For those of you in this thread who stopped watching SC2, when did you stop? I keep seeing takes about SC2 that sound very outdated and it'd be nice to know what everyone's frame of reference is when they talk about "SC2".
On March 17 2023 03:48 Slydie wrote: Ideally, game studios should not even have to bother about e-sports. Noone "owns" baseball, anyone with a ball, bat and glove can play anywhere they want.
This is the essence of the IP rights discussion. Gaming and esports has voice actors, music, sound effects, people constantly working on the game over multiple years, and more. Gaming and esports will never get here so its pointless to go down this path because it is apples and oranges.
On March 17 2023 03:48 Slydie wrote: Yes, the game studios still throw a lot of money into e-sports, but gamers is an attractive demographic which is getting older and richer, so it also offers excellent marketing possibilities if you are selling anything gaming related.
I think it was quite clear that SC2 viewership was always too low to sustain the cost of the prize pools and production. The real money was in selling the game itself, unfortunately, but I feel confident that will change in the future.
Marketers want to bring in younger gamers not older ones. Why do you think older franchises like Diablo embrace the battle pass model despite how much older gamers reject it.
There isn't a single esports broadcast that can "sustain" the cost of producing events for the game but it doesn't matter. It's just a different form of marketing for the game and not all forms of marketing can directly sustain. Many more can't even prove that they provide a greater than or equal to zero return on investment ESPECIALLY as it pertains to esports. But when the game cannot possibly make any more money, it doesn't make sense for the business to continue to invest in it.
Are you really claiming not a single e-sports event is sustainable? I am sorry, that is wrong. Sponsorships, tickets and crowd funding have funded plenty of e-sports events, including broadcast expenses. Maybe the first prize winner wont get millions, but is that even needed?
I think Blizzard messed up their role in the eco-system, trying to get a bigger piece of broadcasting and events organizing, which did not work out. Making SC2 as an e-sport first game was probably even wrong. Both for BW and WC3, most ended up playing MODs anyway, so that+the social aspect was undersold. They did do a nice job with the campaigns and at least kept the map editor, so the game was still a reasonable success after all.
For older vs newer, I think older gamers are underrated as a customer group! Maybe companies want to cater youngsters, but that does not mean they are right. Eventually, I think games should get just as diverse target audiences as movies and TV shows.
What is even the median age of forum members on TL? Probably 30+, with plenty of people 50+.
But there was no hope of there being an ecosystem that was actually sustainable for this long. The scene lasted as long as it did because Blizz was injecting tons of blizzard bucks into it. Could the region locking and whatnot been handled better? Yeah undoubtedly. But ultimately, it's a matter of viewship. If you get equal viewership for your mediocre American and Euro players as your significantly better Koreans
And I think it's clear that the majority of esports are not really a good investment. This is apparent just looking at all of the esport scenes. Overwatch League? The Guard? Just about everything is much more about breaking even than it is ever about having prospects of "profit". Maybe you could argue that The International is a success, in that it's able to sell tons of pass things and get giant prize pools. But soooo much of the esports scene's money is from early adopter investments, all hoping to establish themselves for when esports REALLY takes off (whenever that is). But in the end, it's all a bubble!
On March 16 2023 08:43 Mizenhauer wrote: Tldr without reading. The game never maintained the popularity blizzard had hoped for in korea. Other games (like lol) were more appealing. Matchfixing didn't help, but influx of new players was already dried up by that point (Last kespa draft was in 2013).
Counterpoint worth making-Region lock worked. Of the two major regions (na/eu and kr) eu and na have a fair number of younger players (late teens/early 20s) that are active in online cups and qualifiers for larger events. This might not have happened without Region lock and, given what we know, its obvious that lining the pockets of the most elite Koreans by allowing them to farm foreigners wouldn't have saved the Korean scene in any way.
Since we're in the death of Korean SC2 - region lock didn't work, it killed the Korean SC2 and was a major blow to the B-tier players. So we basically traded NA/EU for Korea, where the SC legacy actually started and was kept.
Sure, from the foreigner side it worked, but this is about the death of SC2 in Korea.
