It wasn’t meant to be like this. Not at all. Blizzard’s long-anticipated launch of StarCraft II was meant to be a dream – a triumphant return to the RTS genre that made the company’s name in 1997, when the first StarCraft revolutionised realtime strategy gaming. The centrepiece of the game’s launch? South Korea, the epicentre of world competitive gaming, where the low-specs original spread like a virus, hopping from the gamer fringe to become a mainstream sport within five years. Of the ten-million-plus copies of the original game sold worldwide, half were in South Korea. Two television channels sprang up to broadcast matches between the 12 Proleague teams, and fans flocked to see elite players face off against their rivals. The best players pulled in big money, earning up to £200,000 a year.
It’s no wonder that Blizzard looked to South Korea as the land of opportunity for the sequel. With so many players and fans still playing the original, with dedicated television channels running constant promotion, with an entire sport evolving from a single game, what could possibly go wrong?
Plenty, as it turns out. When Blizzard made the original StarCraft way back in 1998, in the early bloom of gaming as a massive entertainment industry, the company had no way of predicting the success of the game in Korea. The blossoming of the e-Sports industry there, spearheaded by StarCraft, took place in an ad-hoc, unregulated manner, and not a single dollar was paid to Blizzard by any of the Korean entities which grew up around the StarCraft phenomenon.
This time around, things have changed. Vivendi took part control of Blizzard in 2008 through its majority-owned company Activision, and a new, more commerce-focused slant became apparent despite Blizzard’s relative independence. Now there would be no chance that an entire sport would spring up unauthorised. This time, Blizzard was going to take control of its own intellectual property and control what was done with it. Stung by the experience of battling World Of Warcraft bots, task automators and gold farmers, the company took a hardline stance against KeSPA – the Korean e-Sports Players Association – and the two TV channels, MBC Game and OnGameNet.
In an open letter on May 27 – two months before the full release – Blizzard president Mike Morhaime laid it out in the open: “In 2007, we were shocked and disappointed to learn that KeSPA had illegally sold the broadcasting rights for StarCraft tournaments without our consent. With this clear violation of our intellectual property rights, we were forced to become more actively involved in the situation and make our voice be heard.”
Strong words indeed. Morhaime wrote that his company had tried hard to negotiate with KeSPA – which has the backing of the Korean government, the teams, and the TV channels – but had got nowhere, effectively forcing Blizzard to ditch KeSPA and give exclusive broadcast rights to SCII matches to a minnow of an operation, Gom TV. The announcement sent shockwaves through the Korean e-Sports establishment, and rippled out into the English-speaking world. To fend off the perception of a money-grab, Morhaime tackled the issue head on: “Unlike the negative rumours you might have heard, Blizzard’s intention towards e-Sports is not to ‘dominate’ it and create excessive profits from it. From the beginning of the negotiations up to now, the basic framework we have thought of is one where e-Sports can continue to grow, while we can protect our intellectual property rights.”
Why is Blizzard getting so hardline about broadcasting rights? After all, the 12 pro-gaming teams are sponsored by major Korean companies who regard the sport simply as a way to get young people interested in their brands. There’s no real money in broadcasting StarCraft – the large audience is nearly all teenage or in its early 20s, a group that in Korea does not have much disposal income, and attending a StarCraft stadium match costs nothing. As Jae-Gyoon Yi, one of the founders of professional StarCraft and the coach of the Woongjin Stars team, told us, when a company sponsors a pro-gaming team, it’s simply another marketing avenue for product exposure.
“In ten years, fans might choose their products instead of the competitors’. They will remember the name,” he says. A team costs up to £14m per year to run – small beer for a long-term branding operation. But the massive corporations will only stay loyal to their teams if fans keep coming to matches and watching them on TV. This battle over intellectual rights may in fact damage the very industry which Blizzard wants to run.
As Korean StarCraft commentator Milkis says, this offline battle is all about control. “Blizzard wanted a lot of control – ownership of pretty much everything – which KeSPA refused to give. The actual negotiations had little to do with money, but more about how much control each party has.”
Control seems to be increasingly important to Blizzard, as evidenced by its refusal to include the LAN play functionality which made the first game such a favourite. To play StarCraft II competitively at all, you have to go through the shinier but more restrictive Battle.net, without chatrooms and restricted to playing within the single region in which you purchased the game. Dig a little bit into Battle.net’s terms of use and you’ll find that it is forbidden to “use the Service for any ‘e-Sports’ or group competition sponsored, promoted or facilitated by any commercial or non-profit entity without Blizzard’s prior written consent”. In short, the unauthorised Korean scene is hereby put on notice: stop using Blizzard’s intellectual property, or be prepared to cough up for the privilege.
