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Pay per vieuw or letting people pay to watch high quality streams is a terrible road to go.
The majority of the people will not pay as there are plenty alternatives wich are free, and it will end up turning away people from the paid streams/tournaments.
You will get a relativly verry small fee from the ones who will pay to compensate for this huge loss of audience.
Monetarising starcraft has to come from using the popularity of starcraft to do other promotions, not from direct payments of vieuwers.
Vieuwers already contribute enough by simply watching and paying attention.
Do people pay to watch the olympics, do people have to pay to watch championship soccer on tv, do people have to pay to watch wimbledon on tv?
NO NO and NO, the only sport people pay for (sometimes) to watch on tv is national league soccer (champonship matches are free in my country, selling the adds makes enough apearently)
Just the idea that people can start paying to watch streams is imo completely rediculous.
(am not saying this because i like watching streams for free, wich i do lol, i do realy think this is a silly idea seeing its not that common in other sports either)
At below: yes adds is the way to go, do you realy think a significant amount of people is willing to pay for tournament streams?
There is no reason to believe to, tons of other sports do it this way (adds around the tournament)
verry few sports rely on the payments of the audienceo, just look at tennis, athletics, swimming cycling.
it realy is a weird idea imo wich has verry few succesfull percedents.
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This thread is also fairly illuminating in showing the maturity of the starcraft 2 demographic. The idea that companies can just make more and more ads and this will cover everything is ludicrous at worst and naive at best. I stand by the idea that foreign tournies aren't worth it yet but if they ever do get as good as GSL they should have a subsciption and people should buy it. I'm sorry, you can make excuses all day long about how tv is free(its not) or how immoral it is to charge subs or how it's HURTING e-sports, but at the end of the day 90% of people who say "lol im a poor college student" are actually just bad at managing money and probably spending that $30 on weed or fast food or steam.
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On February 10 2012 11:25 TheyCallMePops wrote:Show nested quote +On February 10 2012 11:13 WolfintheSheep wrote:On February 10 2012 11:08 SlimeBagly wrote:
It's fascinating, we live in a generation of unprecedented entitlement. The idea of "Free exchange of information" is talked about like it's the 11th amendment, when all it really means is "I'm used to getting shit for free, so anything that's contrary to that is nazi germany." One way or another, we'll have to get used to the idea that we have to pay for things we enjoy... Bullshit. Tournaments have to accept that without free streams, they won't even exist. Ask Everquest how it's doing as a P2P game. How about Lineage? The Old Republic? Guild Wars? Team Fortress 2? DotA? LoL? Oh, right, every single one of those games are FREE TO PLAY because WoW completely, totally, and absolutely dominated the market of monthly payment games. It's not entitlement to expect free streams from tournaments. It's common sense and basic business understanding that tells you that a PPV model funnels all the money to a select few organizations, and completely starves out the rest. Guild Wars needs to be bought and was always intended to not have a monthly sub. Everquest was pay to play for 12? years. TOR is pay to play and has a store price just like EQ. TF2/DotA/LoL aren't MMO games (and have completely different business models, and DotA is a WC3 custom game, it has no revenue besides donations.... DotA 2 is in beta and currently has no revenue generation). Also, what does any of this have to do with streaming Starcraft games?
Guild Wars was created by ex-Blizzard employees who were intentionally forcing a different business model than WoW's in order to compete. EQ was P2Play for more than a decade because it was the top dog, and then it became F2P because that was more profitable for the lesser games.
As I said earlier, I was mistaken about TOR, I'd heard they were going F2P - most other new MMOs are starting F2P regardless. DotA was a typo, because I can't for the life of me remember the names of the other clones.
And it relates to streaming Starcraft games because the business principles are exactly the same. The top dogs, meaning GSL, WoW, UFC, WWE, etc. all have captive audiences. They can afford a PPV pay-wall business model because if/when people are going to pay to see the product, they want the top product.
