Expanding Liquid's E-Sport Fan-Base in Canada
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TEAM LIQUID EXPANDING LIQUID’S E-SPORT FAN-BASE IN CANADA A MRK-6018 report by Yvette Djiena-Engoue, Lukas Kocher, Maximilien van Gaver, Pierre Babineau & Maxime Bérubé. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY E-sport, the competitive playing of video games in a multi-player mode, has been considered, since its apparition in the 1980’s, a niche market aimed at a very specific computer-savvy demographics and without any real appeal to a larger audience. Nevertheless, the last decade has proven this view wrong in South Korea, with the popular video game StarCraft: Brood War becoming a major trend and growing into a several billion dollar market with its own set of professional teams, tournaments, sponsors, celebrities and live matches gathering hundred of thousands of fans. With the recent and highly successful release of StarCraft II: Wing of Liberty, which sparked a renewed interest in the franchise, it now appears that the rest of the world is trying to catch on. The number of e-sport matches and viewers have never been as high, sponsorship is becoming ever more common and even some of the American corporate giants have started organizing multi-million dollar events of their own. As a pioneer of StarCraft e-sport outside of South Korea, Team Liquid is undoubtably one of the most well-known professional team. Its community is by far the largest on the internet and its website receives over two million unique visitors each month and has become the main online hub for everything StarCraft related. Although the team is composed of players of various nationalities and doesn’t wish to be considered as representing any particular country, its current fan-base is mainly American. As a matter of fact, its headquarters are located in New York City and each and every event organized by Team Liquid to date has been taking place in the USA. However, the Canadian market seems to hold a very strong potential, albeit not fully exploited yet. More than half of its population is considered to be a gamer and the local gaming industry, which has been steadily developing into a $1.7 billion business, is expected to grow by 17% during the next two years. Furthermore, the Canadian e-sport scene has recently met a lot of success, with numerous national organizations heavily promoting it over various events all across the country. We therefore believe Team Liquid should expand both its fan-base and presence in Canada, with the help of two main marketing actions: organizing a Canadian-players- only Tournament against the team’s players and getting involved in the growing trend of StarCraft matches public broadcasting in bars, also known as BarCraft. TABLE OF CONTENTS E-SPORT Definition 1 Birth and rise 1 TEAM LIQUID History 3 Competitors 5 U.S.P. 6 E-SPORT IN CANADA Domestic promotion through associations and events 7 Market difficulties 8 E-sport’s economic role in Canada 8 MARKETING STRATEGY A new Canadian tournament 9 Target groups 11 State of being 11 State of mind 12 Product benefits 12 Product usage 13 Location 13 Distribution 14 Promotion 14 BIBLIOGRAPHY 17 E-SPORT DEFINITION Electronic sport can be defined as the competitive playing of video games in a setup similar to regular sport competitions. It covers a broad number of gaming genres, but is usually associated with real-time strategy (RTS), fighting, first-person shooter (FPS), massively multi-player online (MMOG), and racing. “E-sport is the competitive playing of computer and video games in a multi-player mode. This can be found either on the Internet or locally (during a large organized event). E-sport means: professional players compete in strictly regulated competitions.” Andreas Hebbel-Seeger - International Journal of Sports Marketing & Sponsorship - 20121 Games are played competitively at amateur, semi-professional and professional levels, with the most popular having their own leagues and tournaments -such as Major League Gaming, World Cyber Games, Dreamhack and Intel Extreme Masters to name but a few- which provide real-time commenting of games by professional casters, live streaming on the Internet and attractive cash prizes to the winners. BIRTH AND RISE Video games have been played competitively since their very beginning. In fact, in 1980, the Space In- vaders Tournament held by Atari was the first Arcade video game competition and attracted more than 10,000 participants, already establishing competitive gaming as a popular and widespread hobby.2 And as soon as 1983, the American organization Twin Galaxies created the U.S. National Video Game Team, whose pro-players ran in a number of competitions worldwide. E-sport steadily grew during the 90’s, as multi-players video games and events became more common. The company Nintendo held its World Championships in 1990, touring across the United States, with the finals taking place at