IEM Katowice confirmed for 2024 + DH Dallas

However, it is an odd choice (atleast for now) to split the Word Championships from Katowice again. On one hand it means more SC2 and more prizemoney, but with this new plan the actual EPT Finals will be so late, they basically cramped two years into one Tour. And those Tour finals will definetly have other seeding rules than before, since IEM Katowice alone will award the Top 4 with an invite and that third Masters in Dallas will also give out spots – and not to mention how potential new GSLs will fit into all of that.
Basically, the originally planned out “Tour Guide” is more or less obsolete now.

Lastly, I’m a bit afraid they will put the EPT Finals into that new Gamers8 event. That would be a huge downside to all of this

I do wonder what it means regarding the EPT, will the 2023-24 circuit still end at Kato or will it continue until next summer?

Edit: Oh yeah Saudi world championship… well shit

2024 let’s go

In Dota 2, this year The International (official world championship) had 3m prize pool and Riyadh Masters (no DPC tour points at all) had 15m prize pool.
TI still has its prestige earned by being the biggest tournament by a huge margin in all e-sports for 10 years in a row – but for how long will it last?

In 2015-2022 The International had 20-40m prize pool and no other tournament had more than 3m, mostly 1m or less even for the biggest non-TI tourneys. Now Saudi’s tourney is 5x bigger in terms of money.

So yeah, it’s inevitable.

SC2 was created on the whims of Mike Morhaime. He was the only thing stopping Activision from turning Blizzard into a WoW expansion factory.

EDIT: stumbled across this… its hilarious. WoW Cosmetic $25 Horse made more money than SC2:WoL.
https://gameworldobserver.com/2023/11/10/starcraft-2-made-less-money-than-wow-mount-blizzard-jason-hall

For $25 horse – even with almost zero development cost – you need to sell it to 12m players to beat this.
WoW had 12m subscribers at its peak, and obviously not all of them bought it, probably not even half of players.

But in general – yes, of course, 10 mounts that took little time to create can easily beat a game like SC2.
If people are ready to buy 2 cosmetic horses for the same price you can buy The Witcher 3 with 200h of unique gameplay – well, who do we have to blame for MTX rise?
I just think that this particular example is exaggerated.

Thus, I’d say SC2:WoL might bring in $200 million in revenue to Blizzard.

There are also marketing costs. Every game store I went there went 6 foot Jim Raynor cardboard cutouts. Damn, those were cool times. SC2 was marketed hard. That is expensive.

Then, there is the costs of all the esports initiatives at the GSL and Blizzcons.

SC2:WoL profit was a fraction of the revenue generated.

Pretty much guaranteed that ATVI was enticed by how Blizzard could monetize the arcade. Blizzard promised a monetized version of DOTA that would sweep across the gaming landscape as DOTA did with Warcraft3. That’s prolly how Blizzard convinced ATVI to fund SC2.