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A lot of the problem is also exclusivity. You say WWE or UFC, but If I want to watch Anderson Silva fight... I HAVE TO watch UFC. If I miss DRG V MVP.. no biggie, they'll be playing again in a different tournament in a weeks time.
This is where the SC1 scene's Pro-League and exclusivity brought by Kespa would work in a monetising sense. You want to watch the best players? then you need to pay to see them. That works slightly with GSL, but even then a lot of the GSL players go to foreign tournaments to play because its offers them good money for their investment (mercenary if you will) because their own scene doesn't offer enough money to keep them there.
There needs to be a scene shift if anyone wants this to happen. Probably a governing body to sort through it. Otherwise, you'll get every mickey mouse tournament trying to charge £20 to watch and killing each other in the process, leaving nothing for anyone. Maybe if GSL (korea) Dreamhack (europe) and MLG (usa) formed a partnership where they signed players to contracts (teams?) and ran it as a premier league style format. With a champions league between the regions every so often, it'd work. oo many tournaments, not enough exclusivity, too much mess. It's hard to get hyped for a match between Player A and Player B at dreamhack, when they just played at MLG, and then in every invitational tournament in the last 2 months.
We should be looking at how professional sports run leagues, and copying that. Because that's proven to work! problem is the scene doesn't have the money to enforce that, or pay the players enough to actually have it work.
Thus the old conundrum, of you need money to make money.
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On February 09 2012 19:30 MrBitter wrote:
From my slightly-insiders point of view:
Right now people aren't making money. Hosting tournaments is expensive, and ad revs from the streaming platforms seldom cover just the prize pools. The only way these organizers stay in business right now is with investor/sponsor money.
I've spoken with many of these sponsors, and I've asked them the very straight question: "How the hell do you make any money in this business?", and the answer is always the same: "We don't."
The big, powerhouse sponsors - the multi-billion dollar corporations that have infinite money to throw around, continue to invest in e-sports, not for profit, but to modernize their image, and to appear "cool" in today's market. True story.
The smaller/mid-range sponsors - industry specific tech companies, peripheral manufacturers, basically companies that cater to a niche market already, are definitely trying to carve out a piece of what they perceive as a growing market, but think about how many mouse pads have to be sold to run a tournament? How many graphics cards, or notebooks have to be bought to cover JUST the prize pools?
There is definitely a day of reckoning on the horizon. A lot of people jumped into the game in hopes of cashing in on e-sports, but it's excruciatingly difficult to make money in this business.
People keep citing the GSL as the premiere league, and the only one worth paying for, but the cold truth is that they too are walking a very thin line in terms of their sustainability.
Some of these tournament organizers are eventually going to have to tap out, or drastically scale back what they've been doing. For events to continue to grow, event organizers will have to figure out a way to make money. Even if it is purely for love of the game, you can't keep playing if you can't stop bleeding cash.
PPV models are something industry people are looking at because it HAS worked in the past. It's what got UFC from grassroots to the big stage. But there were more factors in UFC rising to the level it has than just a functional PPV platform.
Personally, I'm of the opinion that you can't charge people to watch Starcraft. There's just too much free Starcraft available. What you can do is charge people to participate in chat, to access VODs, and to avoid seeing ads.
But that change alone would not make running major tournaments profitable. For that to happen, the people at the top of the industry, Sundance, David Ting, Carmac, Robert Ohlen, Russ, have got to figure out ways to sell their product to a small, niche market, without that market turning on them.
It's a very difficult problem to solve, and the answer may very well be to scale back and hold smaller events, but really, nobody wants that.
We all want bigger, better, faster, and stronger, and in the world of business, the first guy to figure out how to deliver that,
while still making money, is going to be the one that survives.
Can this be edited into the OP? So important that people realise that no-one is really making bank off e-sports and very few organisations ever have.
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Wait did he say Alex Garfield makes 2 mio a year??? If this were to be true, wouldnt it show that theres not to little money in e-sports?
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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.
I think it's totally realistic for viewers to continue to get what they're already getting for free, but have the monetized portion of the event something that, if people want additional content, they can pay for it, kind of like one of those silly blu ray discs.
