Developer reveals overhaul to World Championship Series; cofounder Mike Morhaime discusses changes.
Today at a press conference in South Korea, Blizzard Entertainment announced a revamp to its StarCraft II World Championship Series which debuted last year, working with partners to create three equal and parallel leagues in North America, Europe, and South Korea. More than $1.6 million in prize money will be up for grabs for players in 2013, and fans at home can expect to watch for free in 720p.
Blizzard announced that it will use both GomTV and OnGameNet in South Korea, Major League Gaming in North America, and Turtle Entertainment's Electronic Sports League in Europe. Each will operate their region's WCS league for the year. There will be three separate seasons in 2013 each with regional finals and a season finals event. A unified global player ranking system will be established with points given to players at each event, culminating with the top 16 players in points vying for a spot to be called World Champion at the BlizzCon Global Finals. Next year there will be four seasons.
"I think we just look at the whole ecosystem and recognize that it could be a whole lot easier to understand", Blizzard Entertainment CEO Mike Morhaime told GameSpot. "There are scheduling conflicts that make players have to make difficult decisions where sometimes you don't get people playing in the tournaments they think they should be playing in. It's very hard to follow, to really know what the relative importance of winning various things are. I think it really falls to us, to Blizzard, we're really the only company in position to work with everybody, to help create a single storyline in the ecosystem."
This will mark the first time that OnGameNet and GomTV will be working together. GomTV will run the first WCS league in Korea, beginning with the upcoming GSL Code S season starting in less than two days. OGN will broadcast the event on TV in with their own casters. Both OGN and GSL will broadcast each other's leagues with their own casters and streams. After this season of Code S, OGN will begin their next OnGameNet StarLeague which has been on hold for a while, and act as the main operator of WCS Korea Season 2. Another season of GSL Code S will not take place until OSL is over, and act as the third and final WCS Korea season before the Global Finals.
The Korean eSports Association has been involved every step of the way, Blizzard said.
"One of the really awesome things about all of this is we have all the entities in Korea working together now," Morhaime said. "The Korean leagues will be available to watch both through OGN and GomTV. ProLeague will still be going on and the GSTL will still be going on. We'll have StarCraft II on television five nights a week."
"Blizzard really worked hard for all partners, so we can truly work together in not only Korea but also the world."
"Blizzard really worked hard for all partners, so we can truly work together in not only Korea but also the world," GomTV StarCraft 2 Manager Chae Jung Won told GameSpot. "For GomTV's perspective, we were working hard to increase our media platform from 2012."
Players must commit to one WCS league at the beginning of the year and cannot change region after, but can compete in any non-WCS events in any region. Each regional league season will run for 8-10 weeks, with all games played on weekdays in a consistent schedule. This will allow players to travel internationally to non-WCS events on weekends. Non-WCS events cannot run events on the same weekend as WCS events. Non-WCS events will be given as of yet undetermined amount of points.
All matches in Korea will be played in studio through GomTV's StarLeague or OnGameNet's StarLeague, while North America and Europe will play Online until the top 16 players. Those top 16 players will compete in a studio environment to determine the best five players in each region. Five players from each region will then compete in the Season 1 finals event, with one additional player to come from the host continent for 16 players total. They will compete for an undermined amount of points. Each continent will get one finals event this year in the size of an event similar to one at GSL, MLG, or ESL.
"We're hoping that by giving the North American and European players their own league, it will make it so they don't have to travel as much and can focus more on practice," Morhaime said. "We think that the level of play will also increase within the regions this way."
The tournament structure has been modeled off of GSL's Code S, Code A, and Code B system and is called Premier, Challenger, and Qualifier. This structure will run for all partners including MLG and ESL. The Challenger events will run slightly different in North America and Europe due to logistics in travel. Players will be able to move up and down within their own region as players do in GSL. Only the OSL will have differences, where there will be an additional Round of 32 added on played in a best of one format.
Players in North America and Europe will be invited to kickoff Season 1 based upon their performances in 2012 across all leagues. Open qualifiers will also be held to determine the final player list. Additionally, the top 200 Grand Masters players on the StarCraft II Ladder will be invited to join the initial qualifiers.
Blizzard says that they have partnered with TwitchTV to broadcast the entire year for free in 720p. There will also be a central hub created for fans to watch the games, follow the storylines, and get all information related to the World Championship Series.
"For all of us in the West, it will be available via TwitchTV" Morhaime said. "We can watch this stuff now. There will be a regular schedule to follow along."
With everything announced, Blizzard feels this will be the best year yet for competitive StarCraft II. With several developers giving support to the competitive side of their game as of late, Morhaime is thrilled to be able to do as much with their own franchise.
"We think the time is right to level-up StarCraft II as an eSport."
