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May 9, 2010

KeSPA vs. Blizzard: Why I Can’t Root for Either

It will happen.  There will be a time that “Billy Mitchell Breaks Donkey Kong Record” isn’t followed with “But did he finally set the high score for ‘Goofiest Haircut’”?  Too many under-twenty-fives rest their manhood on Call of Duty to make me believe Americans won’t pay to see talented gamers kick ass.

I’d totally enjoy a world where girls want your pro-gaming dick.  But my dad and every post-apocalyptic movie of the last thirty years have screamed the same thing: Beware sports invented by corporations.  And that new sport is Starcraft II.

I know the history of South Korean Starcraft.  I know the history of the video game business.  And I know what happens when corporations control sports.  And armed with that knowledge, I know it doesn’t matter who wins the Battle to broadcast Starcraft II.  Whether the sequel to the father figure of competitive gaming succeeds or dies, competitive gaming will be worse off in one way or another.

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On July 28, 2009, Warcraft III’s Jang Jae Ho (Moon) was scheduled to play Starcraft’s Lee Yun-Yeol (NaDa) in a Starcraft II exhibition match at South Korea’s eStars gaming event.  The pissing matches of real-time strategy past would finally be settled: Two inexperienced players would play a pre-beta version of Starcraft II to determine which Blizzard strategy game was the ultimate combat system.  No beta-testing in sight and we get “The Fifth Race” versus a three-time Starleague champion?  Who needed porn?

Enter the Korean E-Sports Association (KeSPA), the conglomeration of corporations that oversee competitive gaming in South Korea.  With the match approaching, the organization opted to prevent under-contract talent from competing in the eStars undercard matches.  Then the night of the event offered a black eye: KeSPA used their clout to keep the Starcraft II matches off of television.  Minus cameraphone footage that might as well be scrambled porn, Moon’s 1:1 draw with NaDa turned into an afterthought.

Starcraft II: Where I Can’t Tell What’s Going On, They May
Be Playing Super Metroid Happens

That’s when it dawned on me.  Everyone thought the removal of Local Arena Network play from Starcraft II was purely a piracy matter.  And as we explained to Blizzard that we’ll only buy five copies of the game (as opposed to six) because we won’t be able to play Starcraft II at the cabin retreat on Everest where I fuck my five smoking-hot girlfriends, the company was thinking ahead: The removal of LAN play is how you consolidate control of the professional Starcraft II scene.  And KeSPA ain’t happy about it.

United States software law essentially states you can modify software and hardware with add-ons as long as you don’t manipulate the existing software.  The courts don’t care if you can create a key for the keyhole.  That’s why Blizzard has no recourse against Garena, a client that tricks (amongst other games) Warcraft III into connecting online through its Local Area Network component.  Routing multiplayer through a closed service requires one to reverse-engineer Battle.net.  The courts don’t like that.

The idea Blizzard can grind legal action against every pirate server is laughable, because one will rise in Russia or Southeast Asia, and those parts of the world don’t quite give a fuck what our legal system thinks.  But a group of corporations playing “Sanctioning Body for South Korean Competitive Gaming”?  “Oh, just letting you know, uh, you’re using Battle.net 2.0 to play our game.  You owe us royalties!”

KeSPA has not paid one dime to Blizzard Entertainment for inventing one of South Korea’s most popular sports.  Blizzard is now introducing a direct competitor.  And in this direct competitor, all play is routed through a centralized server.  Blizzard has created a world where the inventor of the sport becomes its unquestioned overlord, a world where the Abner Doubleday estate gets royalties every time a professional baseball umpire shouts “Play ball!”  As far as I know, this is the first time any company has ever programmed an anti-trust exemption into their product.

The war was on.  Blizzard pours resources into a promising competitive gaming webcaster named GOMTV, KeSPA clubs pull from the league, killing it.  Starcraft II ends up with an Adults Only rating in South Korea, making it impossible to wrest the game from the tentacle loli queen and get it on television.  KeSPA wants unrestricted access to Video Games: The Athletic Competition.  Should you believe them, Blizzard wanted licensing fees, marketing and television control, yearly contract renewals, and control of the Starcraft II broadcast library.

So please tell me, who would you like me to root for?

The Korean E-Sports Association was founded in 2001, years after a tech boom saturated South Korea with state-of-the-art internet cafes.  Anyone who watched the Warcraft III competitive gaming scene struggle to supply top-tier matchups knows the dividends a centralized authority can reap.  With this centralized authority, the next eight years of Starcraft became so lucrative that Americans can’t make fun of South Korea without mentioning a Zerg Rush.

Think about it: 120,000 people saw “free admission” and showed up to watch the SKY Pro League finals.  As in “watched it at the stadium”.  South Korea has two Starcraft-dedicated television networks.  The best players are national celebrities.  And they will continue to become celebs because Starcraft has eliminated the country’s stigma of professional gaming.  South Korean moms and dads will give their prodigy the blessing of making it in Starcraft because it will make them “successful”.

