May 12, 2012

Now drop your f****** pitchforks, you’re spamming my inbox!

Please be aware that this post express my own opinion, and my own opinion only. Comprende?

So @keekerdc asked me on Twitter the other day what had happened to my blog. I crumbled under the expectations of having a girlfriend, a job, a study and living life at the same time. Or more likely I forgot about the blog because I was intoxicated on beer slash hard alcohol. In any extent, I mean to pick the blog up again (for the umpteenth time…), and since I’m trying to procrastinate from my Bachelor Assignment due in 11 days, I thought this would be a perfect moment.

And the topic of the day is “Drop your fucking pitchforks”. Really StarCraft II community. I mean, I love you, but oh my you make it hard. I’ve been a part of eSport communities for 10+ years and I have never experienced a more belittling or narrow-minded community than this. God forbid that you step out of the very sharply defined borders that you have set up for behavior and “professionalism”, because if someoby does that, they will be hunted to hell and back.

Please do get me right, I would love to rid language of things like “nigger” – a word which has done nothing but degrading a whole race of people – but why the fuck does an entire community have to step up as moral judges?

I’m fed up with having to read about people using “eSport” as leverage for personal quests for revenge because their feelings have been hurt in one way or another.

I’m fed up with having to explain to people why there are 200 emails in an inbox, and why they are threatening to boycut a company because some team has some guy who said some thing at some point some years ago.

I’m fed up with all you moralists, who probably are real humans, with real flaws in your real lives, setting yourselves on pedestals of moral indignation to start witchhunts on reddit and TL.net.

I’m fed up with the community not being able to handle differences and drama within itself.

I’m fed up with teams being blackmailed by the community to react to every little thing that their players might or might not do.

I’m fed up with your pitchforks. Stick them up your own arse if you will, but before you open your closet to take it out next time, please fucking have a look in the mirror and ask yourself whether you deserve to be a moral judge over other people.

You see, the SC2 community has a real opportunity to be a part of manifesting games as a core part of our culture. Forget “eSports” for a moment and think about how gamers were portrayed just 5-6 years ago. Think about how they are portrayed now. Right. Think about how reddit and TL.net acts like one big fucking kindergarden and think 1 year ahead. If the current trend continues, then we’ve thrown the last 10 years of work out the window and nerds are right back in the stereotypes as immature little pizza eating gnomes who dislike sunlight.

With great power comes great responsibility. Please do be responsible and start going through a less hotheaded chain of command when you want to influence something. Let people and teams redeem themselves, and for crying out loud – STOP SPAMMING MY INBOX.

January 18, 2012

What’s a player to do?

Well duh, a player is going to play. Simple right? No. Guess again. According to my most recent research (me pondering over problems and making assumptions about life; or qualitative research as its also called), players are caught in a never ending battle between playing and acting as posterboys.

Ah well, not really, but in the comments to @keekerdc’s column on hype,  @seanconned brought up an entirely new thought to me. What is a player actually to do when his team works more as a marketing agency than a modern sports team? Well what about this.

MAN THE FUCK UP!

There, I said it. Now get me right, I don’t say that players should just eat anything raw. They are first and foremost players and need to practice in order to be at their best performance. With that said however, my initial reaction to people asking why players should take part in marketing campaigns, Fan Q&A’s, media inquiries and other things supposedly unrelated to their jobs as players, is “grow the fuck up”. Except for the ten most profiled sports, athletes around the world have to work part time or full time to keep their economy afloat. And those who don’t are either sponsored by private companies or public resources set to aid athletes in achieving their goals (usually fame, glory and World Championships so you can beat USSR in the medal count).

With eSports not attracting public funding, alot of Sheiks, absurd television deals or other inexhaustible money sources, players, teams, event-organizers and journalists are all dependent on cash from marketing-budgets around the world. As is right now, eSport isn’t really sustainable, but think about it, what kind of sports really have a sustainable business model? Granted there will probably always be enough money in Football to have ludicrous amounts of money shifting hands in transfers, but that doesn’t make it sustainable. Just look at how the English Premier League have had to implement parachute payments to clubs relegating from the premier division to help avoid bankrupcy; does that say sustainable to you?

If this guy can answer his emails, so can you.

If this guy can answer his emails, so can you.

Derailed again I think. Anyway when you splash your marketing budget on teams and players you expect something in return. That something is at the very least “awareness” and “visibility”. It’s possibly that this awareness and visibility only derives from tournament appearances and sponsor logos, but it isn’t very plausible. With too many teams fighting for too little money in too inconsistent a business, it is the sponsors’ market. They know that and the teams knows that. Consequently companies can sometimes come up with the most horrendous demands from either content or players (trust me, I’ve seen some really fucked up ones over the time).

The players remain utterly unaware of this, and I have no clue why. Maybe teams and managers aren’t good enough at making their players understand this, or maybe the players just haven’t learn to read (which would explain many a contract twist over the years… yes I’m looking at you Delpan), but the fact of the matter is that a lot of players are totally oblivious to what they need to live up to.

