![]() Data from the now-defunct Xfire would corroborate that story in the Western world months later, when their July report showed that League of Legends had nearly double the raw gameplay hours of any other game tracked on their platform (across over 21 million users). By March of 2012, it had surpassed Wings of Liberty as the most-played game in Korea. League of Legends had long left SC2 a distant second in stream viewership. But 2012 was also the year that the tide began to turn in favour of other games and genres, most notably the rise of MOBAs. Total prize money awarded crested the $4 million dollar mark in 2012. Viewership numbers on major events weren’t enormous, but average and peak viewer counts continued climbing reliably. While it is unclear exactly how these negotiations transpired, KeSPA did make several releases and plan press conferences to address the ongoing risk that their operations would be fundamentally shuttered by Blizzard’s demands.ĭespite some setbacks, the StarCraft scene appeared to be comfortably on the rise well into 20. Three years of negotiation regarding KeSPA’s operation of Brood War (and, in theory, the future operation of StarCraft II) in Korea had come to a halt due to concerns about broadcast rights and intellectual property expectations. It was revealed in the lead-up to Wings of Liberty coming out in 2010 that Blizzard had exited negotiations with KeSPA as their partner in Korea, which presented serious challenges and risks to both the existing operation of competitive Brood War, as well as the future potential for StarCraft II esports in Korea. The thriving Brood War leagues in Korea were actually overseen by the Korean Government - the Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism’s new branch, the Korea e-Sports Association (KeSPA). It was events behind-the-scenes that would ultimately limit StarCraft II’s potential.īlizzard could well have used a ‘build order’ - the term for the sequencing of which units to build in a game of StarCraft - of their own when StarCraft II was approaching release. In a world where it enjoyed unparalleled success as a game, stream entertainment, and a spectator sport, it seems hard to imagine that anything could go wrong for Blizzard’s platinum child of a product. By 2014, Twitch would represent the fourth-largest source of peak internet traffic in the United States, thanks in part to the popularity of StarCraft II. Blizzard enjoyed seeing their games atop Twitch’s most-watched list, and would formally partner with them for the newly minted World Championship Series (WCS) in 2013. ![]() As the most popular game and esport in the world by almost all metrics, Twitch took off by allowing fans to watch pro players any time the wanted, and by giving pros another revenue stream. Twitch officially launched in June of 2011, and the service relied heavily on StarCraft II to gain an audience. ![]() Between over a decade of balance patches, expansions, and evolving playstyles, there are now a ton of reasons why even new players should try out StarCraft II.Alongside its popularity and financial success, SC2 also helped elevate the profile of a little-known video streaming platform called. Despair not, though, for StarCraft II's isn't down for the count yet. Skip ahead a little over a decade, and although the sequel in the series, StarCraft II, drummed up enormous enthusiasm back in 2010, it's hard to deny that the heyday of StarCraft II, and strategy games in general, seems to have passed. RELATED: Blizzard Seems To Have Abandoned StarCraft For Now Furthermore, the game had a reputation as being among the most tactically deep and mechanically complex strategy games out there. The popular real-time strategy game StarCraft commands an impressive legacy: it was so wildly popular worldwide that it essentially created Esports as they are known today, and the competitive scene that thrived throughout the '90s and early '00s defined a lot of the elements that would become standard for big-budget pro gaming competitions in the future.
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