Universal Studios Hollywood in California. A success that would then be repeated in 1994 with its second edition called the Nintendo Power Fest ‘94.3 In 1993, the legendary FPS Doom in- troduced multi-player death match games over the Internet and proved so successful that Microsoft held the first PC tournament in the U.S.A., Deathmatch ‘95, where national qualifiers flew from as for as Europe to play in the tournament. Eventually, 1997 proved to be a turning point for e-sport, thanks to the Red Annihilation Quake tournament. With Quake’s creator John Carmack promising his own Ferrari 328 GTS convertible to the winner, the event gathered considerable attention and gave Dennis “Thresh” Fong, the winner of both the competition and the car, a “Michael Jordan of gaming” status.4 The unexpected success of this event quickly led to new e-sport scene, with the apparition of recurring tournaments, dedicated teams, commentators and referees and its expansion to a number of other no- table video games such as StarCraft: Brood War, Counter-Strike or WarCraft. As a result, numerous com- peting organizations appeared, each trying to outperform the others and offering enough prize money for some players to actually make a living. In 2001, as the dot-com bubble burst, e-sport continued to grow, especially in South Korea, with some events such as the World Cyber Games Challenge in Seoul attracting 1 Andreas Hebbel-Seeger ; 2012 ; The relationship between real sports and digital adaptation in e-sport gaming 2 Electronic Games ; 1982 ; Players Guide To Electronic Science Fiction Games - http://goo.gl/uBhC0 3 Wikipedia ; 2012 ; Nintendo PowerFest ‘94 - http://goo.gl/7neu8 4 Salon ; 2000 ; The Michael Jordan of gaming - http://goo.gl/b9IBT players with a prize pool of more than $200,000.5 And at the end of that year, the World Cyber Games involved 430 players from 37 nations, with an overall prize money of $300,000. In 2005, companies started getting involved into e-sport and sponsorship got more common, eventually allowing the e-sport scene to become fully professional. That year, Intel organized the CPL World Tour, setting a new landmark with an unprecedented total prize money of $1,000,000. At the same time, pro- fessional teams began to gain momentum, with the biggest South Korean ones paying annual salaries of more than $200,000 to some of their best star-players such as Lim “BoxeR” Yo-hwan.6 And, as a sad but true proof of e-sport’s rise to the professional league, even match fixing scandals were discovered.7 “In Korea, pro-gaming started to get popular around 2000. I thought it was just going to be a fad, but it eventually stuck. Nowadays, going to a “PC Salon” with friends is more or less like going to a bar and it is nothing unusual to talk about games at school between friends. The older generations don’t understand it much, but to me pro-gamers have a great job, just like other professional athletes.” SeunYung Kim ; Université Laval ; 20128 Since then, e-sport has been steadily growing and proving its financial viability. Nowadays, there are more than thirty professional leagues currently in activity around the globe9, and major international companies such as the computer hardware manufacturer Razer10 or even the energy drinks producer Red Bull11 -al- though traditionally associated with more extreme kind of sports- have realized the importance of e-sport as an entry-point into an industry now worth more than $25 billion worldwide.12 5 Team Liquid ; 2011 ; eSports: A Short History of Nearly Everything - http://goo.gl/Crbt6 6 Los Angeles Times ; 2007 ; Gamer is royalty in S. Korea - http://goo.gl/GrJ0K 7 Korea Realtime ; 2012 ; Players Charged In Match-Fixing Scandal - http://goo.gl/fKWjb 8 SeunYung Kim ; 2012 ; Face to face interview. 9 Wikipedia ; 2012 ; Electronic sports - http://goo.gl/y9jpk 10 Razer ; 2012 ; About Razer - http://goo.gl/IOiuR 11 Red Bull ; 2012 ; Pro Gaming - http://goo.gl/bHs3B 12 Entertainment Software Association ; 2012 ; Industry Facts - http://goo.gl/1KxdD TEAM LIQUID HISTORY Founded in 2000 by Victor “Nazgul” Goossens, one of the best Dutch professional video gamers by then13, Team Liquid’s debuts were far from ambitious. At a time where professional gaming was still in its very infancy14, TL was in fact only created as an amateur team, also known as “clan”, simply designed to provide a way for the best players of StarCraft: Brood War, a hugely popular video game that sold more than 11 million copies worldwide15, to connect and play together in a non-competitive way. “Team Liquid as a team started out as a fun team of top players to hang out with and feel connected to. […] Most of the Team Liquid members from StarCraft: Brood War had Team Liquid as their fun clan and another team that actually sponsored them.” Victor Goossens - Team Liquid - 201016 Around that same time, StarCraft: Brood War quickly attained a cult status in Korea and set a complete new trend in e-sport.