Kennigit talks eSports

“I'm part-time student and full-time eSports or full time-student, part-time eSports depending on the week”

“I started watching StarCraft at the beginning of the year [2006] and during one event, it was Tasteless' first casting event, and he'd mentioned that he was worried that he was going to get flamed on this site called Teamliquid and I looked into it, googled it a little bit, found out what it was and got hooked immediately!”

“It was probably around 2002 that I played it. I played Single Player, cheated through Single Player didn't really get too much into Multiplayer [...]”

“It is a completely different feel, when I play Brood War single player now I get super nostalgic [...]”

“[...] I found it [Brood War] got a lot more emotion out of me than some of the StarCraft II stuff even though it's a huge cinematic experience [...]”

“As far as becoming Marketing Manager goes, I still focus on a lot of other things and I think most of our jobs require that. [...] It's a lot of business decisions and a lot of business talking and figuring out our strategies for things [...]”

“For most teams I think the majority of it comes from pure sponsorship dollars and I think a lot of teams are making a conscious effort trying to move away from that because it's not really sustainable.”

“I think in the future what you are going to see a big focus on is that we all will still have sponsors but it won't be as heavy a reliance on it”

“When we designed that shirt, we actually made a massive mistake...”

“With the new stuff we are going to be doing for the team and the site the tournaround time and the production will be a lot shorter”

“We made a conscious decision at one point to focus on the horse brand, the horse logo...”

“I believe Pay-Per-View isn't for every league but in general there needs to be more money coming into the scene and less money leaving it and one of the ways to do that is Pay-Per-View. I am pretty open to it!”

“Not for sometime and I'll tell you why...”

“There's been a lot of polls and a lot of discourse amongst the community about what's the right way to do it and what I would feel comfortable doing. I don't really take that too much value. Yeah, you have to take the community's opinion into consideration but if you go based on what the people in the community say, these organizations simply won't exist and also I think people aren't necessarily honest with themselves...”

“I don't think you can make business decisions based on that, and that's not a Teamliquid opinion, this is just me.”

“There is only going to be a change when content providers force a change...”

“eSports is pretty unique, In no other Sport is it where you can have such direct access to executives of these companies […] Imagine Jerry Jones from the Dallas Cowboys getting on a message board and you tell him 'No man, you're killing football!' [...]”

“Fans vote with their wallet, fans don't vote verbally. If you go and buy it you've told the content provider it was successful. So if 20.000 people buy MLG the community has told MLG it is a good thing...”

“I don't think everybody is going to switch over to Pay-Per-View immediately […] IPL said they are going to stick with Freemium and NASL as well...”

“The most important thing is that we keep growing the audience. I think we have shown that this thing [PPV] has a chance but it is not where it is fully sustainable yet. It needs a bigger audience...”

“Teamliquid basically carried Brood War for its entire eSports career outside of Korea...”

“It's hard to guess what would have happened without it, but as far as its existence, it's incredibly, incredibly important in the history of foreign eSports...”

“I think there will be a big bump. I have talked to Blizzard about this, they were pretty open about the fact that a lot of people buy StarCraft II just to play the single player...”

“I think there is a lot of room for Youtube commentators and content providers to capitalize on that and capture new fans and I think they will! [...] And the fact that we have to shots of that with Heart of the Swarm and Legacy of the Void is pretty cool...”

“When it's appropriate we want to get really good engaging content from Blizzard and do cool projects like that but it's not something we rely on in our day-to-day...”

“There's an eSports team we talk to, there is a community team we talk to, there is Bob Colayco in the PR team who we talk to for interviews and things like that. There is pretty steady communication back and forth”

“It's happening in April, April is coming! ”

“It's just kind of a rumour. There is people training now in StarCraft II who've been training for a while and will slowly transition; a bunch of B-teamers and some A-teamers and people who retired and are investigating it but it's not some kind of cataclysmic event where all the foreigners are going to ask 'Why didn't you stop it?'”

“It's not like all the Brood War players are going to switch and the game changes because they were Brood War players. These players will adapt to StarCraft II and not the other way around but they will add more talent to the pool. So yeah, the game will get better.”

“I think most of the Korean teams treat their teams as teams only while most of the foreign teams treat their teams as marketing companies first. So there is kind of a difference in philosophy there in what the focus should be...”

“The very first time I played StarCraft II at BlizzCon, four of us went and played it, and we wrote this article […] and the very first thing we all wrote was that all of these things lower the skill cap of the game. I don't take that back at all. I think it's very clear that they lowered the skill cap of the game. It makes it much easier for Noobies to keep up with Pros...”

“Just the nature of the game engine and those sorts of mechanics; it's an easier game. It's not necessarily a worse game but a lot of people probably contest that.”

“ My favorite Brood War player was sAviOr and I don't think he will be switching to StarCraft II anytime soon ”

“LiquidHerO is my favorite StarCraft II player.”

“Yeah, absolutely... The only reason they wouldn't need it is if they could maintain the same audience and the same exposure for sponsors at the same price point. Because Intel has that hall already there with CeBIT and there is 100.000 people coming in for CeBIT already, there is no real situation I can see where you can add 150.000$ in cost for a hall to ESL and still maintain that audience at a standalone event. There is no real point in doing that. That money can go somewhere else...”

“That's how you build new audiences by exposing it to people at gaming shows and tech conventions who haven't necessarily seen it before...”

“I find with a lot of traditional sports casters, professionalism comes off as phoniness...”

“If you are accusing somebody of cheating; I mean in StarCraft II, literally the worst thing you can do is cheat. […] to throw that out casually I think is pretty dumb. The guy obviously learnt his lesson but I think the reaction was pretty appropriate from people to demand more out of casters...”

“Player salaries aren't public […] the reason for that, honestly, […] is because teams and organizations can't brag about them yet...”

“Organizations want more money coming in from the audience as there is right now...”