Why do you think allowing the best Korean players to stomp foreigners at wcs weekenders would have helped Korean sc2? The game wasn't very popular in korea and couldnt compete with titles like lol. new players weren't coming in long before region lock. Proleague was going to end one way or another. In fact, it would have ended earlier if Koreans suddenly started playing overseas.
All region lock did was give eu and na a chance of fostering new players, whereas as the Korean side of things had already failed to do so beyond the players who came over with kespa in 2012 (the majority of whom didn't even last until the end of proleague only 4 years later).
Most of the "esf new guys" like Maru played bw at a young age. Maru was on skt in brood war as part of one of their lower teams (this is direct from soO). The negative effects of region lock were totally overblown from start. Maybe if blizz had kept wcs as a gsl style tournament it could have been different, but south korea doesn't like sending men who haven't served in the military overseas for months at a time for any reason. (remember how hard it was for TRUE to get a visa to play in the us?)
Assuming blizz kept the hots wcs format (and now we're already far removed from reality), having b-tier Koreans win gsl style formats overseas wouldn't have helped the Korean scene either. It would have helped a few players win money, but the issues with the lack of new players, obtaining sponsors for leagues , eventual dissolution of proleague (remember proleague was a league for Korean players, sponsored by Korean companies with ads in Korean for Korean viewers) were going to occur either way. Those were "korean" problems. Having Koreans go to other countries to play wouldn't have helped that at all.
The Korean scene was always "doomed", to a degree, for a host of reasons that had nothing to do with region lock. This is coming from someone who exclusively watched Korean sc2 before working for this site and didn't care in the slightest about foreign sc2. I wrote a forum piece in 2019 about how the Korean scene was dying and addressed the lack of new players and other factors the op mentioned.
There was no saving South Korean sc2. The only reason it lasted as long as it did was because of blizzard adding money to the prize pool. The fact that the eu scene might have actually developed into something small but sustainable is remarkable considering where it was at in 2015.
I'm not denying the fact it helped the foreign community, just saying that it did NOT help the Korean scene and we're in a thread about THE KOREAN scene As such it did not work, unless the target was to kill the Korean scene. Then it worked miraculously.
The purpose of region lock was to help the other regions, it never was meant to have positive implications for korea. So yes, it worked perfectly and as intended. And it probably did not have much effect on the korean scene, since most players that returned home weren't really a factor, right? So the players "outsourced" to the other regions wouldn't have helped the korean scene an.yway
Ding ding. You hit the nail on the head. Not having region lock wouldn't have saved Korean sc2. Inevitability is a cruel mistress.
Favouring certain nationalities is actually the norm in sports, not the exception. The FIFA world cup is one example, geographical variety is valued much higher than level of competition.
For male cross country skiing, the situation is actually in the ballpark of SC2: as a Norwegian, you can be the 10th best in the world with a fair shot at a medal, but still not be allowed into to participate in the world Championship because of other Norwegians ahead of you.
Korea still got massively favored after the region lock, usually getting 50% of the spots for the global finals. That is much more than for example Europe gets for the upcoming FIFA World Championship (16 of 48), even though Europe is by far the most compettive region in football.
Yeah Korea, the only region without any region-locked tournaments, was definitely "massively favored" by the region-locking.
Reading comprehension isn't your thing, is it?
I understood what you said, it was just dumb. On the topic of reading comprehension, my point was that Korea was literally the only region which gained no benefits, only penalties, for the lock, without even their own protected tournaments.
"50% of the spots for the global finals" is only "favored" if that's more spots than there are Korean players who are at a level they should be there--which wasn't and probably still isn't the case. You can argue whether they are more or less disfavored than Europe is in the FIFA World Championship and I can then point out that Europe has a ton of "region-locked" events but, genuinely, who cares? It's an almost completely unrelated type of competition.
On March 16 2023 19:57 deacon.frost wrote: [quote] Since we're in the death of Korean SC2 - region lock didn't work, it killed the Korean SC2 and was a major blow to the B-tier players. So we basically traded NA/EU for Korea, where the SC legacy actually started and was kept.
Sure, from the foreigner side it worked, but this is about the death of SC2 in Korea.
Why do you think allowing the best Korean players to stomp foreigners at wcs weekenders would have helped Korean sc2? The game wasn't very popular in korea and couldnt compete with titles like lol. new players weren't coming in long before region lock. Proleague was going to end one way or another. In fact, it would have ended earlier if Koreans suddenly started playing overseas.
