Tag Archives: blizzard

Here’s what I learned from CheckPoint S3E25.

  • Oh no. Another Angry Birds spin-off title. Oh no.
  • The second most popular game on Twitch last week was Diablo 2? Standard, since the only folks playing Diablo 3 anywhere near normal as it should be are on now-last-generation consoles. Nice job there, Blizzard.
  • Square Enix iOS title pricing joke aside, Rovio’s incessant push towards monetizing every single aspect of their Angry Birds related games (and every other game they release) is starting to really push me away from ever seriously considering future mobile titles that are priced as ‘free’ in their respective stores. At least with most of Square Enix’s titles, I know what I am paying for ahead of time because they’re simply porting their products they’ve already ported to other less popular platforms, like the Nintendo 3DS or the Playstation Vita.
  • It’s not a huge secret that development on the next title begins after shipping the game that your development house has been working on, and it’s definitely the case in the dynasty that is Gran Turismo. GT6 wasn’t a launch title for the Playstation 4, but that’s being addressed with its release this week. Forza never really held much of a candle to GT’s extreme simulation of everything car-related, but it was a title that Xbox One users picked up at launch. GT6 will certainly see success, but how long will it be until PS4 early adopters head back to their local game store, pull out their wallets and buy a new game? A fair question, I think.
  • Twitch integration has come to Minecraft. I’d have rather that Notch had been working on 0x10c instead, but I understand that subjecting the masses of Minecraft players to Twitch broadcasting while trying to run Minecraft in a stable fashion comes second to revenue generation.
  • Putting cameras in an average person’s living room with a microphone didn’t yield a second thought because of all of the marketing research potential that could be gathered from their players, but they didn’t realize that a camera pointing at a player could mean dicks on the Internet? Clearly, Sony hasn’t thought through the consequences of a player-facing camera as Twitch has decided that it would rather not list the PS4 Playroom as a title on their service, but what is MSFT going to do when this same situation affects them due to horribly, average Xbox One users?
  • Localization mixing as DLC isn’t exactly a new thing, but I suppose that Square Enix getting behind it makes the whole thing newsworthy. I’d buy the pack, but I still have to finish FFXIII, purchase and finish FFXIII-2 and then purchase FFXIII-3 before the optional patch becomes even remotely relevant to me.
  • That answer is easy, Graham: it’s FFVIII. Emo kids run about with swords that are also guns doing wire-fu maneuvers in order to save the world while playing random card mini-games and lamenting about not being in a relationship or something like that. What’s so hard to understand about that? It’s not so simple like the balance of the world has been destroyed and a party fights to correct it, yet I’m fairly sure I’ve got it nailed down in one run-on sentence.
  • GTA: San Andreas is the logical next step for Rockstar’s mobile gaming / porting strategy. Even though the controls aren’t really the greatest, all of their titles play flawlessly on iOS and Android. Can’t wait to not replay GTA:SA.

Another day, another esports scheduling crisis averted.

A short message posted to Twitter this past Tuesday could have turned the middle of next June into an interesting threesome for competitive gaming.

The announcement was regarding Major League Gaming’s Spring 2014 finale, traditionally hosted in Anaheim, CA, informally referred to as MLG Anaheim 2014. In the past, this event is one of the biggest live spectator events in esports and an event that I’ve personally attended in 2012 supporting ESFI’s on-scene coverage of the event. It was awesome.

And then, one of their European counterparts looked at their calendar.

The Dreamhack representative went on to reference this press release published in May 2012, two years in advance and also mentioned that the date was included in last year’s post-event release for Dreamhack Summer 2013.

Slasher, reporting for Gamespot, was the first to publish the story in a relatively proper context. Most notably, he made the mention that the date also conflicted with another favorite video game industry pastime—the 2014 Electronic Entertainment Expo.

With hints from Twitter posts following Adam’s informal announcement, one could conclude that there would have been some backchannel discussions taking place between MLG and the Anaheim Convention Center crew, and, presumably, the publisher/partners who would be lending their games to the show to find an alternative date.

Today, only two days after the initial announcement, a revised announcement was made via the MLG executive’s Twitter account:

Not a bad turnaround for an organization that seemed to be losing favor with parts of its audience because of the company’s switching games based on business decisions. Personally, I don’t have a problem with MLG playing favorites when it comes to making money and keeping their business afloat so long as they don’t start fixing tournaments or begin catering to a younger audience for the sake of advertising dollars. It’s a business decision and they want to create some cool entertainment that a wide-sepctrum audience can watch and enjoy, and maybe even pay for.

All of this is more impressive when you consider the following, as SirScoots points out:

I don’t think that MLG simply called up the folks responsible for scheduling the Anaheim Convention Center out and politely asked for the dates they previously arranged to have changed without a legally compelling reason, unless Blizzard or another publisher was at the table with them. I could be wrong about that, but my read on the situation is MLG had to work pretty hard to change the dates for the convention center deal they made for this next summer and the public was clued in by MLG’s SVP out of a need to appeal to their potential audience that they no longer have to decide between one of the best produced events in the business and one that isn’t. It comes down to business.

Though I also would have thought that Twitter isn’t exactly the best way to publicly announce something as big of a deal as MLG Anaheim 2014. I could be wrong about that, too.

A prelude to a few investigations.

The larger idea that prompted the above tweet is the following: is the viewership to players ratio for any given game a factor in esports marketing ventures?

I’d like to take a look at the numbers game, so to speak, behind esports events and broadcasts. What is coveted ‘critical mass’ behind the explosive growth and inevitable decline of a game’s viewership?

I want to try to understand this particular train of thought because I’m not sure there are many marketing perspectives from the video game industry’s side of esports. Perhaps that’s why Valve hid Dota 2 behind the beta invite wall for so long? Maybe that’s why Activision could throw a million dollars at Call of Duty one year and not do the same the next year? What gave Blizzard the idea that its much smaller scene could support the reformation of its World Championship Series events against its competitor’s League Championship Series? Why did Shootmania never ascend to replace Quake?

As with anything esports-related, the scope of the initial questions that has prompted me to look into things as simple as numbers has outgrown its initial goals over time. Of course, this also means taking the time to actually sit down and watch these events, something that I really haven’t done lately. Which series of events for each game should I start with? This is the crazy question I’ll have to answer first, really.

Maybe it’ll get me excited about esports again.

We’ll see.

[contact-form][contact-field label=’Name’ type=’name’ required=’1’/][contact-field label=’Which game do I try to figure out first?’ type=’select’ required=’1′ options=’CS:GO,Dota 2,League of Legends,Other,Shootmania,StarCraft 2′][/contact-form]