Here are some quick charts that show different ways of looking at the massive $330,000+ that was awarded to Starcraft players in the month of March. You can sort, select, and manipulate some of the elements in the charts, so give it a try! Also, notice that you can find out more about each area by hovering over it.
Top Players
Top Teams
See my column at ESFI world for a more in depth discussion on March’s prize money.
What you see above is a presentation of data that has been collected and presented by the awesome Liquipedia volunteers. The charts show the distribution and trends in award money since launch. A gut check against the gold standard of SC2 prize winnings, sc2earnings.com shows that players with over $1,000 in winnings have combined for about 80% of all winnings. Seeing as premier events account for approximately 75% of all prize money, I feel pretty good about the data.
I think that the data show some interesting things for the Starcraft scene.
First is that prize money is still growing, if at a bit of an uneven pace.
Second is that there are six organizations that are really providing a lot of the financial incentive for players. It is no coincidence in my view that GOM is awarding the most money and that most of the best players either live in Korea or try to go there to train.
The last bit of info that stuck in my mind was that small events account for almost 25% of all winnings. It takes a whole lot of dailies to award the same amount of money as even one season of the GSL.
This is a re-post of my forum post over at TeamLiquid.net
Over at his blog at FNATIC.com, fams argues that hype is a necessary ingredient to eSports. His big points are that The Fans, The Storyline, and the Sponsors all benefit immensely from hyping.
In general, I agree with him. Hype is essentially a form of marketing, and is used in marketing for other sports, leagues, and products. Here are a few similar examples.
The Fans:
The NFL has a feature called NFL Huddle that could be more accurately called “Chat stream for fans to talk about the games.” When I last checked, there were something like 100,000 comments involving either the Ravens, Giants, Pats, or Niners. My guess is that this has only been tracking on these teams for a week. Clearly, fans love getting excited about their favorite… or most hated team.
The Storyline:
“I PERSONALLY GUARANTEE THAT THE CLEVELAND CAVALIERS WILL WIN AN NBA CHAMPIONSHIP BEFORE THE SELF-TITLED FORMER ‘KING’ WINS ONE.”
– Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert
Now all of a sudden, everyone knows a story behind LeBron, the Cavs, and the Heat. This really helps keep the teams and players stuck in everyone’s minds. That was a year and a half ago and I remember it. I don’t even consider basketball to be a sport!
The Sponsors:
The sponsors are how it all gets tied together. When fans excitedly post in The Huddle about how the Niners have no business in this year’s Superbowl, when they watch a press conference about King James, when they cry about Huk moving to EG, they get exposed to sponsors like Visa, Budweiser, and Steelseries. It is these sponsors, and many more like them that help to fund sports, and indeed eSports. They look for more exposure and will apparently pay to get it.
Many people like Keekerdc dislike the large amount of hype that is going on in eSports these days. While I too dislike the constant “LOOK OVER HERE” component, I think that we need to consider what we want eSports to look like in the future. By using hype in a similar way to other forms of entertainment, we can drive more people to watch which convinces sponsors to provide support. That sponsor support means that we can reach a larger audience and get more players. In turn, that means that we can play and watch more and better games.
For better or for worse, hype, sponsors, more fans, and better games go hand in hand.
I found some inspiration from the weekly posts on the Starcraft subreddit and Team Liquid by juicyjames and thought that more detailed look at eSports press coverage by mainstream media would be a good thing.
OGN to Broadcast League of Legends
Unfortunately, I don’t read Korean very well, so I’m relying on nokz88 over at Team Liquid. It looks like OneGame.net and Riot Games are partnering up to bring two separate television events to the Korean airwaves. One will be an internet stream style show offering tips and gameplay commentary, while the other is a six team invitational tournament that will test the waters for a planned Korean LoL league!
Here is the original from thisisgame.com,
This isn’t really an eSports article, but rather an interesting development in the community. The folks at GLHF Magazine appear to be trying to create a monthly online magazine that will offer a polished look at news, strategy, and interviews to the wider community.
E-Sporting Chance: 2012 Kickoff
This writeup on Rock, Paper, Shotgun by ESFI World’s Samuel Lingle is a Starcraft 2 centric piece that looks at some of the upcoming (and recent) big events in 2012. Among these are MC’s win at HomeStory Cup IV, recent GSL results, Apex 2012, and the Awesome Games Done Quick 2012 charity marathon. Samuel also notes that two companies, IPL and Plantronics are hard at work expanding their eSports audiences by hosting events at the ever popular CES and SXSW.
Starcraft vs. Warcraft: What is the WoW Community Missing?