And I’m supposed to believe this conglomeration of billion-dollar corporations cannot support a salary structure where the best players in the game are lucky to make as much as a National Football League bottom-feeder, and the second-tier players are better off with an office job.  Know how Florida Gators football coach Urban Meyer becomes the highest-paid government official in the state of Florida with his four-million-a-year salary?  And then I’m told compensating student-athletes for creating a product that generates billion-dollar television deals will break the system?  That famous television judge was right: “If it doesn’t make sense, it’s not true.”

Where we think of free agency as a way for talent to earn its market value, Starcraft “free agency” is a three-phase form of collusion: First, the player is required to negotiate with the team they previously played under.  Should the parties be unable to agree on a salary, other teams earn the right to bid for his services.  That player goes to the highest bidder, regardless of the player’s personal preference.  That is, if any team is willing to pay twice his current salary to the team letting him go.  And if the player doesn’t get a bid?  Return to your original squad to renegotiate the terms of Bubba’s shower visit.  Don’t like Bubba?  Enjoy your mandated one-year “retirement”.  And don’t think it couldn’t happen, because it almost wiped out the career of Lee Jae-Dong (Jaedong), the greatest Zerg player in the history of the game.  Have a problem with any of this?  Good luck.  KeSPA doesn’t care because you and your mill-workers can’t form a union.

Want a better grasp of the business model I’m describing?  Consider which American business model emulates South Korean Starcraft.  What business has its roots in globalization?  What made its first major in-roads during the 1990s?  What has become a stomping ground for white Americans who lack the athleticism to become professional football or basketball players?  If you said “video games”, “competitive gaming”, and “Counter-Strike”, you are totally fucking wrong.

Fake pro wrestler.  Or something.

Yes, that mixed martial arts, where professional wrestling is more fun when the violence is real.

Yes, the Brazilians had Vale Tudo.  Yes, Antonio Inoki became a Japanese national hero by fighting Muhammad Ali to a draw under rules better suited for full-court basketball.  It does not change that the sport’s modern incarnation is owned and paid for by corporations.

Big business wanted boxing.  They found out the sport’s indidivuals were just as greedy.  So big business found mixed martial arts.  They sold this sport by selling themselves as bodies of oversight that can create the matchups fans want to see.  “While Manny Pacquiao keeps dodging blood tests, we’ll guarantee you a money match every six weeks.”  And a salary system where UFC President Dana White is reportedly worth nine-figures but undercard fighters are lucky to get ten grand for a night’s work?  “That’s why we award bonuses for the best moments of the night.  That way, guys have to go in and earn their money.”

I’m pretty uncomfortable with a pay structure emulating the worst days of the Robber Barons, too.  When the UFC convinced 1.7 million people to spend green on the broadcast of UFC 100, the twenty-two fighters earned (not including Brock Lesnar’s unknown cut of pay-per-view revenue and various undisclosed fighter bonuses) a combined payroll of 1.8 million dollars.  For every fifty-five-dollar pay-per-view bought by the fan, the fighters made a little over one dollar.

You probably hate a world where someone can play a sport for one year and earn your lifetime salary.  But if people pay hundreds of dollars for tickets and eight dollars for a single beer, then the average National Basketball Association player will be four-million dollars because that is his market value. So call boxing a “dying sport”, but Floyd Mayweather earned twenty-two-million dollars for kicking the piss out of Shane Mosley.  By every conceivable metric, the UFC pays its fighters a smidgen of the revenue it generates.  The men who create the product can’t petition this because, surprise!  There is no union!  So in a sport where nothing challenges the prestige and financial stability of the UFC, your options are “man up” or “go coach high school wrestling”.

Where are the fighters suppose to make their meal ticket?  Merchandising!  Merchandising, where the real money from the movie is made.  And the less tradition a sport has, the easier it is to paint Condom Depot on a man’s ass and call it a day.  Don’t give me some crap about the tradition of mixed martial arts being rooted in the world’s fighting styles.  When Major League Baseball or the NFL try to throw ads on jerseys, fans riot.  Tradition does not let this happen:

Or this:

Or this:

Wow.  It’s like the Korean E-Sports Association is some bizarro-world incarnation of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, where people punch, kick, and armbar others with their brains.

So that establishes why I can’t root for KeSPA.  And thanks to Starcraft II’s closed system, we’re left with Blizzard and nobody else.  Should the company succeed, they establish corporate control of a competitive video game scene and have free reign to pull the same abuses KeSPA does.  If they fail?  Competitive gaming in the West goes back in the box for another half-decade.  Blizzard has programmed this game to adhere to their perception of intellectual property law and there is no recourse if they fuck this up.

Believe me, no game developer has a better history of post-release support.  But Blizzard has never proven they can manage the competition that revolves around their gaming universe.  Blizzard did not create Starcraft with the intention of forging a pseudo-sport.  Starcraft became a competitive game because the fans decided it could be one.

