Developing local scenes

I was listening to Chris Schetter’s fourth Keekercast where he was interviewing chobopeon the original anchor of SCcenter and they started talking about starcraft and localization of the scene to cities and nations.

I’ll give you my personal opinion on this. While i think it’s good, especially since the scene can grow and prosper without needing the internationals to survive. However from personal experience i seem to have mixed opinions on it.

I grow up in a growing city in southern California. Together with a neighboring city there is a total population of 203,000 people in this city, most of them young. And by young i mean middle school-high school-college age. Some of my fondest memories in middle and high school was going to local LAN centers and playing counter-strike with my friends. Playing tournaments, and just pug a lugging was great fun.

But the major problem with this is the simple fact that these LAN centers either moved or went out of business, or made the cost to play at them so high which a person of the gaming age range simply can’t afford it.

I also nerded out with some of those same guys in LAN parties which we organized ourselves. However it became quickly evident that we could not do this all the time - people would move away, graduate and go to college, join the military, or simply not being able to show up to the LAN parties.

But no matter how hard i tried i couldn’t get them to continue playing a single game - whether it be Super Smash Brothers, Halo, Counter-strike or any other game i tried to get them into - for more than a few weeks. Maybe a few months if there was a local tournament coming up.

And if you’re like me - where i live is 2 hours away from San Diego and 3 hours away from Los Angeles - having a local scene dedicated to a single game is nearly impossible to create. It’s like the CGS - a single league that pays it’s players a respectable salary and a defined format that is good for all games? AND IT’S ON TV? SIGN ME UP. But when you get down to brass tacks you couldn’t possibly keep it up.

However national leagues with regional teams in each league seems completely feasible. Now that the average game of a gamer is in the 30’s and from the look of the average pro gamer is about 18 the ability for the people to get up and move. Gaming mobility if you will.

This move, towards localizing teams for practicing and matches to areas, has happened in the past - fatal1ty would hold bootcamps at his house all the time, korea has always had their starcraft teams live in one house, and finally the coL house proved to be successful during coL’s glory days of 4 undefeated seasons in 1.6 and source - however now it seems like every team is doing it. Almost every Starcraft 2 team is starting to localize to practice. Some major CS teams have houses they practice in. Hell even Ultimax’s american CS team has their own house for Christs sakes.

Hopefully this move will also facilitate something that I think will definitely is necessary. A season which home and away games ACTUALLY MEAN SOMETHING. Where teams actually TRAVEL and PLAY GAMES at LAN CENTERS or ESPORTS STADIUMS. Maybe then the organizations can actually have a revenue stream outside of taking money way from their players and advertising.