Meanwhile, the lesser players, who don't have the luxury of being the best choice, compete much better by using their free product to expand their user/viewer base at a much more rapid rate, then using peripheral "bonus" products to generate higher profits than an exclusive, walled business model would generate.
The basics of a paywall is that you're cannibalizing your current viewership in an attempt to increase the profit per viewer, something that obviously only works if you can convert enough viewers into subscribers. More often than not, and basically in every attempt from internet businesses, the net result is a loss in revenue.
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It's been monetized ad naseum already. Anyone heard gskill or pepsi mentioned recently? Also I think you could watch free content 24/7 and still not have time to watch it all. Btw does anyone with internet pay to watch UFC? Unless it's completely ad free I would never pay to watch anything.
The sickest thing ever is american ice hockey, where they stop the game just to show more comercials. Imagine NesTea vs MVP paused mid battle and a diaper comercial popping up ^^
Ps. Advertising is brainwashing and should be illegal. Atleast 90% of the population is completely defenceless against it.
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On February 10 2012 12:14 ReVox wrote:
This thread is also fairly illuminating in showing the maturity of the starcraft 2 demographic. The idea that companies can just make more and more ads and this will cover everything is ludicrous at worst and naive at best. I stand by the idea that foreign tournies aren't worth it yet but if they ever do get as good as GSL they should have a subsciption and people should buy it. I'm sorry, you can make excuses all day long about how tv is free(its not) or how immoral it is to charge subs or how it's HURTING e-sports, but at the end of the day 90% of people who say "lol im a poor college student" are actually just bad at managing money and probably spending that $30 on weed or fast food or steam.
They still have the issue of children (foreigners) fighting adults (koreans) or just children fighting children. sorry but a boxing or MMA match never sold with such disparities. Peoplr tend to want to watch the best vs the best.
I blew $3000 at Planet Hollywood casino last friday but would never pay to see blowouts.
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As someone who was starting to get into SC2 E-sports, in my opinion it's dead. Nothing worth watching for free any more, how can it grow if there isn't open free links in common areas for people new to the genera to get excited about it. This is all compounded by the fact that starcraft 2 is getting a bit old at this point. Can't wait for the expansion, I wont be buying it, but i do plan on watching some streams when it comes out. Watching new games these days just feel like reruns.
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On February 10 2012 12:18 crazyfingers wrote:
As someone who was starting to get into SC2 E-sports, in my opinion it's dead. Nothing worth watching for free any more, how can it grow if there isn't open free links in common areas for people new to the genera to get excited about it. This is all compounded by the fact that starcraft 2 is getting a bit old at this point. Can't wait for the expansion, I wont be buying it, but i do plan on watching some streams when it comes out. Watching new games these days just feel like reruns.
It's far from old. BW is still watched an that came out over a decade ago. So SC2 is far from dying I mean at IEM Kiev I remember seeing 60k people watching the stream so you're completely wrong about it dying nothing could be further from the truth. Plus E-Sports as a whole is only growing I mean the same amount of people were watching the LoL stream at the same tournament an IdrA gets between 5-16k viewers on his stream when he streams an thats not even a tournament. So as I've already stated SC2 is far from dead an only gaining momentum.
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I'm happy to pay for the GSL and MLG and occasionally throw a couple of bucks at smaller tourneys like HomeStory. I'm also older than average and have a job. If I didn't play, though, I doubt I'd pay for my son to watch.
I don't envy the guys trying to make it in this business now. They need some revenue, but esports really needs serious growth. SC2 is the best to watch, but it really doesn't have a huge player base. I'm hoping somebody in the casting/tournament community starts figuring out how to cast the games so that they can be enjoyed by casual or non-players.
When we watched some of the Super Bowl, we noticed the casters aren't trying to teach us to play football. They are explaining what's going on in the game, and why the players might make the decisions they do and a lot more about the players themselves. That helps the viewer to understand the game, but if you want the illusion you could be playing it, you have to bring that yourself.