Like with MLG's lately. You get the main streams ezpz, but the quad view gold and w/e streams you have to pay for, so you can still see the main games that everyone gets hyped about, but the additional content is stuff like candid interviews and lower prestige open bracket rounds. If they had multiple streams, one devoted to interviews, several devoted to specific chunks of open brackets, etc, and whatever else you can think up, and charge viewers for THAT content, while just getting ad revenue from people that don't care as much, i think it works out fine.
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The quality of the product is usually way too low for me to consider paying for it.
Code S is the only place where the casters are never bad/annoying, the games usually of the highest quality & there's no delays or other junk. I don't mind paying for that, np. The rest of the tournaments mess up one way or another so if it weren't for free I'd just watch some other stream.
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I feel like this guy is missing a certain piece of information, yet I know that he knows it. His rant is confusing because it doesn't make any sense with that missing bit of information. I'm thinking his rant comes from a general anger that he has because he knows a lot of his friends are going to fail hard and be out of the business in the not too distant future.
The part that he is missing is that Starcraft is already being monetized... he has to know that much. Nearly every major tournament has a premium service of some kind. Nearly every major tournament and team already sells merchandise... I can go to the TL store and buy 6 different shirts and two posters, I can unleash the gracken, or I can buy all sorts of MLG branded stuff. Nearly every major tournament and team has major sponsorship support. Nearly every major tournament charges entrance fees to the events. That all sounds like a lot of monetization. In fact, that's the exactly same monetization that every major sport around the world uses... actually, most don't use premium streams, but a rare few (MMA, Boxing, ???) use PPV instead.
People already are shelling out the money. The problem is that there just aren't enough of us. An American football playoff game this year hit 40 million viewers and it's not even a worldwide sport. IEM Sao Paulo day 1 hit what? 10k? 15k? Maybe 20k? What are the all-time stream records for a tournament? 150k? 200k? That was an extreme rarity whereas major sports can regularly pull in 1 million+ viewers for regular season garbage games. And they do it on a proven medium (TV, where ad revenues are still reasonably good) as opposed to a new medium (streams, where ad revenue is a fledgling industry in its own right). Certain stadiums get 100k or more attendance and 30k+ is not uncommon at all even at $40+ per ticket.
E-Sports still needs to grow its audience. MLG needs to hit 200k viewers regularly on their events, not just the best final day of the year. The final day needs to hit 500k (exact number pulled out of my posterior) before advertisers really start to care... where they have a big enough audience to make a return on their advertizing bucks. When you get that many people, if 10% of the people buy a T-Shirt, you've just sold 50k t-shirts and can pay out some reasonable salaries.
The problem is that we're simply not there yet. Yelling at the audience to spend more doesn't exactly encourage them. Instead it tends to alienate the audience and my personal opinion of this vVv guy went from neutral down to a negative. I also think that turning major tournaments into PPV is too early in SC2's development (PPV might never be a good idea). It has the potential to drive away a huge portion of the audience. Eyeballs aren't as important as pure money, but they are still important and represent money in the form of advertizing dollars and growth. Those eyeballs may tell their friends and build the audience that you need. Maybe those eyeballs even decide to buy a t-shirt or pay for the premium stream in the future.
Don't cripple a growing audience by trying to shake it down for money too soon. Let the audience grow and decide when they want to pay for premium services and merchandise. I hate to say it, but if you have to, you need to cut down prize pools, live event expenses, or some production quality until the audience is large enough to justify it.
As a related thought: Does anyone find it interesting that the sports that use the PPV model (MMA, Boxing) are violent sports that many sponsors don't want to be associated with? Almost as if they use the PPV model because they know that sponsorship dollars won't come in proportion to their audience. The sports that are almost completely socially accepted and are able to get sponsorship dollars seem to almost never use the PPV model.
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When I was in college I would go clubbing with my friends occasionally. To pay the cover that would sometimes be up to 20 dollars, just for the privilege of being around drunk, sweaty people with overloud music destroying my hearing. Surely the same amount for a high quality stream of the best SC2 players in the world is worth just as much.
