There are currently talks of the Brood Wars Pro League (Proleague) moving to Starcraft 2.
99% of people really do not understand what this means.
Most people actually think the vast majority of Brood Wars professionals have actually moved on to Starcraft 2. This is simply not the case. In reality the Brood Wars Proleague is still alive and strong. The players in this league are making six figure salaries with the highest being somewhere around guaranteed $500,000/year.
The guaranteed salary is how much that player’s team pays them just to be on that team. That does not include the tournament money they win on top of that.
Kind of silly right?
Now I know what you’re thinking, there are a lot of Brood Wars pros in Starcraft 2. Well kinda. The ones you see in Brood Wars are in Starcraft 2 are really not the big name ones. They are usually mid level ones. So when you hear someone say “this guy was huge in Brood Wars” its kind of like how FruitDealer is huge in Starcraft 2. He had his time in the sun but he’s not really the “big thing” right now.
There is kind of an open question on how this will effect the current Starcraft 2 community. Right now there is a pretty strong non-Korean tournament presence. In the North American scene you have tones of tournaments everywhere and a North American Pro League (or two).
These tournaments and leagues are about 50:50 between Korean pros and non-Korean pros. This leads to the occasional upset. Imagine though if you saw a few hundred more professional gamers show up, all of which are just better than anyone currently playing.
I mean the last big “shake up” in Starcraft 2 was when Boxer created his Slayers Team and 100% changed the “meta game” of terran play by showing how zergs, protosses, and terrans could really not play against their style at all. At the time unknown SlayersMMA debuted this style and almost instantly became famous.
Another big part of this is the financial change. It is presumed that a lot of Starcraft 2 teams in Korea will just up and vanish over night. The big problem is a Broodwars team offers a six figure salary to their players. By comparison Starcraft players are making five figure salaries and the REALLY successful ones are making it off of tournament victories. CombatEX most recently threw up a YouTube video quitting based on the fact that he is making a five-figure salary and is just not doing that well with it.
Since that is the case single players will not be able to survive if they’re not winning tournaments. North American sponsors can really only afford to pay a team so much money.
Korean telecommunication companies pay insanely high amounts of money to support Brood War teams. If those sponsors shift you could see a really big game switch.
The honest truth is no one likes watching a loser. That’s why no one really wants to watch Idra or InControl anymore. Nice guys and all, but they don’t win. People rather watch HuK and Stephano. And the irony is HuK is Canadian and Stephano is French. People will watch Whitera games because just like KiwiKaki he plays with non-standard interesting play.
Now if HuK and Stephano just never won anything and always lost… you would not watch them. No one would. If all North Americans just suck sponsors will get pulled and you will see a pretty big shrink in esports in North America.
Now this might just be a bit of over-exageration.
In truth there is a pretty powerful esports scene in North America that in no way relies on the Korean scene. The North American players have developed a different playstyle and a different meta game from Korea that is not inferior but different. I say not inferior because all too often you will see Korean players pick up this North American style and one-up Koreans in tournament play.
But on the other side of it the North American esports scene died largely in part because of how much money was in Korea.
By comparison the Nroth American Brood Wars tournaments were just bush leagues… and no one really likes watching bush leagues. Well some people do, but they’re rare. Bush leagues generally thrive when people do not have access to the good stuff. Since tournaments are all online anyway it is pretty much accessible to everyone.
It appears Blizzard is going to work with the Broodwars Proleague to invent a brand new Starcraft 2 Proleague which will basically consume The Gobal Starcraft League (GSL).
It will be interesting to see where this goes.
Pandaren Monks and the Tween Demographic
Posted in Blizzard News, Blog Entry, Commentary, WoW Ramblings with tags monk class, pandaren, tween, world of warcraft on October 26, 2011 by troublmakerThe interesting thing is that the choice for the Panda race does not come with trying to increase their share in the Chinese market, but instead to increase its share in the tween market.
The tween market is one of the hardest ones to get to specifically because the tween market is the awkward one that is uncommitted to what it likes.
A Tweenie, tweener or “tween” is a person who is “in between” teen-age and childhood. They are a group of people who are attempting to look and feel more like teenagers yet unable or unwilling to let go of elements of their childhood. The most successful products to market this odd demographic by making a hybrid product that might appeal to a teenager.
A good example of a typical tween product is Pixar films movies. Many argue this is the success of the Pixar computer animation films. Here is a movie (Toy Story) which is so obviously made for children given that it is a story about toys in a cartoon format… and yet it has semi-adult themes and life lessons. It was a movie that swept the world and had massive commercial success. What Producer Steve Jobs (and 33% owner of Pixar) found was that if you can attract a product specifically for 12-year-olds you are going to gain a massive portion of untapped market. As an after effect what they found was that teenagers and adults who had not fully made that transition out of their childhood were buying into this semi-childhood market.
This is also why the iPhone, iPad and iTunes were such a killer success. All of the marketing for the iPod was designed around trying to convince this tweener market that they should buy into this (and through them everyone else). They did this by taking largely unknown bands (The Fratelis and Franz Ferdinand and mixing them in with well known bands (Jet and U2). They used silhouette dancers in the background doing dances that nobody in their right mind would do as a teenager in order to convince tweeners that this is what it means to be a teenager, owning an iPod. Future iPhone and iPad commercials would be done the same. Below is a simple illustration, pay attention to the age group that is doing the crazy dances (teenagers) and the simple color schemes that would appeal to a child:
Apple would market every single product they had as a toy for adults which gave a similar outcome as Toy Story, total capturing of the 10-12 market and large shares of the adult and teenager market.
World of Warcraft developers Blizzard are not stupid. They are aware of how to make a game and how to market it. By telling people they are looking to market for the 12-year-olds the only people they are going to upset are people who are already upset with Blizzard. In truth this move will increase their shares of the market across the board.
As more MMOs are being created they are all looking to capture that premium 21-35 market. That is the gamers who have a lot of money to spend and want to spend all of their time doing it. But as more MMOs are created that means the market is going to be far more clustered and it’ll be harder to make a buck. I’m sure Blizzard has noticed that the child themed Korean games (Prius Anima Online/Rusty Hearts) are those that are doing the best. While Blizzard boasts a 12-13 million subscriber basis these small and cheap games are swinging a 3-4M subscriber basis each… and these games are by no means mainstream or as well marketed as Blizzard’s World of Warcraft.
As the current 21-35 market ages they will be having children and families. Family-friendly games are going to be more appealing and the more casual the better. The pandaren monk is a perfect synergy of age and youth to trap 12-year olds into playing their brand for years to come. It is enough to convince parents that World of Warcraft is harmless fun and enough to keep a younger child interested in a game that is so massively dominated by adults.
So many people misinterpreted this news as them developing for an existing young audience. The truth is they lack a young audience and as the game ages they will continue to lose their player base. Cheers to the folks at Blizzard for proving that they are not an old dinosaur and are willing to make drastic moves in order to stay in a market.
It won’t make me want to come back to the game… but I see what you did there Blizzard.
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