[s]battlenet[/s]The World Cyber Games Committee has announced that it has signed an agreement with Blizzard Entertainment based in the U.S.A. for an exclusive channel on the Battle.net server. This committee is lead basically by an unsual cooperation between Co-chairmen of the WCG committee: Chang Dong Lee, the Minister of Ministry of Culture & Tourism in Korea and Jong Yong Yun, Vice Chairman & CEO of Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.
The agreement states that Blizzard will provide a Battle.net channel to be used exclusively for the online preliminaries of StarCraft and Warcraft, both official games of the WCG 2004.
Who would have guessed 7 years ago that the government of Korea and Samsung Co. would be in charge of a world cyber games competition with approximately 1 million participants? Who would have guessed they would be paying Blizzard, now owned by Vivendi, for a series of virtual "channels" in Battle.net?
The question that begs itself to be asked is how much or what was offered for this agreement? This also leads me to ask myself many other questions. If big money has now entered our gaming world how long will they tolerate private servers and what will they do to boycott them? How will big money influence our gamming community, that was essentially amateurs having fun a few years ago? I can think of many mind boggling consequences but that would be material for a few more articles!
According to this agreement, all the participating countries will be able to hold online preliminaries in the WCG exclusive channels on the Battle.net from May to December in 2004. Also, the WCG has been offered premium online banner space on the Battle.net game network as well as on www.battle.net.
The idea according to Heung-Seop Jeong, CEO of ICM Inc, the organizer of WCG, is of course to increase vastly the number of participants. Now he does not say it, but what exactly does a participant mean to ICM Inc? Games without boundaries?
I will spell it out to you in plain English. A participant is essentially the target consumer market of every game publisher out there. We are the ones that buy the games after all. This is turn means a huge bargaining power when it comes to marketing game brand names, new games and more selling publicity space to "sponsors" and all the different game publishers.
Do we benefit from all this? You bet, for now at least! But do not fool yourself my felow SCVs, probes and larvas. In this issue we are the workers building farms and buildings. A few like Boxer and grrr.... are the hero units in the game, and Blizzard is the map. Who then is the real gamer, the one that has the mouse control and the keyboard control?
None other but the ICM Inc. They do not hide what they are either: International Cyber Marketing Inc.
Links
Worldcybergames.com/icm - International Cyber Marketing
Hardwarezone.com - Source News
GosuGamers.net - Related Article