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If they upped production values I might pay to watch some hd streams. But as it is it usually looks way to amateurish for me to even consider paying. I think they'd be shooting themselves in the foot by charging for it, they'd definetly lose alot of viewers thus getting less exposure. Unless they could rival that of other sports though in production value, better camera work, less uncomfortable moments when presenting players and winners for example.
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I do think charging for HD streams and VODS are a good idea, but the price needs to be really cheap. GSL imo is toooooo much expensive.
"10% of the people buy a T-Shirt"
10% buying T-shirts is an outrageous number.... more than likely no more than 0.5% of people buy T-shirts
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On February 09 2012 22:03 RenSC2 wrote:
Don't cripple a growing audience by trying to shake it down for money too soon. Let the audience grow and decide when they want to pay for premium services and merchandise. I hate to say it, but if you have to, you need to cut down prize pools, live event expenses, or some production quality until the audience is large enough to justify it.
The SC2 scene is probably already past it's peak growth judging by recent threads that have noticed a decline in people actually playing the game each season, I don't see how you're expecting it to grow any more. Sure you can argue that more people will play when HOTS comes out, but I'm pretty sure those are the same people who will leave again after 2-3 seasons anyway to play/watch some other game. Even then, fast-track to when LOTV comes out and the same situation occurs, what then? You'll still have the same relatively sized audience and we'll (probably) be back into this situation.
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Vatican City State334 Posts
That word "e-sports" again. You know why we hear it all the time? The people with the loudest voices have a massive stake in it, and need it to succeed and grow because it funds them. It MUST succeed for them. The casters, the event organizers, even the moderators on this forum to a small extent. They will often lean on the mantra "I know about the business side of e-sports, so pipe down and listen" and circulate false dilemmas regarding an imminent e-sports scene collapse.
The truth is, as of right now the fans have the best possible deal. Lots of free, high quality streams. Players who are active in the community, who you can walk up to and start a conversation. Attempts at monetization which are not particularly intrusive. You should count yourself lucky how fortunate you are to have such power as a fan. You are in the golden age of "e-sports" right now, this is it, the most pure form of entertainment and competition without execs in suits trying to streamline it for mass consumption. You want that to change?
Luckily SC2 viewers are part of the hardest demographic to reach in advertising, who are abandoning traditional media in their droves, and sponsors will always want to tap into that market. What worries guys like LordJerith the most, is that even if MLG or vVv were to hypothetically collapse, some guy with a lot of money and optimism would spring up and start another business which takes their place in time simply because human nature is to pursue growth and progress. The same reason most will insinctively disagree with my post.
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So what people are asking for is:
- Have 1080+ free stream (a la IPL)
- Nearly TV broadcast production levels
- Constant flow of high quality content (many people commenting on MLG only being on a few times a year)
- Perfectly run event (no delays, tech problems etc)
- The best casters (despite that being an enormously subjective thing)
- The very best players
And then they would maybe consider dropping $5/10 on the event? Just trying to do some market research here.
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If this happened, the only people watching MLG/IPL/IEM/NASL would be hardcore fans of NA/EU pros and LoL people.
Even then, most LoL players won't be paying for the services (they play a free game for Pete's sake).
To be honest, watching low quality tournament streams these days is sometimes worse than getting on team liquid and looking at some streams.
Take IEM Kiev for example. I watched Zenio v Naniwa, Kas v Zenio, and MMA v Dimaga in IPL Kiev. Kas v Zenio was the only one worth watching.
To me the tournament had 1 good match, a couple of one sided stompings, and low quality games that don't even compare to watching streams. I would not pay or even watch if the streams were of lower quality than everyday player streams. I'd rather watch a 480p+ stream than one that looked as if it was still BW. I'd still be watching BW if I didn't care for the visual stuff.
Hey, I liked Kas v Zenio. Despite that, I could've watched Kas or Zenio's stream or some other high quality players. I'm not paying $25 to watch anything like IEM Kiev.
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On February 09 2012 22:24 Klonere wrote:
So what people are asking for is:
- Have 1080+ free stream (a la IPL)
- Nearly TV broadcast production levels
- Constant flow of high quality content (many people commenting on MLG only being on a few times a year)
- Perfectly run event (no delays, tech problems etc)
- The best casters (despite that being an enormously subjective thing)
- The very best players
And then they would maybe consider dropping $5/10 on the event? Just trying to do some market research here.