Blizzard cofounder Mike Morhaime says StarCraft II growth outside Korea has been a "big surprise."
Blizzard cofounder Mike Morhaime believes that the time is right to level-up StarCraft II as an eSport. In a new interview with GameSpot, the industry veteran detailed the new system for the World Championship Series, how StarCraft II's growth outside of Korea has been surprising, and more.
Check out the full interview below.
What is the goal in creating this new system for the World Championship Series?
I think we just look at the whole ecosystem and recognize that it could be a whole lot easier to understand. There are scheduling conflicts that make players have to make difficult decisions where sometimes you don't get people playing in the tournaments they think they should be playing in. It's very hard to follow, to really know what the relative importance of winning various things are. I think it really falls to us, to Blizzard, we're really the only company in position to work with everybody, to help create a single storyline in the ecosystem. We think the time is right to level-up StarCraft II as an eSport.
When you guys were deciding to make a change, what were your considerations going into this? What were the first problems you were looking to solve?
Well number one, we wanted to leverage all the great stuff our eSports partners were already doing. I think we took a first attempt at this last year with the World Championship Series which was awesome, but it didn't really do what we had hoped, which is to be the single storyline around StarCraft eSports. It actually turned to a parallel storyline that just added a whole other set of events to follow. Even though we worked with our existing partners, it didn't really leverage the cool stuff that they were already doing. So I think this approach is actually much better because now we're having partners actually running the league.
Why set up this system of events now instead of before?
We didn't know how big StarCraft II was going to be in the West. We've always viewed South Korea as the epicenter of eSports. We did actually setup a global StarCraft League in Korea called by the same name: GSL. The big surprise with StarCraft II is how big SC2 eSports has grown outside of Korea.
Ideally we would have loved to be able to announce this before Heart of The Swarm launched, but setting something up something like this with so many different partners is actually quite complicated. We're a little bit later in the year than we would have hoped, but everybody is really excited now and it's going to be a really awesome story for the year.
Why decide to use both GomTV and OnGameNet as partners in Korea instead of choosing one?
GomTV has been an excellent partner to us in StarCraft 2. We've been talking to OnGameNet now for years. We're really excited to finally have everybody in Korea working together in harmony. We have some excellent partners that have contributed a lot to esports throughout the years and we really wanted them to take part in the league.
In North America and Europe the partners are Major League Gaming and the Electronic Sports League, respectively. Notable names left out are DreamHack and the North American Star League. Why were these regions not done the same way as Korea with both participating?
We talked to everyone and we tried to do the things that were best for each region according to the various existing capabilities of the partners. We think that the stuff that NASL and DreamHack have been doing has been really awesome for StarCraft II, and we would love to see that continue. We think that seeing a single operator in those regions for North America and Europe made more sense for the World Championship Series events.
We're hoping that by giving the North American and European players their own league, it will make it so they don't have to travel as much and can focus more on practice. We think that the level of play will also increase within the regions this way.
The Korean region will have only studio matches in the form of GSL and OSL. Will this format also happen in the North American and European regions?
Most of the matches will be played in a studio. The Online portion for North American and Europe is mainly looked at for logistical reasons for this year, to ease the travel burden. We do recognize the challenges with online play and that's something we're working on to address in future iterations of the WCS. All the critical matches will be played in a studio, and we're taking different steps to ensure the online play is fair.
For North America and Europe, the Round of 32 will probably be played Online. We're still zeroing in how exactly that will look like. Anything from the Round of 16 and beyond will definitely be in studio.
How will events like DreamHack and NASL now exist in the new World Championship Series system?
The way that we envision that is there will be the opportunity for non-WCS events if they meet certain criteria to give out WCS points so that there is some incentive and reward for pro players to compete in those events. But the majority of the points that we expect pro players to get will probably be through doing really well in the league.
Korean media reported that GomTV and OnGameNet would be paid $1.8 Million dollars in financial support. Is this true?
The numbers they reported are not accurate.
Are those numbers close at all? Can you say how much you're paying the leagues? Is this support being given also to MLG and ESL?
Our business terms with the leagues are not public information, so I'm not able to talk about those. Blizzard is making financial investments and we have been making financial investments to support StarCraft II eSports for a while now.
There were some initial reports saying that the Korea eSports Association weren't involved in talks initially. How much of a role do they play in all of this?
It's critical, and KeSPA was with us every step of the way. Not all the information that gets to press in South Korea is accurate. I don't really know why that is, but it's true. Anyone that reported KeSPA wasn't involved just wasn't true.
There will be three Season finals this year. Will they be located in the same region or spread out? Have you thought about how you want to present them?