SC2 is different because I love that I can alt-tab over and play when I'm geeked up after a great match. But it's currently hard to get non-players excited to watch MLG or GSL with you. Try it and you'll see that you spend most of your time explaining who MC or Naniwa are and where they come from (and what they've won) and very little about the technical differences between a 1-gas and 2-gas 4-gate.
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On February 09 2012 14:56 bustanut wrote:
Personally, I would never pay for high quality content, unless it's the GSL.
If I only got 480p and such for free, I'd only tune into the matches I really wanted to see.
Well, this pretty much says it all. Seeing as the only tournament that really matters is the GSL (haters gonna hate, but the truth is the truth), it makes no sense paying to watch any other tournament. The global standard IS the GSL, whether some like it or not, so yeah, that's pretty much it.
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On February 10 2012 12:14 ReVox wrote:
This thread is also fairly illuminating in showing the maturity of the starcraft 2 demographic. The idea that companies can just make more and more ads and this will cover everything is ludicrous at worst and naive at best. I stand by the idea that foreign tournies aren't worth it yet but if they ever do get as good as GSL they should have a subsciption and people should buy it. I'm sorry, you can make excuses all day long about how tv is free(its not) or how immoral it is to charge subs or how it's HURTING e-sports, but at the end of the day 90% of people who say "lol im a poor college student" are actually just bad at managing money and probably spending that $30 on weed or fast food or steam.
Hahaha, earlier I was gonna make the point about college kids buying weed and other things, but I didn't go there. Glad you did.
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On February 09 2012 15:30 KingOfAmerica wrote:
The community absolutely needs to make at least a moderate cultural shift in their willingness to vote with their dollars. If you want high quality professional gaming organizations, they need income. Teams and leagues are not government subsidized, they are businesses.
I couldn't agree more with this. The e-sports community is generally aged very young, and because of that we have a culture with lower expectations of professionalism from a business perspective. I feel like young people are less inclined to pay for content because they don't understand the business plan behind professional athleticism and aren't willing to pay to see great players because of their disillusion.
I think that young folks in the SC community are simply too content with the content they are recieving already because they don't value professionalism. Don't you just hate it when you introduce Starcraft to some friends who can't help but laugh at it and just think it's a farce of an industry? The reason is because there is no MONEY behind it. Nobody takes this shit seriously because the industry is founded on gaming culture -- a culture composed of mainly kids -- who are unwilling to fork up small sums of money for something they love.
I, myself, love gaming and starcraft II. I would happily pay for (and I'm not going to discuss pricing because that can be appropriately be discussed somewhere else) streams of professional starcraft II if they were treated with the professionalism they deserve. By this I mean everybody should have to pay to watch the top pros play games. If we don't set the bar for the standard of business in this industry, then it won't become a profitable industry.
Honestly answer youself this question: If my favourite SC2 pro began to charge for his stream, would I pay to watch it? If Huk, the most popular Canadian SC2 pro were charging $2.99 a month for his streaming, would you just cut him off completely because he charges to make a living off of doing something he loves? If you were in the same position you would realize how much better the community would benefit from one another if we just charged people to watch us -- it brings a whole new level of professionalism to the table because now we can justifiably say that we make money off of playing Starcraft without having to rely on shitty methods of profit such as advertising. If people want to watch, they should pay for it. esports needs a larger pool of money to be able to grow from, and advertising doesn't cut it
Gamers need to invest in their passions rather than hope that popularity circulates it. Not investing in this industry will only let it sit and stagnate in a pool of immature and adolescent young adults who use popularity and advertising as a part of their poorly thought out business plan. I think people should be more willing to spend money in e-sports.
I think that the argument which highlights advertising as the main priority of profititability is possible only when the target audience has vast population of viewers like we see on facebook or google, for example. Starcraft II, and esports in general, is not big enough to support itself by advertisement because there simply are not enough viewers for it to allow it to flourish into a successful business. A populated industry needs to be established. MONEY needs to be injected into that industry for it to be able to takeoff, and at this point in time advertising simply doesn't compare to subscription.
