TotalBiscuit on SHOUTcraft, KeSPA, Blizzard, his voice pack and more! Text by Olli Graphics by shiroiusagi



TotalBiscuit Interview



Olli : You mentioned in a recent tweet that you had plans for something big in 2017, something that is not SHOUTcraft. Can you give us any details about that yet?



TotalBiscuit : It’s still in early stages, however we have secured funding for it. It is not a tournament. We have several experienced people working on it as a team. We’re trying to think outside the box to enrich the StarCraft scene without simply throwing on more tournaments. I’d rather not say any more right now, but let people see the results of this work in a more complete form. Hopefully I can have more information about this project in about 3 months.



You explained to us that you wanted to create advertisement space for tournaments – even grass-roots projects – in SHOUTcraft. How is that working out?



It is happening. The only issue we had with it was making sure that we had no legal ramifications with Blizzard and our new co-sponsor, simply because of course they’re paying for the event. So offering advertisement space for other events which could potentially have others sponsors could have been a violation of contract – it wasn’t, though. It’s all been sorted out. We trialed it in December and it seemed to go down really well. So we’ve extended that invitation to pretty much every tournament there is. We will happily promote pretty much anything – with one restriction: we’re not promoting tournaments sponsored by companies that deal in grey market keys or keys that were acquired through credit card fraud. So G2A and Kinguin are the two big ones that we’re not extending this offer to.



Since you’re working closer with Blizzard now – previews for microtransactions and other promotions – is there contractual obligation for you to dedicate a certain share of advertisement space to Blizzard?



That’s the great thing about working with Blizzard – no, there isn’t. They never asked for that. We extended it to them mainly as a courtesy. There’s an announcement released today that will make it seem very logical that SHOUTcraft would cooperate with Blizzard on certain in-game transactions and purchases.



A few months ago I was in Los Angeles and posted a picture of a mysterious studio. The reason I was there was because I pitched a pitch to Blizzard that I would like to do an announcer pack for the game – and they actually accepted that. So they got me into the studio in LA with the guy that voice acts Artanis. I wrote a script for the whole thing and we laid down an announcer pack. It’s got I think over 170 lines of brand new dialogue in it. It’s a really big pack, bigger than most of the others. That will be available for purchase this month, and then you’ll be able to have me as the person yelling at you!



We’re obviously also very interested in working with them on Warchests that were announced at BlizzCon, but I don’t have any information on that yet and I’m fairly sure Blizzard is still working through the specifics. But I’ll absolutely say that Blizzard have never pressured us into promoting any Blizzard products, and they’ve been really easy to work with.



SHOUTcraft is supposed to tie into WCS in terms of context, but not WCS points – how so? Do you want to use it as a sort of introduction to players and their storylines?



So the current way that we’re doing it is we keep up to date on tournaments, and we use the tournament itself to tie in rivalries. We of course use head-to-head stats, the current meta, see if there’s a streak going on, then tie that into the live event and try to give context to more casual viewers. We’ve pulled in a lot more viewers than any other online tournament and our VODs are doing insanely well, so we know for a fact that we have a more casual fanbase, and we think it’s important for those guys to understand why matches are important and why they matter.



We recently launched the Kings Court talkshow, which is a monthly YouTube video that provides promotion for the upcoming tournament, but also includes interviews, statistics and storyline recaps. We also use that to enhance the spotlight on up and coming players. We’re also trying to take a more in depth profile look at some of the upcoming Korean players, like NightMare and DRGLing, who are complete unknowns to our audience. I suppose this is a bit of a spoiler for the event – we have every intention of letting these guys shine on our stage as well.



Could you see it in some way being part of WCS at any point?



I think our format is just too unpredictable. We’ve built the tournament deliberately as the most unfair tournament in StarCraft. It’s a nice marketing gimmick, but to some degree it’s true. We’re happy to use it as a platform to help promote the storylines that are going on in WCS and GSL, but we wouldn’t want to be tied down. We want to remain flexible.



Do you have a vision as to how storylines should be pushed in StarCraft II?



It’s a very challenging thing to do. First suggestion I would have is: start that five years ago. The problem we have right now is not a lack of storylines – it’s a lack of means to get those storylines out to a wider audience in a way that resonates with them. I take a lot of my cues, when it comes to that, from wrestling, which I’m a big fan of. A lot of the ideas of SHOUTcraft came out of wrestling and wanting to do a ‘Royal Rumble’ type event. There’s quite a few parallels between wrestling and StarCraft in that aspect. Wrestling has a lot of ideas on how to get people invested in storylines. The notion is that you use a bunch of different media outlets to build up larger than life characters.



