly misleading. Take a look at this graph. This is the percent of visitors that arrive from search engines like google. As you can see, this graph indicates that initially many people didn't know about SC2, and stumbled upon the site using search engines, and at the beginning of the SC2 life Teamliquid had many possible players to attract, but in a year this number went from 20% to 5%. The player pool has been exhausted, and there is nowhere to attract a new audience from. For example if you go on battle.net and you ask someone if they know what Teamliquid is they all do. I'm not sharing this information to scare people, but to make them understand how fragile this scene is, and try and help people understand the importance of attracting new players if they wish for the scene to succeed. Many seem to have this mentality "Oh HotS will fix everything, although I think that is a poor misconception, sure the HotS will bring in some new players, but expansions don't just magically double, triple, or make the player base go 10 fold. If anyone has been here for a while, do you guys remember the HDH Invitational? It's finals peaked at nearly 30k views if my memory serves right, how about TSL3? Nony vs Strelok in ro32 having 60k+ viewers?... Where did all these players go? Events like NASL being way below that, Dreamhack keeping on par with TSL3 numbers, and I'm going to take MLG numbers with a grain of salt because those figures are often exaggerated. So hopefully you guys better understand the scope of size of SC2, and if you share a passion for it, you'll do what you can to keep it alive. More graphs: Poll: What direction do you think SC2 is going into?Constant (110) 45% Decline (75) 31% Increase (47) 19% Sharp Decline (7) 3% Sharp Increase (3) 1% 242 total votes Your vote: What direction do you think SC2 is going into? (Vote): Sharp Increase
(Vote): Increase
(Vote): Constant
(Vote): Decline
(Vote): Sharp Decline
Speaking to just the first graph the only real decline came at the very end of the year. Holidays and lack of events may have something to do with it. Also the popularity of esports has nothing to do with how many people visit TL because TL doesn't actually hold anything SC2 related except forums and TSL. And because of the amount of trolls on the forums as well as TSL being over there really isn't much need to come here except for any news once every few days and the stream list to the right.
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On December 31 2011 06:07 Bagration wrote:
Troubling statistics indeed.
However, I believe it all depends on the money: If tournaments are in the green in terms of finances, and have stable sponsor relations, then tournaments can continue to host events. If players can make a living from SC2, whether from salaries, winnings, or streaming, or a combination.
Finally, I feel if GSL is financially solvent and the Korean market is maintained or growing, SC2 will always have the fallback. If major tournaments like Dreamhack, MLG and IPL can become sustainable, then the scene can survive. SC2 does not have to necessarily become as large as football, but just large enough where the scene becomes sustainable.
I think, maybe surprisingly, League of Legends will overtake Starcraft 2 in viewership. No matter what people say, ultimately, most eSports fans are fans of the game they play. By being free, League has a huge userbase, and thus a huge fanbase. Unless Starcraft 2 goes free to play, it will be hard to keep up with League.
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On December 31 2011 06:07 Bagration wrote:
Troubling statistics indeed.
However, I believe it all depends on the money: If tournaments are in the green in terms of finances, and have stable sponsor relations, then tournaments can continue to host events. If players can make a living from SC2, whether from salaries, winnings, or streaming, or a combination.
Finally, I feel if GSL is financially solvent and the Korean market is maintained or growing, SC2 will always have the fallback. If major tournaments like Dreamhack, MLG and IPL can become sustainable, then the scene can survive. SC2 does not have to necessarily become as large as football, but just large enough where the scene becomes sustainable.
It does come down to the money, but understand. Less viewers = less sponsors = less money = less sustainability to the scene. And once viewers begin to go down a little, it all keeps on compounding which can lead to it's death. Who wants to invest into something that is dying, I know I'm exaggerating slightly, but I'm just trying to get a point across.
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Increase with a few small declines.
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This is also abit missleading because alot of the people that are coming in and getting into starcraft aren't die hard fans right away. They probably don't even visit teamliquid. Maybe they watch some streams or attend some local tournaments just to watch every now and then. Maybe they just go to the barcrafts in their town. Maybe they have a friend or family member who tells them what to watch or what's good. Those people wouldn't show up on any of your graphs. If you think sc2 has lost popularity look at the live crowds of events, they are pretty huge!
Besides you're saying sc2 isn't growing because there's no new world class tournaments started in the last 9 months or so? That just sounds pretty ridiculous overall. Very rarely will you ever see a new tournament of that scale "pop" up, the only reason alot of them did about a year ago was because sc2 was new and didn't have many big tournaments at the time.
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I think tournament events and their success has a lot to do with it, but since SC2 is so young it's in a lull while organizers figure out the best format to present to the viewers.
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Missing the unpredictable option.
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Alexa is a very poor gauge of viewership trends. Here are some actual numbers.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/cMm4t.jpg)
Dreamhack Summer 2011
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/40ix0.jpg)
Dreamhack Winnter 2011
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On December 31 2011 06:03 FiWiFaKi wrote:Show nested quote +On December 31 2011 06:01 Kammalleri wrote:
There are more websites where you can get SC2 info than before so it`s pretty misleading to do a size of sc2 analysis based on 1 website.. Are you saying the info Alexa gives is incorrect? If you need more evidence, you can check the amount of players on Sc2ranks (lots less people play with each new season)... Or just look at the number of people on TL on the top left, this number RARELY dropped to below 10k, now in the evenings here in NA it's often at 7k-9k for just a few examples.
I'm not saying it's straight up wrong that it's declining, but basing an analysis on one website is just a really weak analysis.
And what pays is how many people watch streams, go on websites, go to events not how many people actually plays the game.
I know here Hockey subscription went down the last 5-6 years, yet they beat a record of viewers in the playoffs 2 years ago.
I just feel like there's not enough information to show that it's declining with what you showed
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This analaysis is lackingl. You definie size as number of users. What about defining size in terms of viewers watching vods or streams constantly.
Eg. if 30.000 ppl are watching streams or vods constantly, thats the size of sc2.
The size of lets say a soccer league where 9 games are played each week, and each game has an average viewership of 1.000.000, and lasts 2 hours, has a viewership of: (1000000/((24*7)/2))* 9 = 107.000
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nice insight and display.
I would love to attract new players but I'm quite happy with the people we have now.
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EPT