I think it'll be different based on each region. There will be one in North America, one in Europe, and one in Asia in 2013. In 2014 there will be four events. Two of them will be in Asia, one in North America, and one in Europe. I think that they'll be similar to a major event that you see today. The North American event may look a lot like how you see a current Major League Gaming major event stop.
Why hold the finals at BlizzCon instead of doing another standalone championship event like last year's World Championship Series finals in China?
We think that eSports has been a pretty important part of BlizzCon for many years now. In terms of celebrating the Blizzard franchises I think there's no better way to celebrate it than crowning a World Champion. At BlizzCon 2011 we had the GSL Code S Championships between Jung "Mvp" Jong Hyun and Mun "MMA" Seong Won, which some consider one of the best events of all time. The weird thing about 2011 was we crowd 2 champions that weekend, one for BlizzCon and one of the GSL finals. That…is strange. We sort of want to get away from that and actually crown THE champion, and have a single storyline that's understandable.
Is there any worry for events that aren't a part of the WCS not getting as much attention as they used to?
Not really, because I don't think it'll be any worse than what we have today, where they don't get any points for anything.
What about regions that aren't listed, such as China and South East Asia?
I think that there's opportunity to expand this in future years based on how successful it is, but I think initially players outside of the set regions will basically have to choose a region to compete in. There are StarCraft leagues in China that still run, but if they'd like to play in WCS at this time they'll have to choose one of these three leagues. I'd love to see that change in the future, but at this point China isn't at that point of maturity in StarCraft 2 eSports that it made sense to do it in 2013.
How much of this is in the response to Riot's League Championship Series?
I don't think it has anything to do with them. We've been working with these guys a lot longer than Riot has.
Has there been thought to running the World Championship Series without the use of partners?
I would say not really. We're not trying to replace all of these great companies. I think there's a lot of great expertise and really good effort that has been built up over the last several years. We want to leverage that. We want Blizzard's focus to be on making awesome games, and not running tournaments and leagues, which in itself is a huge project. There are entire companies based on doing just that. This allows us to focus on what we do best.
Who will handle the broadcasting?
For all of us in the West, it will be available via TwitchTV. We can watch this stuff. There will be a regular schedule. One of the really awesome things about all of this is we have all the entities in Korea working together now. The Korean leagues will be available to watch both through OGN and GomTV. ProLeague will still be going on and the GSTL will still be going on. We'll have StarCraft 2 on television 5 nights a week.
The broadcasts will be streamed in 720p for free through all services. We're still working out what to do beyond that with qualities beyond 720p, and VOD packages.
What type of potential hub could we see for all of the World Championship Series?
That's a great question. We still have some work to do here. We don't have that hub Online yet but it's something we know we need, and we have plans to create that and put it Online this year.
Activision confirms around 40 full-time High Moon employees let go following completion of Deadpool.
Activision has laid off around 40 full-time developers at Transformers and Deadpool outfit High Moon Studios. The cuts came after the team completed work on action Deadpool, according to a statement provided to Deadpool.
"Activision Publishing consistently works to align its costs with its revenues--this is an ongoing process. With the completion of development on Deadpool, we are taking a reduction in staff at High Moon Studios to better align our development talent against our slate," reads a line from the statement.
"Approximately, 40 full-time employees will be impacted globally. We are offering those employees who are impacted outplacement counseling services."
Deadpool is due out this summer for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. For more, check out GameSpot's previous coverage.
CEO Paul Raines says "the world is going to stand up and take notice" when Microsoft announces new machine.
GameStop CEO Paul Raines is optimistic about the still-unannounced Xbox 720. Speaking with Games Industry International, the executive said the platform will draw the attention of gamers worldwide when Microsoft decides to announce it.
"We've been spending a lot of time with Microsoft, but we have to let them take the lead on this, but it will be a very hot, compelling device," Raines said. "They are doing some really cool stuff, and I'm eager to hear them start their announcements because I think the world is going to stand up and take notice."
Raines is bullish on the vitality of consoles overall. He said negative sentiments about new platforms is not a new phenomenon for the upcoming console transition. In addition, he said internal data shows strong demand for the PlayStation 4 and noted this enthusiasm is likely to be matched for the Xbox 720.
"We don't subscribe to that. The cool thing with GameStop is, we've got a lot of gamers here and we've got a lot of people [on the team] who've seen every console cycle. And what's interesting to me - I was talking to one of our founders, Dan DeMatteo, and he was telling me every console cycle you get people who will say 'there will never be another console,' or 'what else can the consoles do?' And we just believe it's a cycle and we just haven't had a new product in so long. But we certainly don't believe that the new consoles won't be as exciting," Raines said. "There's a lot of demand for PS4, and I think there will be for the next Xbox as well, once it's announced."
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