EPTSC2 in Korea: content problem or doomed at start? - Page 2
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JJH777
United States4418 Posts
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jinjin5000
United States1510 Posts
On March 14 2024 10:35 Waxangel wrote: Personally I don't think there's any sort of chicken-egg dilemma regarding games and their surrounding content. The popularity of a game drives content, period. If lots of people play a game, then lots of people will be interested in the surrounding content, whether that's streams, youtube videos, or esports. (I will say that influencer content DOES play a part in discovery/marketing, but the fundamental 'fun-ness' of a game and its ability to retain players is that matters. What percent of paid-influencer sessions for games actually succeed?) SC2 supports one full-time content guy right now in the form of Crank; I think that's about the saturation point considering its popularity (or lack thereof) in the country. Even if there is some undersaturation in KR for SC2 content, I gotta think it's by like 1~2 more guys MAX (consider the # of non-English creators in YOUR country for SC2). Would it not possible the pie grow with successful/attractive enough streamers? Players like Rain or MC certainly had potential to be big regardless of what game they played with their persona and could have grown their own audience | ||
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WombaT
Northern Ireland26815 Posts
On March 14 2024 14:07 jinjin5000 wrote: Would it not possible the pie grow with successful/attractive enough streamers? Players like Rain or MC certainly had potential to be big regardless of what game they played with their persona and could have grown their own audience Perhaps, but then we’re kind of talking variety/general streamers who dip into SC2 versus SC2 streamers if you get me. For me a lot of content that’s popular in SC2 is very tied into the competitive game. From tournaments which are the real bread and butter (and numbers of a tournament versus streamers somewhat attest to this), and a lot of popular content by content creators on YouTube feeds into this too. Tournament casts are pretty popular and analysis, I’d say guides are very popular because a lot of the audience still aspires to get better at the competitive game. Stuff like patch analysis is also pretty popular, either through interest in takes or folks again interested in getting some early analysis that would give them a leg up in their own play. If there’s maybe three categories that are popular that remain, the first is top players doing troll builds, that’s certainly got an audience. And having a pro analyse community-contributed games is also popular, such as Harstem’s ‘Is it Imba Or Do I suck?’ which I think is a great watch, you sometimes get a good laugh but he also gives great advice on what you should be doing. The last are salt streams, which definitely I think have some appeal, although one has to give oneself wholly to the salt. It’s not like Korea has no historic SC2 audience whatsoever, so these avenues could maybe have been explored to that domestic audience. But it is somewhat predominately foreign, and off the top of my head it’s maybe only Solar who has good enough English to emulate something like Harstem’s ‘Is it Imba or Do I Suck?’ to any real degree. A Parting or an MC have decent enough English to do an entertaining play stream for sure I also don’t think the SC2 audience in the West is all that younger than the BW audience really. Maybe a little but not hugely. And I think it broadly likes to see some high level StarCraft, with some stakes to it. Or if not, stuff that helps them get better at the game. So I’m not sure, for example that there’d be a huge amount of interest in something like the SC college scene one has in BW currently. Others may disagree! I think the audience skews old enough that seeing ladies coached wouldn’t massively interest a bunch of old fathers and married fucks haha. For that kind of content to maybe work in the foreign market it would need to be perhaps something like raw talent with pro potential being groomed to fulfill it. | ||
afreecaTV.Char
United States339 Posts
On March 14 2024 12:07 JJH777 wrote: Do current BW streamers ever get harassed by Blizzard for portions of their profits or over licensing for events? I feel like Blizzard gave up on profiting off BW (besides the profit they already made from sales) a long time ago while they've still been trying to squeeze every drop out of SC2 until the last few years or so and even now I doubt anyone could run any type of large scale tournament without being harassed by them. I think SC2 (and Melee TT) would be in a much stronger place without all that BS. I've never heard of Blizzard going after an individual streamer or small tournament organizer, at least not directly. I think it would be an incredibly unpopular move. | ||
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Balnazza
Germany1286 Posts
On March 15 2024 01:57 afreecaTV.Char wrote: I've never heard of Blizzard going after an individual streamer or small tournament organizer, at least not directly. I think it would be an incredibly unpopular move. He probably refers to the fact that every big-ish tournament has to be cleared with Blizzard first - but that is what everyone in the industry does and I can't remember the last time this even was a topic...maybe right at the very beginning, when this sorta thing was new idk | ||