TL;DR I feel like the conflict here is divided between the people who want to make gaming a more reputable sport and the people who want just want to be able to watch Starcraft the way they have been for over a decade now.
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I currently pay for gsl, but only because there is a very reasonable annual ticket that I know will give me access to more content than I have time to watch, and I know it will always be the best players in the world.
I love the atmosphere of mlg though, but it's like a cool thing to watch live. It's not like gsl where you watch a few vods every day, over a long period of time. I don't really watch mlg vods even if I missed an event, because it's just too overwhelming to catch up on that many games in a short period of time. If i have the time to watch mlg live as it's happening, it's really awesome, but it's not something I feel like I'd pay for like gsl.
I bought NASL season 1 based on the same logic but haven't bought a season since just because FUCK I just don't have time, I have to prioritize, and GSL is just the better league to watch.
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On February 09 2012 16:37 labbe wrote:Show nested quote +On February 09 2012 16:23 WolfintheSheep wrote:On February 09 2012 15:09 Chill wrote:
I think people have gotten used to this charity model where the majority is given away for free. I think there's this perception that companies are making money, but I doubt they are.
It's a tough spot. Monetize and people revolt and you die. Don't monetize and you slowly drown. I don't know how it's going to work. Maybe you have to completely level up the broadcast to a completely different place where people expect to pay for that quality? No idea.
Edit: No one seems to treat this as a business. There's a feeling things should be free because they want it to grow. Until we get past that and make it a business, it'll never be more than a niche market, which is fine, but it is what it is. You're missing the more likely result of complete monetization: The top league becomes filthy rich, and the rest die entirely, reduced to small audiences and "indy league" quality, just like the situation with Professional Wrestling and MMA. And this isn't a what-if scenario, it's the one that exists in SC2 right now. The GSL is the league, and there is absolutely no argument about that. Viewers can't and won't pay for every tournament, so they are going to be selective about their money, and more often than not, the GSL is going to be the one to get that revenue. In other words, if tournaments like IPL, NASL, MLG, etc. don't stream for free, then they will probably vanish into obscurity. I think the biggest issue is the mentality that free streams are a "charity model" as you put it, which couldn't be further from the truth. Look at the MMORPG scene, for instance. WoW is the only Pay-to-Play game left, and it dominates everything. How did ever other game remain relevant and profitable? By removing subscriptions entirely, making access to the game 100% free, and then charging for peripherals...and more often than not, that made them even more profitable than before. I couldn't possibly say what would be smart marketing tactics, or how these tournaments could generate revenue. But I can, and will, say with certainty, that a pay-to-watch business model will only benefit the top-tier organizations, and would be the swiftest way to kill off the ones that aren't on top. Thank you! Best shit I've read along the complete drivel of posts in this thread.
that's capitalism, friend. any competitive business works around this model, just like in any professional sports league. When you say that the top league becomes rich and the small leagues die entirely, that could easily be compared to any other athletic.
Myself living in Canada, I know a number of semi-professional hockey players who are in league below NHL, OHL, AHL, who have contracts and are paid to play.
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On February 10 2012 12:59 Carbonthief wrote:
I currently pay for gsl, but only because there is a very reasonable annual ticket that I know will give me access to more content than I have time to watch, and I know it will always be the best players in the world.
I love the atmosphere of mlg though, but it's like a cool thing to watch live. It's not like gsl where you watch a few vods every day, over a long period of time. I don't really watch mlg vods even if I missed an event, because it's just too overwhelming to catch up on that many games in a short period of time. If i have the time to watch mlg live as it's happening, it's really awesome, but it's not something I feel like I'd pay for like gsl.
I bought NASL season 1 based on the same logic but haven't bought a season since just because FUCK I just don't have time, I have to prioritize, and GSL is just the better league to watch.
