CEO Pot Bonus [Blow UP]

General Discussion
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Hmm… perhaps but I’ve definitely seen more than one FG personality do this.

I’m definitely not saying that people shouldn’t criticize the game, or that there’s no room for improvement - but we’ve plenty of examples of people being constructive and intelligent with their feedback (Infilament for instance), and when you compare this Ego-Shielding behavior to constructive discussion there are some stark contrasts.

Well - kind of a broad term but what I mean by it is taking every chance they can get to snipe at the game and speak about it in a negative connotation to try to make themselves look good.

Some people have a really funny idea of what it means to support a game, I guess.

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First world problems.

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LOL you’re on a gaming forum in a thread about twitter posts and FG Tourney attendance.

Not quite sure what you expected.

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Did you see my edit? I read that thread the day you made it.

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This is a more interesting discussion than the rest of the thread, so indulge me while I glom onto your post and analyze it.

Blizzard is a bit of a strange beast in this day and age. They have an extremely strong brand in the PC community - to the point where I know people who will buy anything and everything that they produce. “WoW? Yes please. Hearthstone? Of course! Overwatch? Well, it’s a FPS that’s nothing like any of their previous games and I don’t even play FPS games, but heck yeah! It’s a Blizzard game!” This is a PC gaming company that doesn’t sell through Steam, and instead makes you use their own wonky proprietary system, with their own proprietary online service to play online. They released Diablo III in a broken state, with a huge “pay to win” incentive and an online auction house that they could tax with real money in order to bilk more money out of their full retail purchase. They are selling people a collectible card game that doesn’t even have cards, using the F2P model. And they are beloved.

Forget for a minute how they got such loyalty and whether they deserve it. That’s a fascinating but separate discussion. The point is they have a super strong brand. So Blizzcon reinforces that brand a lot better than, say “KI World Cup” reinforces Microsoft’s brand, or any major tournament like CEO (before anyone jumps down my throat - I’m not suggesting MS shouldn’t sponsor tournaments. Just walk with me here…).

Blizzcon is also a convention. It has show floor, and presentations and all kinds of stuff for Blizzard to showcase their future products (and other peoples’) to their adoring fans. The primary audience is fans - not competitors. They charge $200 a ticket, just to get in. It’s four per family and they are sold out. CEO charges $30 to people not playing games and $50 to people competing. The primary audience for CEO, and other fighting game tournaments is people who are actually competing. Plus whoever they bring with them (mom, dad, girlfriend, boyfriend, kids). Blizzcon is actually SELLING stream service. Let that sink in. You have to pay to watch it on your PC.

But the real reason I expect Blizzard is making money, not spending it, at Blizzcon is sponsorships. Now every fighting game tournament has a sponsor, from the local Arby’s to MadCatz to Microsoft. But the trick is not getting a few T-shirts or a free game download as a prize, it’s getting real money from people to advertise. Blizzcon had about 25,000 attendees last year - all devoted PC gamers (and some simple math tells you that’s $5,000,000 they collect at the gate). So guess who one of the sponsors was? Windows 10. It’s worth it to put your logo on stuff that 25,000 fans will associate with their good time, and then get it in front of all the folks watching on stream etc. If that audience is tailor made for your product, all the better. CEO has sponsorships. They have really good ones, with lots of companies that make fighting game related products. And I’m certain they are using that money, or those donated items to the best of their ability. But they aren’t able to get the kind of money from those sponsors that Blizzard is able to get for Blizzcon. Why? 25,000 fans is why.

As @TheKeits and others pointed out - the fans come first and then the sponsors follow. Blizzard didn’t just wake up one morning and say “hey look, 100 people are having a Warcraft tournament. Let’s give them $1,000,000!” KI tournaments are great, but they are advertising KI. KI doesn’t have the budget to swing around to drop a money bomb on CEO. The audience (of maybe a couple of thousand people on a live stream?) isn’t big, nor is it likely to be a target for MS’s big products (like Win 10). So the economics matter. And you can’t just bring up “Company X does this thing, why can’t Company Y?” Because the situations aren’t really comparable. It makes much more sense for MS to sponsor Blizzcon than to sponsor a pot bonus for a KI tournament.

TL:DR - Blizzard already has millions of fans glued to Blizzcon. So they can get people to give them money and use some of it for prize pools. KI is awesome, but it just doesn’t have anything like the numbers those Blizzard games pull.

Which brings me back to something else. I don’t want to doom the community with low expectations, but I just don’t think it’s realistic to think that KI is going to rocket into the stratosphere and be the next League of Legends.

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129

good point but no fighting game is near the levels of those pc games (and in some cases with console versions)…rts, rpg and fps…

so do u think capcom/sony r just giving money away with their half million prize pool for SF?

or do they get income to recover it?

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Capcom is sponsoring the Capcom Pro Tour. It’s already better branded than MS sponsoring a KI tourney at CEO. Plus, fighting games are a huge chunk of Capcom’s business (all of it, if you exclude HD remakes of Resident Evil games…). A fighting game tournament targets their core audience, playing their core product. It’s just a different situation. But if you look at the number of entrants for CEO, you will see that the numbers are nearly 10x those for KI. If KI starts to have 700 entrants at regional tournaments then I think you would see much more interest from MS in sponsoring those tournaments. But again, the players show up and that attracts the money. Not the other way around.

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131

gotta love some people entitlement nowadays.
you have it way way way too ■■■■ good. Sf3 was the black sheep of the series on a commercial level and still, its community busted their asses to support the game. no pc version begging, no arcade perfect home port, no prize pots, no sponsored events. only the ■■■■ arcade cabinet and the will to get better.

dont come crying when next year ki is not gonna be at evo.

