Gamespot's Rod "Slasher" Breslau sits with Sundance DiGiovanni - CEO and co-founder of MLG - to hear his thoughts on the new Arena models, changes to the tournament formats and KeSPA's partnership.
With the start of MLG's Summer Season, the Arena events saw a change in their viewership model, switching from a PPV-only experience to a freemium one, similar to all the 2011 tournaments and the 2012 championships. Why was that done and how was that possible? DiGiovanni says that it was never MLG's intention to close Arena's doors to the community.
- "The goal was always to get to a place where there is enough interest around them to find a way to open them up. We're going to still have the HD upgrade and certain Arenas may have PPV components to them, but Full Sail University is helping with this initial one to kind of lead the charge to see how it goes. Before we did an Arena, nobody knew if there would be interest in them, so there was no way to model that out. The goal was never to block the community from having access to the Arenas; the goal was just to prove that there were business models and revenue lines that we can associate with the activity."
Staying on the same topic, DiGiovanni says that although the PPV model for the Arenas was not necessarily detrimental and they could have continued operating under it in the future, there would not be any scaling to this.
"There's a fine line between creating a sustainable business and keeping the community happy and making sure those things are in direct connection with one another," DiGiovanni told Gamespot.
Once the topic switches to MLG's format and if there will be any changes soon, MLG's CEO throws it out there that there'll be comment about the future of the extended series coming some time soon, along with alterations to the structure of the MLG season to limit the extent to which MLG tournaments are all about "a rotisserie of Korean players".
In relation to that, DiGiovanni talks about how the KeSPA relationship will impact MLG and how the league itself will approach and regionalize individual scenes.
- "One of the big things from the [Korean e-Sports Association] partnership that's a focus from both sides is that it's not very exciting if the Koreans are just light years ahead of everybody. Now KeSPA doesn't want to lose necessarily, but they don't want to see the rest of the world lose interest because there are no foreign players making moves. They don't want to see everybody transitioning away from the game. We're looking at things we can do around Heart of the Swarm with our relationship with KeSPA to regionalize some of the activity so that the individual scenes have more importance."
The full interview can be found over at Gamespot.
