What make Starcraft a Sucessful E-Sport?

Introduction
This is a rewrite of a post I made on teamliquid.net. At the time it was part of a discussion about Multiple Building Select, a feature of SC2’s UI which a great number of the current player base are against. One of the major complaints about MBS is that it makes the game easier, and therefore lowers the skill ceiling. Some people were trying to construct the argument that a less competitive game would be a less successful e-sport. Now this is something I contend strongly, but it does open up the more general debate over what makes Starcraft a successful e-sport and why WC3 and WoW fail at repeating the success.

Here are my thoughts.

Starcraft – The E-Sport Dream
Many anti-mbs argument, that I have read, tend to go along these lines: MBS lowers the skill ceiling, this will make games less competitive, and thus SC2 will fail as an e-sport. I believe this argument is flawed, and shows a lack of understanding/insight into why the pro-scene of SC even exists. The general anti-MBS line is that SC has a pro-scene because it is highly competitive and difficult, I disagree. Lots of games are hard, that doesn’t make millions of dollars of sponsorship suddenly appear for that game.

Lots of games have sponsors; most sponsors are other game companies. Why ?
Because sponsorship is a business action, businesses do not go "Oh wow, SC is the best game out there, lets give it money"; businesses say "lots of people watch this game, so sponsoring it has a high value in market exposure to us". Now most E-Sport events are low exposure, and your audience are generally dedicated gamers who will most likely be exposed to your brand simply through their normal activities of playing the games and reading forums.

Blizzcon sponsors: Blizzard, Nvidia, Intel and Microsoft
WCG Sponsors: Samsung Electronics, Intel, Razer and Shuttle

So the question becomes, why is SC gathering much greater volumes of sponsorship ? This is an important question because, without that money the pro-scene could not exist. And it is the failure of other games to acquire that sponsorship that marks them out as "failures" relative to SC.

SC proleague sponsors: Pringles, Bacchus (Similar to Gatoraide), Shihan Bank

Note
The sponsors are not games companies, hardware manufacturers or anything similar. They are the sort of people who sponsor football or other sports in the US/EU.

I’m going to repeat myself here; companies are not sponsoring SC because it is a "great game", they are sponsoring it because the value the advertisement potential of exposure to the market which watches Starcraft. Not people who play Starcraft, people who watch Starcraft. These types of sponsorship exist solely because SC is on TV and people watch it: if people did not watch SC on TV the value of sponsoring SC would be much lower, and if the viewing figures were low enough, that value would become so low SC would be taken off TV at which point the pro-scene would largely evaporate (certainly as we know it).

I argume that the pro-scene has not evolved because SC is hard, or competitive, or anything else that might draw you to the game as a player, but because SC is a good spectator sport. Arguments about MBS's effect on SC as a pro-sport are pointless if view SC as a game for gamers, and not a game for spectators.

Why is Starcraft a good spectator sport ?
In the MBS discussion several comments were made along these lines:
Now the post is really making 2 points here, and a third one which is not obvious.

First it is saying that, because the skill cap is lower, the gap between the players is smaller and so you can not win as convincingly in WC3 as in SC. I disagree, but that’s a matter of opinion.

The second point is that, you should be able to win effortlessly against lesser player every single time due to superior skill and that if you cant the game is flawed. Now I heavily contend this, look at any pro-sport and you will often see lesser teams beating or troubling stronger teams. Does this mean that games such as football, soccer, basketball, golf etc are flawed because the better player cannot effortlessly crush his opposition every time? I do not believe so.

My final point is more subtle. If you watched a lot of WC3 you would probably see a game with Grubby vs random-player differently, you might argue that Grubby did, infact, crush his opposition. The difference is, as I alluded to before, WC3 is not as visually representative as SC. The WC3 observer might point out how grubby levels his hero faster, creep-jacked some neutral mobs, scored an early peon kill and forced the other player to use his TP scroll early. But these are little things, its not obvious that you got a peon to 20hp and now that peon has to hide at the back and heal, effectively taking it from combat, as an observer all you saw was that the peon did not die. In SC you would have see a player pinned in his base, his mineral line raided, his workers dying in large numbers, and its easy to see as an observer who is winning at that point in the game. This is one of the reasons why SC is a superior game to WC3 as a spectator sport; and that ability to understand and enjoy the game as an observer has a far greater part to play in why SC has a pro-league and WC3 does not.

This can been seen in the repeated failure of FPS’s, even CS:Source, to break out as an E-Sport from being a niche, gamer only, event. FPS’s are confusing, and muddling to watch or follow; even experienced players will struggle to follow the action. Further, in most FPSs it is only possible to get the FPV from one player at a time, concealing the entire map but for one room. And this is why WoW arena will never succeed as an e-sport. Too much of what happens in an arena match is invisible to the observer. Maybe the priest got silenced, but how can you tell amongst the 20 other debuffs, and of course that requires you to know what the various debuff icons mean. To the uninformed observer, WoW PvP seems like utter chaos and therefore is less likely to appeal to a spectator. Too much information is hidden, by the game, the UI, or simply the point of views available.

Conversely, StarCraft succeeds because the units have a high mortality, because almost all the game is visually representative in an intuitive way (upgrades being the exception), and because the game starts quickly, you can harass the opponent before even building a “proper” unit. By having resources spread such that the player will have multiple bases it is harder for people turtle, there are more areas to attack, and thus more ares to defend leading to the thurst and parry we love (particularly drops, drops are the epitome of this).

Warcraft3 fails on all these fronts, the units are highly durable, players work from a single base, and the important information (health bars, hero level and mana) are all hidden and less than intuitive to the observer. WoW arena fails on many of the same levels. People get more excited when 20 marines die, exploding in a show of blood and guts, than when a peon is reduced to 20hp and made to retreat, or when a priest is pummeled and wo wonder if the warrior can survive the focus train until that wears off..

So what does it Take ?
Well, first a game needs to have action: that means units/players need to die fairly regulary or at least be in conflict; turtling is bad; two armies in an endless battle of attrition is bad; 15 minutes before the players engage each other is bad. The game needs a high mortality rate, either of players or their units. A fight between 200 units with 1 hp is more visually exciting than a fight between 2 units with 100 hp.

The game needs resources that are obvious, I dont want to count who has more powerplants, I want to look at a resource patch and quickly see who has more workers. Spectators need to be able to over-see the whole game at once, or at least much of it. FPS's particularly fail here.

The units need variety, watching 400 identi-tanks is bad.

If the game is an RTS, it needs multiple bases so the army has to keep moving between them either on offense or defence, rather than just turtling at a choke.

And the game needs balance, and a high skill ceiling.There needs to be room for a player to do make beutiful moves on his opponent, the kind of moves that make players like Boxer loved and revered.