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SC2, LoL, and BW's Ranking of Popularity in Korea since 2010
There are a lot of revived discussion about the popularity of SC2 vs LoL vs BW. But few have taken a more objective view on this issue. When did SC2 start to decline? When did LoL get this big? What was SC2's highest rankings? How is BW doing? There are a lot of unanswered questions going around. I made these charts to provide more information about the puzzling battles between SC2, LoL, and BW.
These data are collected from two of the most popular gaming rankings in Korea. They are http://www.gametrics.com/ and http://www.inven.co.kr/. They release these rankings monthly and/or weekly.
Many people have pointed out that PC bang statistics can be misleading. Therefore, I include the online game ranking, which is not a PC bang statistics. And all in all, data and statistics are always 'misleading' because there is no perfect data and this is what we got.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/xidfp5k.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/DbB21RC.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/d9iDfc0.jpg)
For bigger pictures, see the album in Imgur:
http://imgur.com/a/FV76b
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Russian Federation81 Posts
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This data does not take into account the hardware of the PCs in these PC bangs. It is entirely possible that sc2 does not run on many of the systems which are being polled for data. This would increase BW and to a lesser extent LoL representation.
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On May 28 2013 15:32 DeCoup wrote:
This data does not take into account the hardware of the PCs in these PC bangs. It is entirely possible that sc2 does not run on many of the systems which are being polled for data. This would increase BW and to a lesser extent LoL representation.
When combined with the online rankings the data still gives a good picture of how big SC2 is in Korea.
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Korea is a small country. If Esport is to grow, there needs to be emphasis on bigger countries.
Too much infatuation with korea from TL imo. It would have been way better doing analysis on US, Euro, or China.
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LoL will ALWAYS be the more popular game. Why?
1) It's FREE and the system requirements are much lower than sc2.
2) It's EASIER to understand and more CASUAL.
3) It's a TEAMGAME. You don't feel alone, and teammates can be blamed for losses
You just can't compare LoL with sc2. They are both played on the computer, but that's it.
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On May 28 2013 15:32 DeCoup wrote:
This data does not take into account the hardware of the PCs in these PC bangs. It is entirely possible that sc2 does not run on many of the systems which are being polled for data. This would increase BW and to a lesser extent LoL representation.
Essentially every pc bang has the hardware to run sc2.
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On May 28 2013 15:32 DeCoup wrote:
This data does not take into account the hardware of the PCs in these PC bangs. It is entirely possible that sc2 does not run on many of the systems which are being polled for data. This would increase BW and to a lesser extent LoL representation.
lol and sc2 has almost the same recommended system requirements. And it's 2013, in a first world country, that has a world class IT industry. Of course they would have 2.4ghz dual core, a 2 gig ram and 512 nvidia gforce 8800 gtx or better, that is pretty cheap to get.
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On May 28 2013 17:07 Snowbear wrote:
LoL will ALWAYS be the more popular game. Why?
1) It's FREE and the system requirements are much lower than sc2.
2) It's EASIER to understand and more CASUAL.
3) It's a TEAMGAME. You don't feel alone, and teammates can be blamed for losses
You just can't compare LoL with sc2. They are both played on the computer, but that's it.
Yes but why is BW still more popular than SC2?
It cant be only the monetizing model.
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Very interesting. I'm surprised that SC2 surpassed BW online. Nice to see it still popular in PC bang. I hope the SSL will bring back a BW hype in korea !
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Inferiority complex at work !
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I also noticed that SC2 slightly declines while BW continues to be on the same level basically.
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51629 Posts
You forget to mention that Korean servers for LoL were only released at the end of 2011 (which is why the ranking starts there). However, many, many people were already playing on the American server before the Korean rollout.
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On May 28 2013 18:14 letian wrote:
I also noticed that SC2 slightly declines while BW continues to be on the same level basically.
The real surprise is how the shift of KESPA legends like Flash, Jaedong and Bisu haven't changed the popularity of SC2. IIRC, only a month had passed between the last BW OSL and the first SC2 OSL, and the live audience difference was almost heart breaking.
The next victim in the next months/year or 2, will be KESPA. That organisation still rolls on BW numbers' sponsor money.. once those are re-signed, I can't imagine Flash deciding to be paid a fraction of what he is paid right now.
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On May 28 2013 17:57 NukeD wrote:Show nested quote +On May 28 2013 17:07 Snowbear wrote:
LoL will ALWAYS be the more popular game. Why?
1) It's FREE and the system requirements are much lower than sc2.
2) It's EASIER to understand and more CASUAL.
3) It's a TEAMGAME. You don't feel alone, and teammates can be blamed for losses
You just can't compare LoL with sc2. They are both played on the computer, but that's it. Yes but why is BW still more popular than SC2? It cant be only the monetizing model.
BW is free and has low system requirements  . And we all know that BW is still a better game. It's the best RTS ever. But: that doesn't mean sc2 is a bad game ofcourse .
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I really think both these charts are misleading when talking about the popularity of Starcraft 2, seeing how their ranks are relative to the popularity of other games.
There are several scenarios that could give the appearance of SC2 dropping in popularity in these charts, without actually meaning anything. Games from another genre such as an FPS game could gain popularity without cannibalizing on the SC2 base but instead bringing completely new players into the data. Or an already more popular game could die out and it's fanbase could be split over many other games, all of them placing above SC2 in the rankings. A combination of both would make sense to me seeing how the MOBA genre has exploded and been spread out over a number of games.
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When I was in Korea last week, I often tune into the OGN tv channel before going out or sleep. For 7 days, the only match I managed to catch was on WCS: Soulkey vs sOs. The rest of the time was them
Replaying CJ Frost vs random team LoL match. Like litereally I watched that match for 3-4 times. Even on of the pro league match days, the channel was playing LoL and I had to watch the match on YouTube. Pretty sure, there's only 1-2 esports channel and 95% of it was playing LoL. Did manage to see some yellow montage which was pretty nice in between commercials though.
Compared this to my last trip where BW was always playing, I'm fairly certain that SC2 just wouldn't last in Korea. And the only reason why BW had a following even after so many years was mainly because of Proleague IMO. Now that most of their focus are on LoL, I really can't see SC2 lasting anywhere. Don't get me wrong, sc2 is the game for me but realistically, I just don't see it surviving.
PS: The live audience of LoL matches are huge, compared to tr abysmal live audiences of PL and stream numbers.
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while I normally would just say oh hey who cares, SC2 is doing better internationally than BW ever did. It's saddening because without popularity and money in the scene, we might see less amount of Korean players playing SC2 and the general SC2 scene will just be less competitive.
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What funny is SC2 from start had better online results based on this stats.
Does it count only battle net gateways or private (FISH etc) as well?
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EPT