This blog post by Dawn Moore over on WoW Insider covers the major positive points about the Starcraft 2 community and contrasts them with similar points in the WoW community. Things like our Team Liquid, the subreddit, and the ability to watch competitive play are things that struck Dawn as particularly good that the WoW community is lacking. From her article at least the WoW community seems very fractured and much more controlled by Blizzard. She concludes with an interesting point: Should and does the WoW community want to be more like the Starcraft 2 community?
Major League Gaming Joins SOPA Blackout, Pulls 100 GoDaddy.com Domains
The last, and arguably most significant organization to cover eSports this week was Forbes.com. In his article, John Gaudiosi describes Major League Gaming’s efforts to raise awareness of SOPA through moving domains away from GoDaddy, as well as its planned January 18th website blackout. He also writes about some of the potential negative impacts that the bill would have to the gaming community. What struck me the most from his article was his last sentence (emphasis mine):
“It’s good to see this community get active, and do something that most big companies, including Facebook and Google, are simply afraid to get involved with for many different reasons.”
Thanks for the pat on the back John!
Mycotoxin wrote up a description of his badass gaming methods and tools over on his website. He also included his tracking sheet which is quite detailed and informative.
The thing that intrigues me most about his post is the idea of looking at your games from a statistical standpoint. Feeling the flow of games is great, but when you want to improve, it can really pay to take a cold hard look at the stats behind your play. He was under the impression that Scrap Station was one of his better maps, but ended up thinking about vetoing it.
“When I first started tracking my games there was one map, the infamous Scrap Station, that I felt was a good map for me. I felt that I performed well on that map. After I started tracking my games I realized that this wasn’t the case at all.”
The idea of statistical analysis of ladder games is cool, but Mycotoxin’s spreadsheet is solid gold…I mean masters… If you want to get better, go check his post out!
No.
Let me explain why with the help of two fairly well involved gentlemen.
First, FXOBoss wrote a quick blog about a big issue, and a clarifying post about FXO’s recent switching between Twitch.tv and Own3d.tv In his first post, he uses a lot of phrases like “isn’t a sustainable method of business” and that streaming companies are ”over extending themselves.” More than a few people took this to mean that he believes that there is an eSports bubble.
In his clarification post, he tells us that he doesn’t think that there is an eSports bubble. I found that his explanation was not really clear… something about dastardly LoL streamers!
Part of FXOBoss’s initial issue with Twitch.tv was their low fill rates and CPMs. He believes that this is a result of them adding too many partners for revenue sharing. While the low fill rates and CPMs of some streaming companies may indicate that they have overextended themselves, this is not indicative of an eSports bubble.
Farmer Destiny
In Jason Tugman’s YouTube video, he says that he doesn’t think that there is currently an eSports bubble. He goes on to tells us that bubbles occur when there is a lot of money poured into a market and there is “not a supporting market to absorb or to give those dollars back.” I think that Mr. Tugman and I agree on the point that there is already a supporting market for stream advertising.
Streaming has been a technical revolution that has allowed players and teams to capture dollars that they could not before. There is a large market for advertising based on capturing people’s attention for a few seconds, and streaming allows people to tap into that.
A bad analogy could be where Farmer Destiny owns some land that the government then builds a road through. Suddenly there are thousands of people passing by FD’s land every day. Since he has the attention (unwilling in this case!) of all of those people, if he wanted, FD could contract with a billboard company and convert that attention into money.
In both of these cases, the advertising market is already there, it was just waiting for an opportunity to get the attention of the people.
Since all of this streaming money is really just from the greater advertising market, there is a readily defined way to “give those dollars back,” and there can be no streaming bubble.
Sorry FXOBoss, but…
The month of January is typically pretty rough for people who depend on advertising money in general due to companies burning their ad budgets for Christmas, so it may get worse before it gets better for streamers.
This is just a quick thank you to ZiggyDStarcraft over on Reddit for pulling together a listing of several independent Starcraft (and a few eSports) blogs.
So if you’re looking for more independent news, stories, laughs, and info, check it out and send your upboats here!
This talk of Pillars, incited by PhilPhoenix’s article over at WellPlayed.org, got me to thinking:
What Exactly is a Community Pillar?
This question is something that PhilPhoenix took for granted, and I think that most community members did the same. The term Pillar does resonate, my first thought would be “Someone who has a disproportionate amount of influence within a community.”
To test this idea, we need to have a solid set of data. Lacking a statistic for “When a Nerd says jump, how many nerdlets ask how high,” I resorted to looking at information for web sites and services like TeamLiquid, YouTube, TwitchTV, Reddit, and Twitter.
I quickly realized that most of these were a mistake. Influential community members like Tyler don’t Karma whore, DJWheat has a relatively small YouTube following, and many of the most influential community members don’t have their own website.
The one thing that nearly everyone in the community, Pillar or otherwise, has is a Twitter account.