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132

There’s going to be a lot of people competing at CEO - why not just have “walk-ins” or last-minute sign ups (that would still have to pay to participate)? While it may be more difficult to organize, it can easily grow the KI scene where and with whom it matters - at the very place where it’s trying to advertise with the very people who care about this kind of thing (fighting game fans). Grow out from the FGC 1st, then let them help KI expand from there into the wider, and more public, domain.

Because prior registration is required, and because of the game’s popularity, we have ~80 participants - and yet there are over 2k+ attendees going to CEO this year. Why isn’t KI tapping into that?

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As I understand it, this is a nightmare for TOs.

Recently a tourney dealt with the challenges by organizing last-minute sign-ups into a “death pool” where all of the walk-ins played in the same pool. Whereas this made for some entertaining stream content, it was a massive headache in the end and other TOs seem to have rejected the idea.

Now that said - in a game like KI, it probably wouldn’t end up being too crazy based on the sheer reduction in numbers - but if they were to do it for KI and not SFV/Smash, heads would roll and lots of folks would turn their back on the tourney/TO.

Someone with TO experience (I have NONE) may be able to elaborate more - but as I understand it, preventing walk-ins is a matter affecting the overall quality of the tourney.

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There probably is plenty of provable data. I’ll speak briefly to some of that and I’ll also list some correlations that have some speculation. First off the Data. Dota 2 embraces Esports and the offline competitive scene they run huge tournaments. The international is their Evo this tournament last year raised a 20 million dollar prize pool that was crowd funded through the sales of an in game compendium that players spent money on leveling up and what not. Now why does this matter to microsoft or any other company for that matter the way the compendium worked is it was 10$ initially 1/4 of the sale went to the prize pool what that means is 3/4 that’s right 60 million dollars went into the pockets of Valve for an in game item all focused around the premise of supporting the “Dota superbowl”. And that’s not even counting the revenue raised at the actual offline events (swag, tickets, sponsors).

Now for the more speculative parts. It’s my opinion that Esports are going to continue to grow, they are certainly a thing and there is certainly interest in them. Twitch and Youtube have become a huge medium for professional level gamers who showcase their talents in popular competitive games. These games often have online competitive scenes but almost always have Offline LAN’s when it comes to their final championships. The fact is no matter how great your netcode or internet connection is you cannot duplicate the low latency pristine conditions of playing on LAN and while these differences may be small they are still noticeable at top level play. The most popular twitch games are the games that heavily embrace ESports. Twitch is free advertisement for these games.

So I dunno, I’m not a big CEO for some game company. But if I’m looking at trends I’d say Esports is continuing to grow and if I want my game to be taken seriously as an esport I have to embrace the offline scene. I mean even Hearthstone has offline tournaments.

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The problem is you are looking at data from games with millions of active players and then saying it’s relevant for KI. Right now, I’m sitting somewhere around 1000 in the world in the KI ranked ladder. There’s no way there are millions of active players.

Microsoft did exactly what you describe, only they gave 1/2 the money from the community fund to support tournaments throughout the year. That’s great. If they want to sell us accessories then I’m happy to buy them.

But what people are complaining in the thread about, unfairly, is MS not wanting to put up their own money to support tournaments.

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I’m actually looking at data. And if you want I can go back and show you the data of these same games with these same practices before they had millions of active players. Look at the International 1 numbers vs. last years TI5. You have to start somewhere and you have to build it up, you don’t magically get millions of players you can suddenly support a scene for. Blizzard North wasn’t always the bohemouth that Blizzard Activision is today.

RocketLeague is growing and I suspect it will continue to get larger for these same reasons.

I’m not saying Microsoft needs to pony up money and they’re greedy for not doing so. I hate how entitled some people sound when they say such things, I understand how a business works and if there isn’t interest then it’s a waste of money. It’s our duty to show them that there is interest we did that last year with the community fund and viola we have a Season 3.

I’m refuting the notion that offline events don’t matter because I believe the longevity of many games is directly correlated to such events these days. If you look at the top streamed games there’s a lot of data that backs that. Obviously there are exceptions but I think fighting games by their nature are competitive as such adopting the modern trends of esports is important.

That said I understand people can’t travel and go and that’s too bad but that’s life, traveling isn’t cheap. For those smaller tournaments the local scenes are more important for their attendance until it’s large enough to pull people from outside areas. But to criticize a TO for the Pot Bonus is really kind of ridiculous and sounds entitled.

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That’s cool. We aren’t arguing. The idea that MS needs to support the game, in general, to build a community which grows into a monster community which then spawns e-sports which then leads to good things is not really in dispute. It’s just a question of what form that support takes and what they can reasonably be expected to do. There’s room for different ideas on that - as long as we take the “drop a money bomb on it because they are a rich company,” bit off the table. Frankly, I think they have been pretty supportive of the tournament scene - especially the KI World Cup.

In any case, the next questions is the importance of offline events. This is interesting because clearly you don’t have these big e-sports tournaments without bringing people to an event. But there are lots of games that are doing fine without really any offline presence. There may be lots of CoD tournaments (I really don’t know) but that game does fine without any real e-sports component. So there are different models for success and it just depends on what you want, mixed with what you can realistically obtain. I am all in favor of supporting KI and the scene, if that’s what people want. I just get tired of being told the game will “die” if we don’t show up at tournaments.

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CoD does have official e-sports tournaments. I’ve watched some of their world championship matches each year.

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I just want to point out that KI doesn’t exist in a vacuum..

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