We do it on our hardware with the overlay, so that particular feature won’t be something that we use anyway. We invested in that early on to make the broadcast easier to follow. A lot of the tech we use does a graphical overlay already. We’ve seen some of the beta but haven’t received the client with the new spectator features yet. What impact do you see StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm’s new broadcast features having on IPL next year? What is hurting it now is that there’s not enough of a player base that makes it a watchable eSports event. But I’m optimistic that it’s going to grow as more people play it. What are your thoughts on Shootmania’s eSports potential? They’re mostly people competing for the $100,000. The remaining 5% are here for Shootmania. StarCraft II accounts for about 35% of our audience. That’s 60% of our attendance – which is approximately 5,000 people. At IPL 5 we have over 2,000 people who bought tickets for League of Legends. Last October our first event sold 100 tickets for League of Legends. We’re seeing a surge in traffic here at IPL 5 with League of Legends fans.there are 2 to 3 times more League of Legends fans than StarCraft II fans here in Vegas.Ĭan you give us some concrete numbers for those fans? It’s a casual game with lots of fans who play the game and they come out to watch the game. There’s been tremendous growth with League of Legends. We have a great partnership with Riot, which began last October with IPL 3 in Atlantic City. What are your thoughts on the role League of Legends has played in the growth of eSports? IPL 4 had 6 million hours of content watched, 3 million unique video views, 346,000 concurrent viewers, 35 million video views. With IPL 5, we’re shooting for doubling the numbers from IPL 4 – and we’re tracking to do that. With every major IPL event we want to see our traffic double. We have a similar philosophy here, where we have experienced Moore’s Laws with views and time spent on our content. At Intel, Andy Grove had Moore’s Law and he said only the paranoid survive to help drive innovation at that company. We started 18 months ago with a set of volunteers. How have you seen IPL grow since you launched? ![]() There are so many things we can do with it, where the production value can marry traditional sports with eSports to attract a wider audience. The beauty of eSports is that it’s in such early stages that we can experiment a lot. There’s a great boxing ring at Mandalay Bay that we could set up and produce a fighter event and have the full experience that way. We hope to see similar levels of interest with these fighting games as the MMA has seen with mainstream viewers. We want to bring in the MMA world with this digital fighting tournament. It will bring in a lot of mainstream audiences. Street Fighter is great for casual fans because almost everyone knows that game. If you look at the spectrum of all the different eSports, some are easy to understand, but there are also some games on the other end of the spectrum with a lot of strategy involved, where if you don’t play the game, you don’t understand what’s going on. What impact do you hope the new fighting games that you’ve signed for IPL has on eSports in 2013 and beyond? David Ting, general manager of eSports for IGN Entertainment and founder of the IPL, talks about the growth potential for eSports in 2013 and explains why Call of Duty: Black Ops II may not be in the competitive picture in this exclusive interview. IGN Pro League 5 (IPL 5) marks the start-up league’s first foray into fighting games, having signed exclusive eSports deals with Capcom for Super Street Fighter IV Arcade Edition and Street Fighter X Tekken and Tecmo Koei for Dead or Alive 5. ![]() Approximately 5,000 fans of eSports have traveled to Las Vegas to watch four days of live pro gaming events at The Cosmpolitan Hotel and Casino.
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