All region lock did was give eu and na a chance of fostering new players, whereas as the Korean side of things had already failed to do so beyond the players who came over with kespa in 2012 (the majority of whom didn't even last until the end of proleague only 4 years later).
Most of the "esf new guys" like Maru played bw at a young age. Maru was on skt in brood war as part of one of their lower teams (this is direct from soO). The negative effects of region lock were totally overblown from start. Maybe if blizz had kept wcs as a gsl style tournament it could have been different, but south korea doesn't like sending men who haven't served in the military overseas for months at a time for any reason. (remember how hard it was for TRUE to get a visa to play in the us?)
Assuming blizz kept the hots wcs format (and now we're already far removed from reality), having b-tier Koreans win gsl style formats overseas wouldn't have helped the Korean scene either. It would have helped a few players win money, but the issues with the lack of new players, obtaining sponsors for leagues , eventual dissolution of proleague (remember proleague was a league for Korean players, sponsored by Korean companies with ads in Korean for Korean viewers) were going to occur either way. Those were "korean" problems. Having Koreans go to other countries to play wouldn't have helped that at all.
The Korean scene was always "doomed", to a degree, for a host of reasons that had nothing to do with region lock. This is coming from someone who exclusively watched Korean sc2 before working for this site and didn't care in the slightest about foreign sc2. I wrote a forum piece in 2019 about how the Korean scene was dying and addressed the lack of new players and other factors the op mentioned.
There was no saving South Korean sc2. The only reason it lasted as long as it did was because of blizzard adding money to the prize pool. The fact that the eu scene might have actually developed into something small but sustainable is remarkable considering where it was at in 2015.
I'm not denying the fact it helped the foreign community, just saying that it did NOT help the Korean scene and we're in a thread about THE KOREAN scene As such it did not work, unless the target was to kill the Korean scene. Then it worked miraculously.
The purpose of region lock was to help the other regions, it never was meant to have positive implications for korea. So yes, it worked perfectly and as intended. And it probably did not have much effect on the korean scene, since most players that returned home weren't really a factor, right? So the players "outsourced" to the other regions wouldn't have helped the korean scene an.yway
Ding ding. You hit the nail on the head. Not having region lock wouldn't have saved Korean sc2. Inevitability is a cruel mistress.
Favouring certain nationalities is actually the norm in sports, not the exception. The FIFA world cup is one example, geographical variety is valued much higher than level of competition.
For male cross country skiing, the situation is actually in the ballpark of SC2: as a Norwegian, you can be the 10th best in the world with a fair shot at a medal, but still not be allowed into to participate in the world Championship because of other Norwegians ahead of you.
Korea still got massively favored after the region lock, usually getting 50% of the spots for the global finals. That is much more than for example Europe gets for the upcoming FIFA World Championship (16 of 48), even though Europe is by far the most compettive region in football.
Yeah Korea, the only region without any region-locked tournaments, was definitely "massively favored" by the region-locking.
Reading comprehension isn't your thing, is it?
I understood what you said, it was just dumb. On the topic of reading comprehension, my point was that Korea was literally the only region which gained no benefits, only penalties, for the lock, without even their own protected tournaments.
"50% of the spots for the global finals" is only "favored" if that's more spots than there are Korean players who are at a level they should be there--which wasn't and probably still isn't the case. You can argue whether they are more or less disfavored than Europe is in the FIFA World Championship and I can then point out that Europe has a ton of "region-locked" events but, genuinely, who cares? It's an almost completely unrelated type of competition.
People opened the topic if region lock "helped" Korea. Which it of course didn't. But it was also never the point of it helping Korea. After that we talked about how favoring nations in sports was quite the norm, which I confirmed, but pointed out that Korea still got favored compared to the rest of the world. I never said region lock itself favored Korea.
On March 17 2023 03:48 Slydie wrote: Ideally, game studios should not even have to bother about e-sports. Noone "owns" baseball, anyone with a ball, bat and glove can play anywhere they want.
This is the essence of the IP rights discussion. Gaming and esports has voice actors, music, sound effects, people constantly working on the game over multiple years, and more. Gaming and esports will never get here so its pointless to go down this path because it is apples and oranges.
