StarCraft News & Notes

WCS Shanghai turned out to be something of a rollercoaster: the one truly surprising player to make it through the R16 (Sioras) was promptly booted for ethical violations; Nerchio choked (again!) in a tournament where he was favoured; Scarlett continued to struggle to find her old form (choked to use her own word); Has, whose surprise participation in the R8 was punctuated by him blowing a 2-0 lead against Harstem; and puCK had his best tournament run since his 4th place at WEC back in 2014.  In the end we finished with an actual Year of Harstem moment as the Dutch player won the biggest tournament of his career, beating Snute 4-1 to take home $16,000 (something the Norwegian has taken pretty hard).  This is a fantastic result both for the player and the system, as Harstem is the second surprise winner of a Circuit event--it's a good thing both in terms of motivating players who haven't traditionally been top foreigners and it's also an indication that the competitive health of the scene is good (we aren't just seeing the same winners over and over again).  As for predictions, Aligulac and I had three of the four semi-finalists picked correctly (puCK was the surprise entrant, while Nerchio was the surprise absentee), and I had Snute in the finals.  Overall predictions were 9-6 a piece (60%), which is a bit low on both sides.  However much I like picking correctly, the low stats are also a good sign that competitive play is in a good place.

As for viewership, the GPL aired at a terrible time for those outside the region to watch, but while it's non-Chinese numbers was accordingly low (3.5k the first three days, then almost 5k and a little over 5k), the numbers in China were around 250k (digging into that thread it could be somewhat less, but it's a reasonable ballpark--which is excellent given that no Chinese player was in the top-four).  This makes the event a success for its primary audience.

I continue to be curious about how the new WCS system is impacting the foreign scene and thought I'd take a look at where we are (keeping in mind this is all very short-term).  One potential sign of health are how many smaller events  are being run (usually community organised events, or "minor tournaments" as TL designates them).  Here's the numbers (via TL) throughout HOTS and into early LOTV:

It's early to draw conclusions, but the indicator is going the right way.  What about larger tournaments?  TL is very wonky about how it differentiates "major" and "premier" tournaments, so in lieu of three graphs let's combine the numbers:

There are a lot of externalities at play here (the EU/AM WCS divisions along with the separate season finals in 2013, etc) and it's difficult to make conclusions from the above.  To me what it does indicate is that the relationship between the health of the game and the number of major tournaments is only partially linked, as there were more big tournaments in 2014 than in any other year and that's the worst year for viewership of the game.

Given that the above doesn't yet indicate much, what about earnings--are we seeing a difference in money being made in the foreign scene?  The easiest way is to compare January-March (and who doesn't want yet another nifty graph); we'll keep the prize distribution to the larger events since those were the most likely to go to parachuting Koreans in the past (these are purely foreign events, so don't include any held in Korea):

Here we see the most obvious impact of the new system--even with the restrictions imposed in 2015 non-Korean earnings were dropping (both in volume and percentage: the raw numbers: 2013 (86,289 of 259,405), 2014 (72,444 of 259,716), 2015 (25,401 of 178,858), and 2016 (224,229 of 310,429).  It's now possible for a foreign pro outside the top three or four players to make a living by playing SC2, something that was impossible in HOTS.

I've been posting viewership numbers for SC2 streams since no one else is doing it (numbers are all via Fuzic).  Streams in green have seen a significant increase, those in red a decrease, and those in blue didn't appear on my last list.  The period covered are weeks 10-12 with a minimum of 10 hours a week (including a few judgement calls and excluding known viewbotters [I've also added in a couple of streamers I missed when I initially posted this]):

1. NaNiwa 821
2. Nathanias 770
3. TLO 565
4. Hui 533
5. iNcontroL 455
6. Lowko 434
7. Avilo 392
8. Dragon 331
9. ForGG 316
10. HTOMario 273
11. MCanning 228
12. PiG 218
13. ViBE 209
14. Twilight Council 197
15. Yogo 194
16. Neuro 185
17. TOP 178
18. FireCake 176
19. TRUE 171
20. Indy 166
21. ProTech 163
22. StarDust 156

There's a lot of nuance in the above numbers--Nathanias is actually on the rise overall, his numbers recovering from when he was away casting; Rotterdam would be near the top of this list, but missed a week because of WCS Shanghai; Dragon has been in free fall since getting his sponsorship (he's lost about 40% of his audience); Avilo has been especially whiny lately and that always hurts his numbers; I'm not sure what's happening to Neuro but after a long period of forward momentum he's slipped back; another notable who doesn't appear here is CranK (whose numbers are slipping badly).  More generally, Destiny would lead this list (followed by Polt) if he'd streamed SC2 during this period; streamers like Happy, Artosis, MoMan, and others have good numbers, but just haven't streamed enough to make the list.

MaximusBlack has largely switched over to poker and other games, which is pretty funny from a guy who was lecturing the community about support in February.  This isn't a complete break from SC2 like when he switched to League of Legends, but since mid-February he's only played twice.  It's a sad place for him given his rhetoric prior to LOTV's launch; while I've personally never cared for his stream I would prefer he remained in the scene full-time.

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This article is written by Peter Levi (@eyeonthesens)