Ex-MLG employee weighs in on MLG PPV
Full disclosure: I am a former Major League Gaming employee. I worked as a full-time staff writer from 2006-2007, and as a freelance writer from 2009-2011. My employment at MLG ended when their content department was closed in December 2011. (http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=297315)
Major League Gaming is a big company. Major League Gaming is an ambitious company. The question of the hour: does Major League Gaming's business model make it a sustainable company?
Since its inception, MLG's goal has been simple and unwavering: to provide the highest quality professional gaming event on the market. It is a company created by gamers, for gamers, and emerged as a league that resonated with fans in a burgeoning industry that offered many alternatives. MLG grew while competitors like AGP and the CPL fell by the wayside, and its vision for the competitive gaming market attracted millions upon millions of dollars in venture capital.
Year after year, MLG cycled through big name corporate sponsors and partnerships including Red Bull, Scion, Stride Gum, and Sony. Its tournaments were featured on the USA Network, its news covered on espn.com, and its players adorned one hundred seventy-five million Dr. Pepper bottles.
MLG aims to create meaningful and memorable tournaments that stand above the weekly grind, where the victor can make a legitimate claim to being the best player in the world in that moment
Ultimately, MLG aims to create meaningful and memorable tournaments that stand above the weekly grind, where the victor can make a legitimate claim to being the best player in the world in that moment. To deliver a tournament of such magnitude, MLG has developed a format that combines the frenetic pace of a weekend-long elimination tournament with the world's most stacked player pool to create a uniquely captivating experience.
While IEM Sao Paulo brought us suspenseful games and an impressive victory in the finals by viOLet, the player pool included only a handful of top Koreans and lacked a live open bracket to provide cinderella stories over the course of the event. Likewise, the GSL deserves its claim to the title of "world's most competitive tournament", but occupies a distinctly different place in the market from MLG. Whereas the GSL provides month-long tournaments in which players diligently prepare for specific opponents, Major League Gaming's events represent a seventy-two-hour brawl between top talent from across the globe.
MLG's 2011 season was rife with unforgettable moments: the MC throat slash, the Boxer v. IdrA rollercoaster series, NesTea and NaNiwa tabloid drama, HayprO defeating NesTea and nearly knocking out MVP, and Leenock's marathon run through the Providence bracket. Major League Gaming events feel as if the entire community is together under one literal roof, and represent what I believe is the best of what e-sports has to offer.
As good as the MLG events are, however, they don't come without a significant price tag. The tournament prize pools are just a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of tournament stations, power distribution systems, broadcasting and recording equipment, a week-long venue rental, transportation, food and lodging for a quite sizable staff, and security among other necessary expenses.
Major League Gaming's primary task then is to harness the community's interest in its tournaments to create a sustainable business model. While the company has been growing rapidly since its creation, adspace sold during its events has historically been bolstered by year-round web traffic. The competitive Halo community posted almost exclusively to the mlgpro.com forums, and related community sites such as Gamebattles and Smashboards were purchased and added to the MLG network.
Despite StarCraft 2 prevailing as MLG's flagship title, however, their network of websites can hardly be considered a hub for the StarCraft community. Similarly, MLG's online-only offerings such as the Global Invitational Qualifiers and Winter Arena Qualifiers don't appear to have garnered much attention from the community. Viewership of the Winter Qualifier VODs, if accurately reported, are measly by anyone's standards. Game one of the Korean Finals between NesTea and PartinG, for example, has logged fewer than eight hundred views at the time this article was written.
The bottom line is this: after years of investment and growth, MLG has reached a point where it needs to start paying dividends.
The bottom line is this: after years of investment and growth, MLG has reached a point where it needs to start paying dividends. The difficulty is that while the StarCraft community has been largely responsible for the league's growth, it is also a community saturated with free content. In a world of nonstop Twitch.tv streams, free GSL live broadcasts and weekly tournaments, StarCraft content is easy to come by. MLG's hope is that fans like myself and others find their brand of StarCraft appealing enough to pay for it.
It's a bold new move, but a necessary one from MLG's perspective. They've taken the "if you build it, they will come" mantra and put it into action. The Winter Arena is home to the best players, the best broadcasters and the best streaming technology in the industry. The question is: are viewers willing to pay a premium for a "luxury" broadcast?
Thanks to a scheduling overlap with the ASUS ROG Assembly Winter, MLG's gambit will be put to the test straight away. MLG's event is headlined by the likes of MC, IdrA, MVP, and will be casted by the GSL's Tasteless and Artosis. For ASUS ROG: HerO, PuMa, Stephano, and European favorites TotalBiscuit and Apollo.
Is the difference between the two enough to justify the $20 price tag? If nothing else, the Winter Arena will be an incredibly telling indication of how highly the community values MLG's product. Disregarding revenue sharing and the Dr. Pepper event sponsorship, it will take five thousand pay-per-view tickets to cover the estimated $100,000 travel and lodging costs for the thirty-two invited players, not to mention the prize pool and additional production expenses.
It remains to be seen whether MLG's vision of a big budget competitive gaming circuit will prove to be financially sustainable. If the Arena fails to draw sufficient sales, MLG will surely continue to explore alternatives: lower ticket prices, fewer arena competitors, smaller championship venues, or even moving the open bracket to an online format. Sundance and MLG have made it explicitly clear that the entire structure could be reworked in the spring pending the success of the winter season.
The GSL, for instance, keeps costs low with a modestly sized studio and a centrally located player base. Other tournaments, like the Dreamhack Valencia Invitational, run small one-off invitation-only events. Further still, online showmatches like the IPL Fight Club boil the e-sports formula down to its bare minimum: two players, a couple of casters, and a prize pool. These formats are safe. Low overhead, low scale, low risk.
MLG's vision is much grander: massive events where any player in the world can sign up and take home the title. A stage where amateurs like Ailuj and Nikoras can square off against LosirA and Puzzle. Theirs are events that pull the entire StarCraft community into one tournament, where the victor is not simply the best of those in attendance, but the best in the world.
I for one hope they succeed. I find Major League Gaming events to be the most exciting broadcasts in the industry, and appreciate the way they've dedicated themselves to improving their organization and the community including revenue sharing programs, all-expenses paid trips for players, and deeper and larger prize pools. On the other hand, what makes them unique is also what makes their model a risky one. MLG has gambled on gathering the scene's top talent in the hopes of creating a product that is worth your $20. Whether they've succeeded is something each of us can vote on with our wallets.