On March 17 2023 03:48 Slydie wrote: Yes, the game studios still throw a lot of money into e-sports, but gamers is an attractive demographic which is getting older and richer, so it also offers excellent marketing possibilities if you are selling anything gaming related.
I think it was quite clear that SC2 viewership was always too low to sustain the cost of the prize pools and production. The real money was in selling the game itself, unfortunately, but I feel confident that will change in the future.
Marketers want to bring in younger gamers not older ones. Why do you think older franchises like Diablo embrace the battle pass model despite how much older gamers reject it.
There isn't a single esports broadcast that can "sustain" the cost of producing events for the game but it doesn't matter. It's just a different form of marketing for the game and not all forms of marketing can directly sustain. Many more can't even prove that they provide a greater than or equal to zero return on investment ESPECIALLY as it pertains to esports. But when the game cannot possibly make any more money, it doesn't make sense for the business to continue to invest in it.
Are you really claiming not a single e-sports event is sustainable? I am sorry, that is wrong. Sponsorships, tickets and crowd funding have funded plenty of e-sports events, including broadcast expenses. Maybe the first prize winner wont get millions, but is that even needed?
I think Blizzard messed up their role in the eco-system, trying to get a bigger piece of broadcasting and events organizing, which did not work out. Making SC2 as an e-sport first game was probably even wrong. Both for BW and WC3, most ended up playing MODs anyway, so that+the social aspect was undersold. They did do a nice job with the campaigns and at least kept the map editor, so the game was still a reasonable success after all.
For older vs newer, I think older gamers are underrated as a customer group! Maybe companies want to cater youngsters, but that does not mean they are right. Eventually, I think games should get just as diverse target audiences as movies and TV shows.
What is even the median age of forum members on TL? Probably 30+, with plenty of people 50+.
But there was no hope of there being an ecosystem that was actually sustainable for this long. The scene lasted as long as it did because Blizz was injecting tons of blizzard bucks into it. Could the region locking and whatnot been handled better? Yeah undoubtedly. But ultimately, it's a matter of viewship. If you get equal viewership for your mediocre American and Euro players as your significantly better Koreans
And I think it's clear that the majority of esports are not really a good investment. This is apparent just looking at all of the esport scenes. Overwatch League? The Guard? Just about everything is much more about breaking even than it is ever about having prospects of "profit". Maybe you could argue that The International is a success, in that it's able to sell tons of pass things and get giant prize pools. But soooo much of the esports scene's money is from early adopter investments, all hoping to establish themselves for when esports REALLY takes off (whenever that is). But in the end, it's all a bubble!
What has taken off, and is sustainable, is Twitch streaming. The personal interaction between streamer and viewer along with gaming content just works.
Watching computer graphics will probably never be quite as engaging as real sports. The streamer and tournament watching audiences overlap, but I'd imagine a lot more hours are sunk into live streams.
On March 20 2023 11:01 StasisField wrote: For those of you in this thread who stopped watching SC2, when did you stop? I keep seeing takes about SC2 that sound very outdated and it'd be nice to know what everyone's frame of reference is when they talk about "SC2".
I think as you get older priorities change and time becomes an increasingly mined out resource like the last gas base in a late-game match. It became a little harder for me to watch once we lost some big personalities who I held dear to me such as TotalBiscuit and Incontrol and I played less and less after that. For me, SC2 was NASL, Nestea's epic run, Scarlett vs Bomber, Day9 dailies, Life going on a tear, MC, Idra, Huk, Stephano. I stopped playing shortly after Legacy of the Void.
Why do you think allowing the best Korean players to stomp foreigners at wcs weekenders would have helped Korean sc2? The game wasn't very popular in korea and couldnt compete with titles like lol. new players weren't coming in long before region lock. Proleague was going to end one way or another. In fact, it would have ended earlier if Koreans suddenly started playing overseas.
All region lock did was give eu and na a chance of fostering new players, whereas as the Korean side of things had already failed to do so beyond the players who came over with kespa in 2012 (the majority of whom didn't even last until the end of proleague only 4 years later).