Time for a reality check here. Do you receive a salary that enables you to play and practice full time? Do you get to keep the bigger part of your winnings? Are you flown around the world to compete in competitions with five digit dollar first place prizes? If yes, the man the fuck up and realize that the reason why this is possible is because people have invested in you. As a player, as a communicator and as a posterboy if that’s needed.

January 16, 2012

Send More $. Please.

Yes @MLGSundance, I’m looking at you.

Let’s just be honest everybody. The Major League Gaming has done amazing in 2011. In fact, they have made a quantum leap in eSports, positioning themselves amongst the very best tournaments in the world. They have invested in top notch TV coverage, have great admins and are good at pre- and post-production. Fact of the matter is that they have tripled their number of unique visitors to their website, and had over 241,000 concurrent viewers during the National Finals in November.

Now, we agreed to cut the bullshit, right? Okay, let’s face it then Sundance; the growth was mainly due to StarCraft II. You even admit it yourself by having two simultaneous SC2 casts (and only one for CoD and Halo), one which is the default channel when you open MLGPro.com during events.  If this is a true assessment of the situation, then it’s time to make that obvious to everyone – and especially the players.

(Courtesy of SK-Gaming.com) MC have won over $250,000. Less than $11,000 of these comes from MLG, despite a 2nd, 3rd and 6th place
(Image courtesy of SK-Gaming.com) @SK__MC has won over $250,000. Less than $11,000 of these comes from MLG, despite a 2nd, 3rd and 6th place

These guys, of which some of them have battled through a gruelling 256-player Open Bracket, to just get into the Championship bracket, have been fed off with $400 for an 8th place. Now it’s obviously not MLG’s fault that there is sooooo much talent in their tournaments, but if I had used the bigger part of 3 days playing my way through some of the best players in the world, maybe even taking a few Koreans down on the way, I would litteraly be able to feel the warmth of someone’s piss in my face when I got handed that $400 checque. Or the $5,000 checque for that matter.

Chris ‘HuK’ Loranger won in Orlando last year, taking home $5,000 for winning the hardest ever MLG tournament (look at the Top 8). Is that fair? Not at all. I know that fans – and Americans probably more than anyone else – love to hand out big checques at the end of the year, but handing $70,000 in total out during 5 events and then putting $120,000 up for grabs at the last (where seeding and structure had the most influence in any eSports tournament ever seen) is just stupid. No, it’s not even stupid, it’s plainly speaking unfair to the competitors.

MLG could lose their edge

In 2011 players of high quality were flocking to the five first events of MLG, despite the abysmal prizepool. Realistically $14,000 shouldn’t be able to lure up to 10 Korean players to the US to play. So why did they come? Because of the flaws in the system. In order to have a meaningful chance to compete for the $50,000 first prize in the Nationals, players had to consistently place high in the first five events. That is if they weren’t already in the Championship Pools. Oh well, I’m getting sidetracked here.

Where I’m trying to get to, is that if MLG doesn’t fix the skewed money distribution between their inaugural events and the Nationals, they might find their 2012 to be less succesful than their 2011. Blizzcon had a GSL Final, IPL have recently teased a GSTL-final at their events in 2012 and “Winter is Coming” to the entire world as DreamHack continues to expand. There is no guarantee that top quality players will continue to stream to the MLG-events, and if the Korean superstars (or their managers, like FXOBoSs in this tumblr post) feel it isn’t worth to jump on the plane to the States, will viewership drop? Most probably.

So what to do? Create a real incentive to go to the first five MLG events instead of soft-forcing players to go in order to gain/protect seeding into the pool play. More $ for example. You hear me @MLGSundance?!

January 13, 2012

Bubble bursting time

So originally I wanted to write something about GSL opening up for letting sponsors bring players into Code S, but I couldn’t really find an angle that was interesting enough, so that has to wait. Instead I developed a thought that I discussed earlier on Twitter:

What would happen if 50 potential Code A players were free agents on the current eSports market?

Before you ridicule me for posing such a random number, consider this. The pro teams of StarCraft BroodWar in South Korea have at least 10-15 players on their roster while some have even more. The total number will probably be around at least two hundred players whom have been playing SC BW for years. Some of them with astonishing results. If you still want to ridicule me, you should probably read this. And this, if you doubt that they WILL come soon.

Anyway, back to the question, what would happen? While it is perfectly reasonable that alot of them would be snapped up by Korean teams, there is no reason not to believe that this influx of new unacquired talent would have a huge impact on the eSports economy. In other words, StarCraft II salaries would probably see a very sudden change.

Now let’s for good measure just eliminate the current Korean pro teams from the equation. They will obviously try to keep a hold of the top SC BW stars (who in turn will definitely be trying to keep their $70,000+ contracts), but the relatively unknown B-teamers might just decide to skip their former employers in order to try a foreign team out. Suddenly the yearly salary budgets of 10-15 eSport teams will have 50 more players to be dispersed over. In relative words that means the players – on average – will receive a lesser salary. Right?

Marketability, bla bla

Well, it’s sort of right. Not every team will be in for the Koreans from the get go. For Mousesports a Korean presence doesn’t make sense right now for example. They’ve acquired a great European setup and their biggest market is Germany. Evil Geniuses, despite having heavy ties to Korea, have their prime market in the US so they won’t either kick out six players to make room for Koreans.

