As I was perusing Reddit the other day, I came across a rather interesting article by pro player Destiny on the Starcraft II sub-reddit glossing over the game’s diminishing casual scene and presence in E-sports.
Here’s an excerpt from the article:
People expected Starcraft 2 to only build upon Brood War and explode in popularity over the 2010-2012 seasons. “E-SPORTS E-SPORTS E-SPORTS” people would chant on the forums. Leagues such as IPL, NASL and MLG were raising all sorts of capital to invest in these tournaments with the idea that we’d be getting hundreds of thousands of viewers.
But that growth never came.
Even Sundance went on Live on 3 to explain that he’s still “not making money” and that the amount of money being spent now was more akin to “investing” than anything that was turning a real profit. We haven’t seen the explosion in prize money we’ve been hoping for.
IPL’s prize pool has remained the same from seasons 3-5. The NASL’s prize pool has remained the same since its inception. MLG’s prize pools have been rising, but they are the only ones to push relatively innovative monetization schemes into the market (such as the $20 PPV model, + high production gold membership content).
So we haven’t really seen the explosive growth that we were kind of expecting and hoping for. There are no million dollar Starcraft 2 tournaments. And, arguably the worst news yet, South Korea didn’t bite.
A quick glance shows that almost 25% of all South Koreans are playing League of Legends in PC Bangs. It’s by far the most popular game, with the next game falling in under 13%. Brood War comes in 8th place, at 3.4%, and Wings of Liberty doesn’t even make the top 10 list.
This video pretty much sums up his argument:
He does bring up a lot of good points. I enjoyed Warcraft 3 playing a great deal when it came out, but it wasn’t the competitive aspect or laddering that I spent most of my time on, but rather all those cool Tower Defence custom games, and of course DoTA.
That being said, you can’t really get that same kind of experience in SC2. While I enjoyed playing ranked matches for a while, after a certain point, the ‘ladder anxiety’ started to kick in as I feared for losing my rank, and eventually stopped playing. What’s worse is that the custom game support wasn’t as robust as in Warcraft 3, leaving me little reason to go back and play.
It’ll be interesting to see if or how Blizzard decides to tackle this problem with future expansions to stand up to League of Legends and DoTA2.