Yes that's correct.
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On February 09 2012 22:26 softan wrote:Show nested quote +On February 09 2012 22:24 Klonere wrote:
So what people are asking for is:
- Have 1080+ free stream (a la IPL)
- Nearly TV broadcast production levels
- Constant flow of high quality content (many people commenting on MLG only being on a few times a year)
- Perfectly run event (no delays, tech problems etc)
- The best casters (despite that being an enormously subjective thing)
- The very best players
And then they would maybe consider dropping $5/10 on the event? Just trying to do some market research here. Yes that's correct.
Hard to see anyone making any sort of money out of that without some serious serious viewer numbers to pull big sponsors. I'm talking in the 500k region here.
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On February 09 2012 17:39 m4inbrain wrote:Show nested quote +On February 09 2012 17:19 flowSthead wrote:On February 09 2012 16:56 m4inbrain wrote:On February 09 2012 16:49 flowSthead wrote:On February 09 2012 16:32 m4inbrain wrote:
Just thought a bit about it.. Its actually kinda stupid to say "well, ad-revenue isnt enough anymore - lets charge viewers". If you have strictly a "no pay, no view"-restriction, you will lose more than 50% of the viewership. More likely more than that. So the ad-revenue will go down pretty harsh.
Theres actually no base at all at the moment to charge like 20$ for a MLG. If there is a big game which becomes famous - well, ill watch it later as VOD. Even if they charge for the VODs, some guy from somewhere will share the VOD with me. If there is not, well.. Ill watch another tournament which charges less/offers more.
On our "mainstreet" we have, i think, 6 different hardware-stores. Private, not like DELL or something. 3 of them closed recently, because they tried to price their stuff lower than the other stores and went into bankrupcy (spelled wrong i think). There wouldnt be "awesome esport", there would be "mlg vs ign vs dh vs etc", all of them would try to steal viewers from another tournament. Again: the base is not big enough for that. First of all, your 50% is a totally made up statistic. If you have a source I would love to read it, but otherwise where do you get that number? It could be 90% or it could be 10%. 50% is completely random. As for your hardware example, that is a bad example. There are so many places to go buy hardware from and you will be buying the same hardware. If I want to watch DRG vs MMA in an epic best of 7 then I have to pay for the Blizzard Cup. I can't watch DRG vs MMA at some MLG for free because there is no guarantee that I will get that same epic best of 7. It's not comparable. What might happen is I go to watch LoL or Dota instead of SC2 (if you're into that; if all you watch is SC then it won't matter). Its actually no statistic at all (but feel free to start a poll). But a reasonable guess. Watch streamchats, forums etc - you will get the reason. And of course its comparable. How do you know that your MMA vs DRG will be epic? Could be DRG dronerushing MMA. And apart from that: just look around you. Every single game/sport that has "business" involved is dominated by ONE big league/tournament. Why is that? Someone in this thread actually had the right idea, just think about world of warcraft. How many p2p-MMOs do you see on the market, and better: how do they compare to WoW in terms of subscriptions? Yeah. You guessed right, the only one noteworthy is SWTOR. And well, i just cancelled by sub after the first month, and so did many others. You cant(!) have 4 big leagues next to each other. That doesnt work. Because business is also about expanding. If you want to expand, you need to kill the other leagues, because no one would actually pay 25$ a month to 4 different leagues. That just wont happen. There is little reason to assume that because football, and basketball, and hockey all went this way, that eSports will too. It's a different market and a different technology. It's not as directly comparable as people want it to be. It still needs to be monetized better, but it doesn't have to be monetized the way other sports need to. Wait. It happened to every (and i mean: every) sport so far, and thats just "little reason"? You are damn right its a different market, especially because its a sooooo much smaller market. Even on free streams, what was the highest amount of viewers you saw? 100k? Iirc (maybe wrong, but im pretty sure) the highest number i saw was round about 150k. Thats 150000 persons watching a FREE stream. 150000. Any idea how small of a number that is? Its literally nothing. There are stadiums out there, in which you could fit more than that. So now you want cancel free streams, and charge. You lose lets say 50k viewers. 100k left. How do you aquire new ones? As you said, Starcraft is NOT football. Or baseball. Or basketball, or anything else that we played as kids (and our parents, and their parents, and THEIR parents etc). You need to have a special interest in starcraft, to watch these streams. If you just want to watch exciting sport, there are tons of them out there, in the TV, for free. So how do you advertise your stream to grow? Its completely pointless to even discuss it, because it cant work. Its not like millions and billions of people watch starcraft 2. Its actually a really small part, even smaller than WoW, LoL or DoTA(2). Also, if its true what someone just pointed out, well.. Its even "pointlessier" (oO) to discuss, because it cant actually happen. Show nested quote +Yea, i actually wanted to know why u think MLG sucks.