You hit the nail right on the head. The GSL is generally considered the best tournament in the world and no one can afford (time/money) to keep up with every single tournament (MLG/IPL/NASL/ESV/IEM) plus all the other stuff going on. There is probably only room for one or two international (NA/EU) tournament providers who can actually capture enough of a market be financially sound.
Who wins that race will be determined by a ton of factors: capital, experience, advertisement, brand-name, players, casters, live events, etc, etc... I think once one or two tournament organizers establish themselves as being heads and tails above the rest, they can begin thinking about some sort of paid service. Resolution bonuses are lame, dual streams are decent, but the SC2 community craves information; giving viewers PAID access to exclusive interviews/commentary/replays will be more successful than access to vods or high resolution and can entice people to actually pay for quality content.
Once someone finds those niche incentives, they'll make money. Other organizers can offer unique casters/events/giveaways supported by sponsors to maintain viewership, but it's absolutely absurd to assume that as many independent organizations that SC2 is a part of can ALL make money with a paid-viewership model.
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Despite how much I've advocated for paying for tournaments in this thread, I will admit that it's much easier to pay for GSL than any other league. It's just the best quality games by far, and it's where you're watching the cutting edge of Starcraft, including metagame development and the like. Personally I think MLG should become the gold standard in North American and Dreamhack in Europe. I think it would be a good thing if the scene consolidated into those three big tournaments, with small online weekly/daily tournies still going on. That way more money could be funneled towards the big 3 and you'd just have less to focus on as a viewer. I think it's pretty undeniable that the market is oversaturated right now. And I a perfectly willing to pay for the big 3.
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Seems like SC2 is already monetized? I definitely can't watch much SC2 without getting commercials or paying to remove them. Both make whoever is streaming money...
And about paying for higher quality streams... It might happen. I'll never pay for it. That's just not really how things work on the internet though, at least that's how I feel (I don't really do much on the internet besides FB and TL). If you start charging for something that was free, people are going to pirate it. GL to vVv's President though, he seems to believe in what he's doing. I mean.... His team's no EG in terms of players or fan base, but... His ideas must be right... Right?
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On February 10 2012 11:24 sluggaslamoo wrote:
OSL and MSL are free to view, even to attend live its free.
They just need advertisements.
But that's impossible! The very idea that an e-sports league could survive on advertisements alone is ludicrious! The scene will surely die if high quality starcraft is easily accessible to new viewers!
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I can't see myself ever paying to watch Starcraft at home. I've never seen more than the first match of any GSL series. If they want to make money off of it then do more big live lan events and bring the sponsors in there. Sell T-shirts. Sell nachos. Make a big show of it.
Spread eSports competition to more people: have your big main even tournament, but have several other tournaments running as well. an open tournament for the locals of the area at each league level. Or break them up by age groups like any other youth sport would do. The more people you get competing, the more people you can then sell nachos to once they've lost. And kids that play will have their parrents there that will have to buy them a T-shirt for WhiteRa to sign.
There's money to be made.
Also, if more schools created starcraft teams (beyond what few college teams there are) there could be all kinds of live lan tournament potential. NCAA SC2 anyone?
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On February 10 2012 13:56 J_Slim wrote:
I can't see myself ever paying to watch Starcraft at home. I've never seen more than the first match of any GSL series. If they want to make money off of it then do more big live lan events and bring the sponsors in there. Sell T-shirts. Sell nachos. Make a big show of it.
Spread eSports competition to more people: have your big main even tournament, but have several other tournaments running as well. an open tournament for the locals of the area at each league level. Or break them up by age groups like any other youth sport would do. The more people you get competing, the more people you can then sell nachos to once they've lost. And kids that play will have their parrents there that will have to buy them a T-shirt for WhiteRa to sign.
There's money to be made.
Also, if more schools created starcraft teams (beyond what few college teams there are) there could be all kinds of live lan tournament potential. NCAA SC2 anyone?
Few? There're 234 active CSL teams playing this season http://www.cstarleague.com/league
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EPT