The influence from the salary expectations of these players will however still hit everyone. We’ve seen it before in WarCraft III; Fnatic managed to run a successful WC3 team with Korean players, whom weren’t paid near the amounts of 4Kings, MYM or SK Gaming. That in turn put some pressure on the general salary levels.

The team’s market

The current salary situation in the SC II community seems rather “bubbly”. Is HuK actually worth six figures a year as he is supposedly getting? Well, is he? In raw prizemoney and tournament placements he sure isn’t. In fanbase and general hype – maybe. But it all comes down to whether Evil Geniuses can use him the right way. If that huge investment (by Western hemispheric standards) in a single player doesn’t pay off, they have either overvalued him or used him the wrong way. I tend to lean towards the first.

Too high salary expectations aren’t healthy to the eSport business as a whole. We saw that in WarCraft III, where MYM’s overvaluation of players in turn made other teams overvalue theirs. This creates salary demands that leave teams dying in their wake. Until now things have been kept in place by the relative random results in StarCraft II and the fact that there is so much talent available, but with the addition of fifty – or more – free agents, we might just see a shift to a situation where it become the team’s market rather than the players’.

The beginning of a new year is usually a time to consolidate for the eSports teams; contracts are running out and new contracts are signed, but this year some teams might take a gamble and wait, hoping to snatch up fresh Korean talent.  Only time will tell if it’s worth it.

Revival!

Okay so my last post is more than a year old. That’s partly explained by the fact that I’ve been working for Fnatic in the past 1½ year-ish, and partly explained by the fact that I tend to be a bit lazy when I’m off duty. At the end of 2011 I quit Fnatic however and I’m now solely working for SteelSeries, producing written content for their online and offline platforms. What that means is basically that I will still do my 1on1-interviews with some of the best gamers in the world, and then some. Expect glorius things to be posted on SteelSeries.com in the next half year.

Anyway back to the headline. Since I used to work at home, and now work from the SteelSeries HQ two times a week, I’ve recently found that I got a lot of time on my hands. Well atleast until I start playing SW:TOR next week. Anyway, encouraged by roychez, frequency, z1n0 and a few more, I’ve decided to revive the blog again. And this time in English and eSport-language only. Hoping for some success. Expect rants and rage.

May 27, 2010

Hvem ejer indhold?

Digitale rettigheder, eller mangel på samme, debatteres på livet løs i hele verden. Hvem har Copyright og Copyleft? Er det i virkeligheden Copytheft? Eller er der bare tale om at vores måde at se på det er Copywrong?

I lang tid har bolden været sparket til hjørne, fordi ingen ved hvad der skal afløse den nuværende model. Aviser og magasiner der producerer online-indhold har ikke turdet opgive deres gratis-koncept, fordi markedet for online-reklamer (i en overgang) så tiltrækkende ud.

Nu har News Corp så sat bolden i spil igen, og det med et indadskruet hjørnespark der er så giftigt det kunne være sparket af selveste Mr Golden Balls (Beckham, til jer der ikke er så stive i fodbold-slangs). Fra og med juni, indfører nyhedsgruppen – der blandt andet ejer The Times og Wall Street Journal – en betalingsmur på deres sites. Dele af deres indhold vil være gratis, men langt hovedparten skal man købe et abonnement til. Planen er at de skrantende avis- og annonce-salg, skal reddes ved hjælp af denne model.

Sekundært er det en stor fed fuckfinger til Google, som i mange år har levet af at videregive andre folks indhold og selv skumme annonce-fløden. Måske på grund af udsigten til at blive lukket ude fra nyhedsnetværk over hele kloden (alle blad- og avis-udgiver venter med spænding på at se om Rupert Murdoch får held med det her), har Google valgt den bløde udvej og vil arbejde sammen med News Corp. Internettet er altså ikke længere gratis.

Hvis og såfremt konceptet holder vand, er det et paradigme-skift der slår igennem. Hvor indhold på Internettet tidligere var frit tilgængeligt, kommer det nu til at koste penge. Men er det ikke også i orden? For dem der producerer indholdet, ejer det vel også. Det er Google ihvertfald enige i, for deres administrerende direktør sagde følgende til The Guardian: “Vi tror meget stærkt på, at indhold er ejet af avisfolk og magasinfolk”.

Krøllen på historien er dog, at Google selv tror at markedet for gratis indhold er størst (DOH!), men at de gerne vil hjælpe med at lave en Berlin-mur omkring andre udbyderes indhold; så længe de får en betaling for det selvfølgelig.

I eSport bruges modellen kun ift. eksklusive tjenester som WinOut eller SK Insider (og med begrænset succes bør det bemærkes), men med et paradigme-skift i de medier, som eSport-medierne også orienterer sig mod, kan det være at et nyt forretnings-grundlag er ved at opstå. Spændende bliver det ihvertfald at følge om kvalitetsindhold i eSport på samme måde, kan skrabe penge ind til dets “ejere”.

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