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WGT-Baal
France3484 Posts
On March 15 2024 01:57 afreecaTV.Char wrote: I've never heard of Blizzard going after an individual streamer or small tournament organizer, at least not directly. I think it would be an incredibly unpopular move. no they did it a lot in WOL. The first LANs in France were crippled with problems, even after clearing the event with blizzard their server would see 30+ connections from one event and lock them out, it was standard to start 4-5hrs late every time for like the first 6months to a year. It was shambolic. We d have bw on usb stick to pass the time. It did get better though | ||
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Nasigil
137 Posts
On March 14 2024 06:40 Balnazza wrote: I think it is often overlooked (in a weird way) that when we talk about BW, we talk about one country and one scene alone. Yes, BW survived throughout the ages - in Korea. And while SC2 was popular in Korea as long as it was popular on a global scale, that interest dwindled over time. BW however stayed popular..but again, only in Korea, which isn't surprising considering the legacy it has there. There is actualy somewhat (though on a smaller scale) of a twin to this: Age of Empires 1 (yes, 1) popularity in Vietnam. For some reason AoE1, even long before it got its Remastered and then the "translation" into AoE 2, was and is extremly popular in Vietnam. So popular, that when RedBull did its whole "we basically get together every pro from every AoE-game"-tournament, the entire AoE 1 tourney was just Vietnamese. There are some AoE 2 players from Vietnam aswell, but they are fewer and far less relevant (except for ACCM maybe). The same can be applied for BroodWar, even before SC2: Of course BroodWar was this massive thing in Korea, but on a global scale, it was basically a pocket. Yes, there was of course international BW competition, but it was much smaller compared to Warcraft 3 (again, globally). But BW was much more popular in Korea than WC3 (in part through the MBC-scandal), so it "survived" through that aswell. Maybe the entire thing isn't so complicated and can just be summed up with this: There is a substantial, though I believe not growing, number of koreans who just love BW over anything else. And these guys and gals will stay with the game come what may. And that is the entire "secret". Similar thing to AOE1 in Vietnam, another example is Red Alert 2 in China. There's an entire generation of Chinese born in the 90s grew up and hit middle school in early 2000s when PC first popularized in China, and their first exposure to RTS games was C&C: Red Alert 2 released in 2000. That game just become part of collective memory of the generation, it still has a massive following on streaming and video platforms in China now, probably more than WC3 and SC2 combined. Some games just established themselves in certain communities in the right place and right time and it's just almost impossible to uproot it. | ||
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jinjin5000
United States1510 Posts
On March 14 2024 18:06 WombaT wrote: Perhaps, but then we’re kind of talking variety/general streamers who dip into SC2 versus SC2 streamers if you get me. For me a lot of content that’s popular in SC2 is very tied into the competitive game. From tournaments which are the real bread and butter (and numbers of a tournament versus streamers somewhat attest to this), and a lot of popular content by content creators on YouTube feeds into this too. Tournament casts are pretty popular and analysis, I’d say guides are very popular because a lot of the audience still aspires to get better at the competitive game. Stuff like patch analysis is also pretty popular, either through interest in takes or folks again interested in getting some early analysis that would give them a leg up in their own play. If there’s maybe three categories that are popular that remain, the first is top players doing troll builds, that’s certainly got an audience. And having a pro analyse community-contributed games is also popular, such as Harstem’s ‘Is it Imba Or Do I suck?’ which I think is a great watch, you sometimes get a good laugh but he also gives great advice on what you should be doing. The last are salt streams, which definitely I think have some appeal, although one has to give oneself wholly to the salt. It’s not like Korea has no historic SC2 audience whatsoever, so these avenues could maybe have been explored to that domestic audience. But it is somewhat predominately foreign, and off the top of my head it’s maybe only Solar who has good enough English to emulate something like Harstem’s ‘Is it Imba or Do I Suck?’ to any real degree. A Parting or an MC have decent enough English to do an entertaining play stream for sure I also don’t think the SC2 audience in the West is all that younger than the BW audience really. Maybe a little but not hugely. And I think it broadly likes to see some high level StarCraft, with some stakes to it. Or if not, stuff that helps them get better at the game. So I’m not sure, for example that there’d be a huge amount of interest in something like the SC college scene one has in BW currently. Others may disagree! I think the audience skews old enough that seeing ladies coached wouldn’t massively interest a bunch of old fathers and married fucks haha. For that kind of content to maybe work in the foreign market it would need to be perhaps something like raw talent with pro potential being groomed to fulfill it. It's pretty tricky