The above graphic shows select community members and their number of Twitter followers. As you can see, there is no sharp drop in followers after Day[9], Artosis, or even iNcontrol. I would even say that you should ignore the actual number of followers for each individual and just note the gradual change between members with the most followers and those with the least.
While I can’t prove it, I’m betting that this gradual change in follower numbers means that many people who follow Day[9] also follow Husky and Idra. This means that while some members have more influence, there isn’t any one particular person that has a disproportionate amount of influence within the community.
Something else that the gradual change in followers suggests is that at the moment, the amount of influence that community members have is still changing. I would expect that in a stagnant community that a few members would be able to collect many many more followers than less influential members. We can clearly see that this is not the case within the Starcraft 2 community, and I think that this can be backed up with anectodal evidence like the recent rise of Mr. Bitter and Rotterdam as influential casters.
It is true that Twitter is not a true measure of how much influence over the community someone has. In reality, that is an extremely complex idea.
However, thousands of people saying “Hey, I want to know what you’re doing and thinking” is about as good as you can get without telling nerdlets to jump at an MLG event.
First, You’ll have to excuse my terrible MS Paint Skills. Second, look below and see the awesome stream expansion that MLG is currently enjoying.
I started thinking that I would write a post that provided a counterpoint to MLG’s recent infographic. What I found was that, while MLG won’t be competing with the NFL anytime soon, its numbers are not insignificant.
I have placed ugly little red paint arrows on the chart showing information for two major sport events this year, the Alabama vs. LSU football game, and the NCAA’s March Madness. While the total viewers for the college football game were much, much higher at approximately 20 million viewers, the online streaming portion of the event was still significant, but quite similar to the peak concurrent numbers from this year’s MLG events.
In a similar metric, total video consumption, MLG Orlando and Providence held their own against the NCAA’s premier basketball tournament on a consumption per day basis (assuming 3 day long MLG events). Also from MLG’s infographic, it should be noted that they are claiming 15 million hours of video consumption. This is actually greater than the online video consumption for March Madness by more than a million hours.
There are some data gaps. For example, MLG did not provide a press release of their Dallas event that I could find. Perhaps that was motivated by the stream fiasco, as reported by ESFI World here. Another significant issue with the data that I found was that often, news outlets incorrectly report information, sometimes mixing total streams with total viewers, for instance, or they are not consistent in what data they give out in different press releases, sometimes giving total viewers, sometimes unique streams, and sometimes giving total streams. When they don’t explain what their reported numbers are is when it gets really confusing!
This chart raises some interesting questions, first on my mind is: how does MLG compare to other event organizations in harnessing its viewers to provide increased sponsorship?Second would be: can MLG keep it up? I sure hope so! Regardless, next year looks like it will be interesting.
Now, I know that these comparisons are not exactly perfect, but I do think that they back the premise behind MLG’s press release: MLG can hang with the big boys and their tournaments are quickly becoming major (e)sport events.
Game Boys by Michael Kane is a book that details the work of Jason Lake is his efforts to build an maintain a successful Counter-Strike squad, Complexity. In order to do this, Kane builds the foundation of his story on the 3D / Complexity rivalry. Depicting the 3D team, and their manager, Craig Levine, the “George Steinbrenner of Counter-Strike,” as the powerhouse that will stop at nothing, Kane takes the readers through the struggles of team Complexity, and more specifically, its manager, Jason Lake.
In the beginning of the story, Kane sets the scene for the reader, one who is not especially familiar with competitive gaming.
He starts by liberally mixing in sports terminology and ideas. He talks about how players fill certain positions, much like an athlete would on a baseball field, and how set team plays are so similar to the playbooks that you would see in the hands of a football coach. He also notes that within the Counter-Strike scene especially, that there are quite a few people that “are the kinds of guys who once excelled in youth sports but washed out at higher levels of competition,” and that they get their competitive team experiences through Counter-Strike, just like they did before in regular sports. For someone who is familiar with e-sports, or even just gaming in general, it almost too explanatory. Though, that is almost certainly because Mr. Kane has targets a broader audience than just gamers.
After setting the eSports scene, Kane transitions into covering the 3D / Complexity rivalry in more depth. He follows the LANs across the country as they get increasingly more competitive, and, finally, on a huge stage, furnished by DirecTV, Complexity beats the villainous 3D team.
While the story arc is fairly predictable, the nice guy underdog beats the big corporate machine, the way that Kane presents it is very interesting. He is able to set the scene for people who are unfamiliar with the idea of eSports, and tell them a compelling story by mixing in details about the competitors, talking about the behind-the-scenes dealings of Levine and Lake, and most of all, by harnessing the ascendant hopes of everyone involved that eSports will be the next big thing.
Game Boys isn’t perfect, but for someone looking for a bit of eSports history, and a good story at the same time, it is a good read.