Blizzard’s hardball approach has left Koreans feeling sore. A KeSPA spokesman told us that he felt the Korean industry had effectively created the StarCraft phenomenon. In part, that’s true – the region’s fascination with all things Zerg, Terran and Protoss did wonders for Blizzard’s bottom line when it was a smaller company than it is today, and countless thousands more copies were sold once the big-name stars emerged on television.
“Our position is that we created the competitions. Korea is the home of StarCraft – it’s very big here. There are still lots of people playing an old game, but now I think Blizzard wants it to be here without KeSPA,” says the spokesman. “Blizzard wants Battle.net to be used in competitions, not LAN. And they want more money.”
Cutting out the old players seemed like a smart move for Blizzard as it prepared to launch a game it felt certain would update and refine its 1998 offering, guaranteeing years more pro-gaming. As critics began lining up to praise the slick graphics, refined gameplay and new tactics, surely no one would mind if it omitted LAN play – forcing all game traffic through Battle.net – and introduced regional licences for the game? Surely the devoted Korean fans wouldn’t mind if a new, more amenable player picked up the rights to broadcast competitions on television?
It seems, however, that Blizzard may have guessed wrong. In Korea, StarCraft II hasn’t bombed – but it hasn’t done as well as its maker was expecting. There’s been a 12-year gap between game instalments, and many players have either outgrown games or moved on to more novel pastures. StarCraft II is an updated StarCraft, not an entirely new game. Eager to ensure Koreans ditched their beloved original StarCraft for the revamped version, Blizzard offered the game to Korean WOW gamers for free.
Even so, the numbers playing in PC baangs (net cafes) have been lower than expected, with only two to three per cent of Korean gamers playing SCII in the month after it was released. It’s a tiny number given that Korea is perceived as StarCraft’s home market, that the game was released in time for the school holidays, and that it launched with a $30m ad campaign. In fact, StarCraft II’s three-million-plus sales have been mainly in the west.
But after months of tense negotiations, the future may be shifting Blizzard’s way once more. In recent weeks, one of the two main StarCraft: Brood War league organisers, MBC, has reluctantly made overtures to Gom TV for the rights to broadcast. It means that KeSPA – which is supposed to represent the entire e-Sports industry – is losing its grip. Since Gom TV owns the Korean rights to broadcast StarCraft II and the original game, Blizzard effectively has KeSPA, and Gom’s rival TV channels, over a barrel. Gom TV gave the two established StarCraft leagues until the end of August to finish their now-illegal matches. Since then, however, negotiations have been going badly.
Blizzard president Mike Morhaime at the TG-Intel STARCRAFT II Open Season1 tournament
“It’s hard to look at the one-sided and coercive demands as negotiations,” a KeSPA source said in late September. The pro team KT, which was involved in the negotiations, went further. “We once again confirmed that [Gom owner] Gretech does not have any desire to negotiate as they deny the existence of pro-game teams and the Proleague,” said its spokesman.
Despite – or perhaps because of – the pitched battle over broadcast rights, Korean pro-gamers are beginning to make the switch to StarCraft II. Jaedong, widely considered the best Zerg player in the original StarCraft at present, now says he will move over to StarCraft II. “I will definitely switch as I feel StarCraft II has a higher status than StarCraft: Brood War,” he told a Chinese game blog. “We will see more international tournaments in SCII compared to StarCraft: Brood War and this will make the change natural for me. I want to build my reputation abroad and reach out to the international audience.”
For pro-gamers, the case for switching between two similar games was given a boost by April’s match-fixing scandal, which engulfed some of the original StarCraft’s most highly paid players, including the legendary Zerg player sAviOr. Many players were forced to quietly resign or stay out of the limelight, while disgusted fans began abandoning the game, speeding up an existing trend away from StarCraft towards newer, Korean-made titles. As Milkis notes, Korean e-Sports has been shrinking recently: “People are growing up, getting into different kinds of games, and events like this [the Blizzard crackdown] and match fixing are drawing people away from the game.”
For now, Blizzard is pinning its hopes on StarCraft II pro-gaming taking off worldwide, rather than remaining in the Korean ghetto of ultra-high actions-per-minute and ten-hour-day practice sessions. To that end, Gom TV put on an open tournament in Seoul in early October, with prize money totalling £315,000. Despite being open to players from around the world, the tournament was largely Korean, and the Korean Zerg player FruitDealer sent in the Ultralisks to ensure ultimate victory.
He was one of the earliest pro-gamers to make the switch to StarCraft II, after he was forced to leave the original StarCraft scene and his team, eSTRO, to deal with a family emergency. Returning, he picked up the new game and proved himself the current master, pocketing £53,000. With his historic win, FruitDealer has staked a firm claim that Korean StarCraft gamers are still the world’s best. It’s a promising sign for Blizzard and Gom TV, but the future is not certain. We won’t know for some time if Blizzard’s tough tactics have damaged the StarCraft phenomenon in Korea beyond repair, or if it all merely boils down to transitional road bumps