Most of the "esf new guys" like Maru played bw at a young age. Maru was on skt in brood war as part of one of their lower teams (this is direct from soO). The negative effects of region lock were totally overblown from start. Maybe if blizz had kept wcs as a gsl style tournament it could have been different, but south korea doesn't like sending men who haven't served in the military overseas for months at a time for any reason. (remember how hard it was for TRUE to get a visa to play in the us?)
Assuming blizz kept the hots wcs format (and now we're already far removed from reality), having b-tier Koreans win gsl style formats overseas wouldn't have helped the Korean scene either. It would have helped a few players win money, but the issues with the lack of new players, obtaining sponsors for leagues , eventual dissolution of proleague (remember proleague was a league for Korean players, sponsored by Korean companies with ads in Korean for Korean viewers) were going to occur either way. Those were "korean" problems. Having Koreans go to other countries to play wouldn't have helped that at all.
The Korean scene was always "doomed", to a degree, for a host of reasons that had nothing to do with region lock. This is coming from someone who exclusively watched Korean sc2 before working for this site and didn't care in the slightest about foreign sc2. I wrote a forum piece in 2019 about how the Korean scene was dying and addressed the lack of new players and other factors the op mentioned.
There was no saving South Korean sc2. The only reason it lasted as long as it did was because of blizzard adding money to the prize pool. The fact that the eu scene might have actually developed into something small but sustainable is remarkable considering where it was at in 2015.
I'm not denying the fact it helped the foreign community, just saying that it did NOT help the Korean scene and we're in a thread about THE KOREAN scene As such it did not work, unless the target was to kill the Korean scene. Then it worked miraculously.
The purpose of region lock was to help the other regions, it never was meant to have positive implications for korea. So yes, it worked perfectly and as intended. And it probably did not have much effect on the korean scene, since most players that returned home weren't really a factor, right? So the players "outsourced" to the other regions wouldn't have helped the korean scene an.yway
Ding ding. You hit the nail on the head. Not having region lock wouldn't have saved Korean sc2. Inevitability is a cruel mistress.
Favouring certain nationalities is actually the norm in sports, not the exception. The FIFA world cup is one example, geographical variety is valued much higher than level of competition.
For male cross country skiing, the situation is actually in the ballpark of SC2: as a Norwegian, you can be the 10th best in the world with a fair shot at a medal, but still not be allowed into to participate in the world Championship because of other Norwegians ahead of you.
Korea still got massively favored after the region lock, usually getting 50% of the spots for the global finals. That is much more than for example Europe gets for the upcoming FIFA World Championship (16 of 48), even though Europe is by far the most compettive region in football.
Yeah Korea, the only region without any region-locked tournaments, was definitely "massively favored" by the region-locking.
Reading comprehension isn't your thing, is it?
I understood what you said, it was just dumb. On the topic of reading comprehension, my point was that Korea was literally the only region which gained no benefits, only penalties, for the lock, without even their own protected tournaments.
"50% of the spots for the global finals" is only "favored" if that's more spots than there are Korean players who are at a level they should be there--which wasn't and probably still isn't the case. You can argue whether they are more or less disfavored than Europe is in the FIFA World Championship and I can then point out that Europe has a ton of "region-locked" events but, genuinely, who cares? It's an almost completely unrelated type of competition.
People opened the topic if region lock "helped" Korea. Which it of course didn't. But it was also never the point of it helping Korea. After that we talked about how favoring nations in sports was quite the norm, which I confirmed, but pointed out that Korea still got favored compared to the rest of the world. I never said region lock itself favored Korea.
That's more reasonable than what you seemed to say previously, though I still take issue with the idea of this sort of lock being the norm in sports. It's sort of the norm in internationally popular team sports, which SC isn't. A better comparison would be something like chess, or singles tennis, or golf--for international competitions (outside of the Olympics, which are very much their own thing), it would be pretty unusual for those competitions to have a hard limit on participation based on nationality.
And a setup wherein South Korean players could end up with literally no slots (as GSL is and always has been open to all competitors and is the only real source of points for them), a risk no other region has, is not, even under rather tenuous technicalities, "favored compared to the rest of the world." They have a worse deal, and the only reason the consequences of that haven't been see is that any international player able to get into a qualifying spot via Korea easily dominates their home region and so qualifies that way.