for SC2 progamers streaming because they have to split between english-speakign audience, whcih make up majority of the SC2 supporters, and Korean audience, which really has greatest potential for their own stream-growth partly due to language barrier. However, I think people like MC and Rain in particular have their own flair enough to grow their own following/pie, kind of like how artosis is for BW for foreign scene, a big streamer that carries large part of viewer/audience in scene. And BW with streamers like Terror/britney/Sea ect showed blueprint of how to transition that into overall scene success- while BW has lot more advantages due to it being a national sensation beforehand, SC2 had its own advantages in that it still had peak progamers fresh off of proleague disbanding (instead of no name streamers who had to make something from nothing in BW) and fresh fans/audience from freshly disbanded proleague in 2016/17. | ||
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Shinokuki
United States923 Posts
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coloursheep
China497 Posts
On March 14 2024 05:07 jinjin5000 wrote: There was small audience for SC2 in Korea; but that doesn't mean it had to stay that way. Maybe it got to that point precisely because there were lack of content to retain/grow said audience. Viewers, however small, still had active viewers through proleague however small. This is more of advantage to start with than no-namers C-teamer streamers who started the current BW wave (Britney, Terror, Larva, ect - you can include people like Pusan after) Rain and MC were able to carve out large following through their own personality. MC in particular had a successful youtube series and then transitioned into BW after. Maybe had they went on with SC2 and SC2 environment was more welcoming to this kind of thing (instead of past and current individual streams), maybe future could have looked a lot different. What is MC doing these days? Is still follow him on twitter but he basically never posts. The last thing I saw him in was the old school player tournament in SA. | ||
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Creager
Germany1925 Posts
On March 14 2024 10:35 Waxangel wrote: Personally I don't think there's any sort of chicken-egg dilemma regarding games and their surrounding content. The popularity of a game drives content, period. If lots of people play a game, then lots of people will be interested in the surrounding content, whether that's streams, youtube videos, or esports. (I will say that influencer content DOES play a part in discovery/marketing, but the fundamental 'fun-ness' of a game and its ability to retain players is that matters. What percent of paid-influencer sessions for games actually succeed?) SC2 supports one full-time content guy right now in the form of Crank; I think that's about the saturation point considering its popularity (or lack thereof) in the country. Even if there is some undersaturation in KR for SC2 content, I gotta think it's by like 1~2 more guys MAX (consider the # of non-English creators in YOUR country for SC2). Just focussing on the tournament aspect here, so how about grassroots? All the historical importance on esports and Korean culture aside, is BW healthy enough with a constant influx of fresh blood to keep going? For the most part in the professional department what we can witness now is SC2 players (who often seem to have BW background anyway) switching back to the old game, but I don't really see a lot of up and coming young players, but since I'm also not following BW closely, this could just be misperception on my part. A somewhat big part of popular BW streamers seems to be just hanging out with some friends/other streamers/fellow players, order food, eat, chat, so I wonder how much part the actual game really takes in all that? Is it mostly memberberries, so a nostalgia-thing for an older audience? Would be really interesting to know as unfortunately I don't understand what they're talking about whenever I take a look. | ||
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jinjin5000
United States1510 Posts
On March 17 2024 13:56 coloursheep wrote: What is MC doing these days? Is still follow him on twitter but he basically never posts. The last thing I saw him in was the old school player tournament in SA. he plays for SC uni team JSA and streams BW | ||
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iRkSupperman
Norway140 Posts
On March 17 2024 13:56 coloursheep wrote: What is MC doing these days? Is still follow him on twitter but he basically never posts. The last thing I saw him in was the old school player tournament in SA. He's very high level in BW and streams that actively on Afreeca. A bit below ASL ro24 level but very strong. | ||
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coloursheep
China497 Posts
On March 17 2024 18:06 jinjin5000 wrote: he plays for SC uni team JSA and streams BW Thanks. I see the person below you said he's just below top 25 level. What about his stream, is it popular? Can you post the link to his channel? | ||
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jinjin5000
United States1510 Posts
On March 17 2024 20:44 coloursheep wrote: Thanks. I see the person below you said he's just below top 25 level. What about his stream, is it popular? Can you post the link to his channel? He's kinda bit farther away from top 25, maybe top 90-110 https://bj.afreecatv.com/jmc06170 | ||
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