Although, have in mind, before sc2, worldwide esports scene and infrastructure have been almost non-existant (speaking about RTS), apart from Korea. We cannot expect to have everything in few years. In other words, the expectations shouldnt be as high as production that are on TV shows, or high-profile sports, and whatnot. You know what? I agree completely. But the same goes for fees/charges.
you dont watch them for FREE since you have to PAY to get the cable or satellite. ads are good but people using add blocker (should be around 50% of the people) dont get any revenue to them stream, so if they would atleast pay a subscrition it would give the a little bit of money from those people
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I think LordJerith is being too aggressive with the money-making ideas. MLG slightly increasing the price of tickets is one thing. Asking us to pay for generic streams (when there are dozens of pro-gamers and tournaments streaming per day that we could watch instead of Stream X) is another. The GSL is a cut above the rest, and even other tournaments like MLG can make some money off fans buying season passes... but asking for too much too soon will just push everyone away.
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On February 09 2012 22:40 Klonere wrote:Show nested quote +On February 09 2012 22:26 softan wrote:On February 09 2012 22:24 Klonere wrote:
So what people are asking for is:
- Have 1080+ free stream (a la IPL)
- Nearly TV broadcast production levels
- Constant flow of high quality content (many people commenting on MLG only being on a few times a year)
- Perfectly run event (no delays, tech problems etc)
- The best casters (despite that being an enormously subjective thing)
- The very best players
And then they would maybe consider dropping $5/10 on the event? Just trying to do some market research here. Yes that's correct. Hard to see anyone making any sort of money out of that without some serious serious viewer numbers to pull big sponsors. I'm talking in the 500k region here.
SC2 will never bring in those numbers for an american/euro tourney
I am 100% positive on this
Most LoL has ever gotten was 210k and they had a news post about it inside their game telling you to go watch. They also have over 1.3million active players playing at once, even if SC2 were to do something like that it wouldnt be the same because the amount of people that play it are significantly lower and you want to see double that? Simply wont happen
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On February 09 2012 22:45 1sz2sz3sz wrote:Show nested quote +On February 09 2012 22:40 Klonere wrote:On February 09 2012 22:26 softan wrote:On February 09 2012 22:24 Klonere wrote:
So what people are asking for is:
- Have 1080+ free stream (a la IPL)
- Nearly TV broadcast production levels
- Constant flow of high quality content (many people commenting on MLG only being on a few times a year)
- Perfectly run event (no delays, tech problems etc)
- The best casters (despite that being an enormously subjective thing)
- The very best players
And then they would maybe consider dropping $5/10 on the event? Just trying to do some market research here. Yes that's correct. Hard to see anyone making any sort of money out of that without some serious serious viewer numbers to pull big sponsors. I'm talking in the 500k region here. SC2 will never bring in those numbers for an american/euro tourney I am 100% positive on this Most LoL has ever gotten was 210k and they had a news post about it inside their game telling you to go watch. They also have over 1.3million active players playing at once, even if SC2 were to do something like that it wouldnt be the same because the amount of people that play it are significantly lower
So do we deduce from this that the major organisations are fucked then?
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For a quality product, I don't mind paying. And I'm saying that while one year ago I would have said that I would never pay for anything. But then the GSL happened, and the product is so good that I gladly paid for it. It changed my mind about the subject. I also paid for MLG streams.
The thing is, there is so much content right now that you have to really do a damn good job to make people pay.
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EPT