On March 17 2023 19:04 deacon.frost wrote: [quote] I'm not denying the fact it helped the foreign community, just saying that it did NOT help the Korean scene and we're in a thread about THE KOREAN scene As such it did not work, unless the target was to kill the Korean scene. Then it worked miraculously.
The purpose of region lock was to help the other regions, it never was meant to have positive implications for korea. So yes, it worked perfectly and as intended. And it probably did not have much effect on the korean scene, since most players that returned home weren't really a factor, right? So the players "outsourced" to the other regions wouldn't have helped the korean scene an.yway
Ding ding. You hit the nail on the head. Not having region lock wouldn't have saved Korean sc2. Inevitability is a cruel mistress.
Favouring certain nationalities is actually the norm in sports, not the exception. The FIFA world cup is one example, geographical variety is valued much higher than level of competition.
For male cross country skiing, the situation is actually in the ballpark of SC2: as a Norwegian, you can be the 10th best in the world with a fair shot at a medal, but still not be allowed into to participate in the world Championship because of other Norwegians ahead of you.
Korea still got massively favored after the region lock, usually getting 50% of the spots for the global finals. That is much more than for example Europe gets for the upcoming FIFA World Championship (16 of 48), even though Europe is by far the most compettive region in football.
Yeah Korea, the only region without any region-locked tournaments, was definitely "massively favored" by the region-locking.
Reading comprehension isn't your thing, is it?
I understood what you said, it was just dumb. On the topic of reading comprehension, my point was that Korea was literally the only region which gained no benefits, only penalties, for the lock, without even their own protected tournaments.
"50% of the spots for the global finals" is only "favored" if that's more spots than there are Korean players who are at a level they should be there--which wasn't and probably still isn't the case. You can argue whether they are more or less disfavored than Europe is in the FIFA World Championship and I can then point out that Europe has a ton of "region-locked" events but, genuinely, who cares? It's an almost completely unrelated type of competition.
People opened the topic if region lock "helped" Korea. Which it of course didn't. But it was also never the point of it helping Korea. After that we talked about how favoring nations in sports was quite the norm, which I confirmed, but pointed out that Korea still got favored compared to the rest of the world. I never said region lock itself favored Korea.
That's more reasonable than what you seemed to say previously, though I still take issue with the idea of this sort of lock being the norm in sports. It's sort of the norm in internationally popular team sports, which SC isn't. A better comparison would be something like chess, or singles tennis, or golf--for international competitions (outside of the Olympics, which are very much their own thing), it would be pretty unusual for those competitions to have a hard limit on participation based on nationality.
And a setup wherein South Korean players could end up with literally no slots (as GSL is and always has been open to all competitors and is the only real source of points for them), a risk no other region has, is not, even under rather tenuous technicalities, "favored compared to the rest of the world." They have a worse deal, and the only reason the consequences of that haven't been see is that any international player able to get into a qualifying spot via Korea easily dominates their home region and so qualifies that way.
Well, ski was mentioned as an example, though I'm not too much into winter sports. No idea how good that comparison is.
The korean scene did not suffer through region lock. If anything, it got stronger because all players had to return and fight for a spot. We talk about the scene here, not korean players - for them it was ofc a bad deal, since players that dominated international didn't do anything in GSL. But for the sustain of the game it was important that the international competition was protected and not a welfare program for players that couldn't cut it in GSL. If your mentioned scenario would have come to place, that international players would have swarmed GSL and consistently taken away korean slots - what makes you think there wouldn't have been a change? Honestly, if international players could steamroll through GSL in a large number (like six out of eight slots going to foreigners or something like that) you wouldn't need a korean region anymore. Korea is without a doubt the strongest region, but it also gets a lot of slots for that. If it wasn't the strongest region, you wouldn't need to waste eight slots on it, you could have just put it together with Taiwan and Japan or something like that. A trend we probably (hopefully) will see with the next iteration of the World Championships, because that skeleton of a GSL doesn't really deserve to get 50% of slots
On March 17 2023 03:48 Slydie wrote: Ideally, game studios should not even have to bother about e-sports. Noone "owns" baseball, anyone with a ball, bat and glove can play anywhere they want.
This is the essence of the IP rights discussion. Gaming and esports has voice actors, music, sound effects, people constantly working on the game over multiple years, and more. Gaming and esports will never get here so its pointless to go down this path because it is apples and oranges.