Players discovered Starcraft’s remaining imbalances could be fixed with map design.  With KeSPA’s help, leagues developed a regularly rotated map pool.  It allowed the game to evolve.  It also allowed the community to regularly “rebalance” the game, in the same way the NFL tweaks rules to make sure hitting a quarterback is grounds for felony charges.  Blizzard now controls that map pool.  And for all the nice things I’ve said about the Warcraft III ladder system, it was too good.  Where KeSPA influenced map choice on the amateur level, Blizzard’s ladder system dictates what maps are played.  And that requires the responsibility of Blizzard to make regular updates to this map pool.  And they don’t.  So where players complain Turtle Rock is a tired map, they’ll play it any way.  Hey, it’s a ladder map.

The Warcraft III Four vs. Four Random Team map pool, circa 2005.
Which is messed up, because it’s 2010 and I just took the picture.

And the efforts of that surprisingly talented Youtube shoutcast crew?  Blizzard wants unopposed access to their video and replay libraries.  You think the company will let Nick Plott bring the month’s best tournament-level Starcraft II games to YouTube if he isn’t under Blizzard contract?  Scratch your amateurs who bust their ass to bring competitive Starcraft to the masses.

What about the people who created private servers that became stomping grounds for the best Starcraft players in the world?  Forget the piracy implications of ICCUP.  The server is a unanimous improvement over Battle.net 1.0 when it comes to playing playing Starcraft.  It features a superior ranking system, superior latency, superior anti-hack capability, superior everything.  You think Blizzard wants to compete with private servers that can expose any Battle.net 2.0 weaknesses?  Blizzard’s already called ICCUP a “pirate server”, so we won’t get private servers, either.

And Blizzard’s track record?  As Starcraft thrived on the backs of passionate fans and a third-party organization, high-level Diablo II was wrecked by an expansion pack that normalized character builds and equipment.  World of Warcraft suffered the same fate.  BlizzCon 2007 watched Manuel Schenkhuizen (Grubby) and Moon try to renew their rivalry with idiotic shoutcasters, non-sound-proof player booths, and faulty hardware combining to postpone the bout.  And the oxymoron known as pro-level World of Warcraft?  The game that is the test run for the Blizzard “license our game or die” mentality has gone nowhere, with Major League Gaming the only guinea pig willing to pay Blizzard’s egregious licensing fees.

What makes a company fight so diligently for this competitive gaming pie?  It’s obviously about money.  But consider the current Activision-Blizzard business position.  Consider the direction of the video game industry.

I love modern video games.  But it’s clear the economic expansion of the market didn’t occur because the product got better.  Companies tapped new markets.  The Sony Playstation introduced games to the 18-29 demographic.  After Nintendo nearly capsized with the kid-friendly GameCube, the company countered with the Nintendo Wii and secured everyone above the age of 29.  So on the demographic front, there’s not much left to tap.

Your mom plays it for the gameplay.  Right.  That’s like drinking
alcohol because you think it tastes good.

World of Warcraft has put Blizzard Entertainment in the unprecedented position of owning a limitless war chest.  The problem?  For every person who gives up World of Warcraft and their monthly subscription fee to play Starcraft II, Blizzard loses money.  So where WoW made MMORPGs cool to the general public, Blizzard is releasing Starcraft II with the intention of making competitive gaming cool to the general public.  And then leaving a market where only they can make money off of it.

There is not a single thing in the Starcraft II production cycle to suggest Blizzard even cares about the amateur competitive gaming scene.  LAN functionality?  Can’t have that.  Pirates going “Arrr!” and stuff.  Battle.net 2.0?  Designed to protect mommy’s snowflake from the pedophiles and liberals that inhabit the internet.  Ranking system?  Lottery style.  You know, everyone’s a winner.  The ability to play people overseas?  The game is region-locked.  But don’t worry, for the first time ever, the top Starcraft II players in the United States and Germany will square off in the Major League Gaming Starcraft II Classic, presented by the icy taste of the Taco Bell Cherry Slushie Burrito!

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This is why I love video games.  They’re designed to bring enjoyment to children and adults.  The most popular are branded with innocent family appeal.  And behind the cute graphics lies one of the most vicious money-driven industries on the planet.  It’s like finding out the characters of Sesame Street shoot heroin.

This particular battle has billions at stake.  Remember: Real-time strategy is not the fighting game genre, where the community can’t agree on which game in a franchise is the competitive standard.  Blizzard strategy games are the real-time strategy scene, the only competitive gaming scene that’s proven it can find a mainstream audience in any part of the world.  And it’s fair to assume Starcraft II will be the dominant real-time strategy game for the foreseeable future.

And you have a lot of potential outcomes.  Does Starcraft II fail in South Korea, leading to a FIBA-NBA situation where players on different sides of the ocean compete in fundamentally-similar games that require radically-different skill sets?  Does Blizzard kiss and make up with KeSPA?  Do the rising stars of South Korea decide to start making their bacon in the United States and Europe, enticed by lucrative contracts from Blizzard’s affiliates?

Welcome to the next chapter in competitive gaming: The part where large companies crush your soul.

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