On March 17 2023 03:48 Slydie wrote: Yes, the game studios still throw a lot of money into e-sports, but gamers is an attractive demographic which is getting older and richer, so it also offers excellent marketing possibilities if you are selling anything gaming related.
I think it was quite clear that SC2 viewership was always too low to sustain the cost of the prize pools and production. The real money was in selling the game itself, unfortunately, but I feel confident that will change in the future.
Marketers want to bring in younger gamers not older ones. Why do you think older franchises like Diablo embrace the battle pass model despite how much older gamers reject it.
There isn't a single esports broadcast that can "sustain" the cost of producing events for the game but it doesn't matter. It's just a different form of marketing for the game and not all forms of marketing can directly sustain. Many more can't even prove that they provide a greater than or equal to zero return on investment ESPECIALLY as it pertains to esports. But when the game cannot possibly make any more money, it doesn't make sense for the business to continue to invest in it.
Are you really claiming not a single e-sports event is sustainable? I am sorry, that is wrong. Sponsorships, tickets and crowd funding have funded plenty of e-sports events, including broadcast expenses. Maybe the first prize winner wont get millions, but is that even needed?
I think Blizzard messed up their role in the eco-system, trying to get a bigger piece of broadcasting and events organizing, which did not work out. Making SC2 as an e-sport first game was probably even wrong. Both for BW and WC3, most ended up playing MODs anyway, so that+the social aspect was undersold. They did do a nice job with the campaigns and at least kept the map editor, so the game was still a reasonable success after all.
For older vs newer, I think older gamers are underrated as a customer group! Maybe companies want to cater youngsters, but that does not mean they are right. Eventually, I think games should get just as diverse target audiences as movies and TV shows.
What is even the median age of forum members on TL? Probably 30+, with plenty of people 50+.
But there was no hope of there being an ecosystem that was actually sustainable for this long. The scene lasted as long as it did because Blizz was injecting tons of blizzard bucks into it. Could the region locking and whatnot been handled better? Yeah undoubtedly. But ultimately, it's a matter of viewship. If you get equal viewership for your mediocre American and Euro players as your significantly better Koreans
And I think it's clear that the majority of esports are not really a good investment. This is apparent just looking at all of the esport scenes. Overwatch League? The Guard? Just about everything is much more about breaking even than it is ever about having prospects of "profit". Maybe you could argue that The International is a success, in that it's able to sell tons of pass things and get giant prize pools. But soooo much of the esports scene's money is from early adopter investments, all hoping to establish themselves for when esports REALLY takes off (whenever that is). But in the end, it's all a bubble!
What has taken off, and is sustainable, is Twitch streaming. The personal interaction between streamer and viewer along with gaming content just works.
Watching computer graphics will probably never be quite as engaging as real sports. The streamer and tournament watching audiences overlap, but I'd imagine a lot more hours are sunk into live streams.
But what has become really clear with Twitch streaming is that it's over-saturated. You can just look at Starcraft 2 streamers and its obvious none of them except for the big casters and some of the faves could ever possibly have a career doing only that. I watch a ton of well known players from different games, and they probably aren't making minimum wage off of streaming. 200-500 subs (which is probably top 0.1% of consistent streamers) is still only $500-$1250 a month. Maybe another $500 a month from ad revenue, another $500 a month from donations. And that's just $2000 a month? $24k a year, from basically full-time streaming...
In the end, there just isn't enough viewership for everyone when so many people are making content. But the ones who make it big, like Ludwig and xQc and Ninja, are all doing very well for themselves. Funny seeing a person from the Smash community actually strike it rich.
Let's just be honest. Professional SC2 simply pales in comparison to BW purely entertainment wise for the viewer.
Yes, SC2 was mechanically alot easier to play for us mortals, campaign was decent with good graphics uplift. I tried to get into SC2 but as OP mentioned, there was absolutely no magic in it.
On March 20 2023 11:01 StasisField wrote: For those of you in this thread who stopped watching SC2, when did you stop? I keep seeing takes about SC2 that sound very outdated and it'd be nice to know what everyone's frame of reference is when they talk about "SC2".
I watched religiously until about 2012. Then life got me busy but I still followed the scene and would at least tune into big tournaments to a greater or lesser degree. I didn't really completely lose interest until maybe 2018. And then I just would check TL every now and then to see what was going on. Lately, YouTube has been recommending me some SC2 and BW ASL, and there's just something more engaging about BW.
Edit:
People opened the topic if region lock "helped" Korea. Which it of course didn't. But it was also never the point of it helping Korea. After that we talked about how favoring nations in sports was quite the norm, which I confirmed, but pointed out that Korea still got favored compared to the rest of the world. I never said region lock itself favored Korea.
YouTube JUST recommended me this video -- seems relevant:
On March 21 2023 04:30 lannisport wrote: I stopped playing shortly after Legacy of the Void.
SC2 really came into its own with the LotV expansion. Less minerals per base... higher starting worker count... etc etc. It made SC2 almost a perfect combo of SC1 and C&C.
The first minute of SC1 matches is just too slow paced for my taste. Despite that, I'd still rate SC1 as the 2nd best RTS ever made.
On March 17 2023 19:04 deacon.frost wrote: [quote] I'm not denying the fact it helped the foreign community, just saying that it did NOT help the Korean scene and we're in a thread about THE KOREAN scene As such it did not work, unless the target was to kill the Korean scene. Then it worked miraculously.
The purpose of region lock was to help the other regions, it never was meant to have positive implications for korea. So yes, it worked perfectly and as intended. And it probably did not have much effect on the korean scene, since most players that returned home weren't really a factor, right? So the players "outsourced" to the other regions wouldn't have helped the korean scene an.yway
Ding ding. You hit the nail on the head. Not having region lock wouldn't have saved Korean sc2. Inevitability is a cruel mistress.
Favouring certain nationalities is actually the norm in sports, not the exception. The FIFA world cup is one example, geographical variety is valued much higher than level of competition.
For male cross country skiing, the situation is actually in the ballpark of SC2: as a Norwegian, you can be the 10th best in the world with a fair shot at a medal, but still not be allowed into to participate in the world Championship because of other Norwegians ahead of you.
Korea still got massively favored after the region lock, usually getting 50% of the spots for the global finals. That is much more than for example Europe gets for the upcoming FIFA World Championship (16 of 48), even though Europe is by far the most compettive region in football.
Yeah Korea, the only region without any region-locked tournaments, was definitely "massively favored" by the region-locking.
Reading comprehension isn't your thing, is it?
I understood what you said, it was just dumb. On the topic of reading comprehension, my point was that Korea was literally the only region which gained no benefits, only penalties, for the lock, without even their own protected tournaments.
"50% of the spots for the global finals" is only "favored" if that's more spots than there are Korean players who are at a level they should be there--which wasn't and probably still isn't the case. You can argue whether they are more or less disfavored than Europe is in the FIFA World Championship and I can then point out that Europe has a ton of "region-locked" events but, genuinely, who cares? It's an almost completely unrelated type of competition.
People opened the topic if region lock "helped" Korea. Which it of course didn't. But it was also never the point of it helping Korea. After that we talked about how favoring nations in sports was quite the norm, which I confirmed, but pointed out that Korea still got favored compared to the rest of the world. I never said region lock itself favored Korea.
That's more reasonable than what you seemed to say previously, though I still take issue with the idea of this sort of lock being the norm in sports. It's sort of the norm in internationally popular team sports, which SC isn't. A better comparison would be something like chess, or singles tennis, or golf--for international competitions (outside of the Olympics, which are very much their own thing), it would be pretty unusual for those competitions to have a hard limit on participation based on nationality.
And a setup wherein South Korean players could end up with literally no slots (as GSL is and always has been open to all competitors and is the only real source of points for them), a risk no other region has, is not, even under rather tenuous technicalities, "favored compared to the rest of the world." They have a worse deal, and the only reason the consequences of that haven't been see is that any international player able to get into a qualifying spot via Korea easily dominates their home region and so qualifies that way.
Individual athletes from one nation are rarely allowed to flood the big international competitions, so limiting the numbers per nation to secure diversity is the norm afaik. Long distance runners from East Africa and sprinters from USA/Jamaica are 2 examples, but it is probably more extreme with winter sports.
EPT
As such it did not work, unless the target was to kill the Korean scene. Then it worked miraculously.