It’s a lot harder to do right now than it used to be. User generated content is in a rather weak state. We’re having problems when it comes to finding a centralized hub to find that sort of content. I suppose the falloff of both TeamLiquid and Reddit as a source for StarCraft content has become a problem. The lack of big YouTube channels providing StarCraft content is also a big issue. I think that in order to really get these storylines out to a wider audience, it falls on the only remaining entity capable of doing that, and that’s Blizzard themselves. And I’ve been pressuring them for quite some time to use both the Battlenet client as well as the in-game client to push out community generated content and also provide storyline updates for a wider audience. And honestly, it wouldn’t be unprecedented for them either. I think the Overwatch team uses the client in a far better way to promote community driven content, whereas the StarCraft team doesn’t seem too interested in doing that.



But I am getting the impression that they are becoming far more open to it through my interactions with them, and what they’re doing with third parties as well. And of course a lot of us have been providing this feedback to them on a pretty consistent basis. But Blizzard are a very old school developer, they’re a huge organization. So it takes them a while to adapt to these ever-changing online media trends, and perhaps embrace content that’s being created out of the house for them.



So to summarize: the ultimate goal is to create a network, with SHOUTcraft as a central part of it, that shares and develops storylines that then spread throughout the whole scene, with you bringing in a more casual audience and sort of ‘getting them started’ on the stories happening in SCII?



Yeah, that’s pretty much the gist of it. And frankly I don’t think it’s a particularly difficult thing to do. It’s just a case of getting enough people to commit to it on a regular basis to maintain a level of consistency. The last thing we would want is to get a storyline going and then having another event contradict it, confusing the audience. Everybody needs to be on the same page. Thankfully there are a number of tools that allow for that collaboration.



So having talked about the organizers’ side of things, what can the community do to help that cause?



Talk about it. It’s really that simple. There needs to be online traffic everywhere when there’s a big deal in StarCraft. They need to be talking about the players, about what players have done. Keep up with current tournaments that are going on. Post about it on TeamLiquid, post about it on Reddit. For anything that’s not particularly dramatic or very funny, the comments on Reddit are honestly depressingly low. Post about it on Twitter or talk about it on Twitch. Just keep the conversation going. Whenever a player does something cool or there is a rivalry going on, discuss it. Spread the word so that others are aware of context. Context makes people invested in the next events that these players are in. It’s so important and we don’t have anywhere near enough about it.



You've announced an increase in prize money and a few added bonus ways to make money in SHOUTcraft. Will that help with attracting even bigger names?



I don’t think we really have that problem anymore. I don’t really have any problem saying it this way now, because KeSPA have run off! So let me be entirely frank on this particular matter: KeSPA was a giant pain in the ass when it came to facilitating all of our events, and this goes back years. The first big example of KeSPA being obstructionist was the original SanDisk SHOUTcraft Invitational. We wanted to make that a huge and successful event showcasing top caliber play in an online tournament – something that really didn’t happen outside GSL or big foreign tournaments. Out of 7 or 8 active KeSPA controlled teams, we were only able to get players from two of them. And most of those who declined did so as a result of them talking to their KeSPA representative, and them saying no. They’ve been really difficult to deal with; they would refuse often for no reason. It was extremely annoying, but they’re out of the way now. We never really had a problem with the top Korean players not wanting to play in our tournaments – they weren’t allowed to. Now we don’t have any access problems anymore.



Online tournaments picking up – is that a model that could take over from more traditional seasons or big offline events?



It could. It’s a lot cheaper and more sustainable. There’s always the possibility that maphacking might be occurring and we wouldn’t know, because we wouldn’t have a controlled environment to monitor the players in. One would hope that doesn’t happen – but it’s been proven in the past that that is an unrealistic expectation. I think we’ll probably go into the direction of more online tournaments simply via necessity. We already don’t really have many ongoing long seasonal offline events, pretty much just GSL. You could argue that it’s been the case for a long time anyway. I hope it doesn’t go that way in Korea – they have the best infrastructure to sustain a week to week offline event. There’s a certain allure to it and it gives legitimacy to StarCraft.



But if others tournaments decide that this – online tournaments with offline finals – is a model to use, I don’t think it’s a bad idea. I think NationWars in particular is going to see a lot of success with their offline finals, and they always put on a great show.



Speaking of sustainability – how sustainable is SHOUTcraft for you?



For me it’s very easy to keep doing this on a monthly basis. The format is nice and self-contained. It requires a decent amount of preparation, but thankfully I have a lot of help for that. CranK burdens a lot of the load and of course he is paid for that. We do have a budget to pay the guys that work with us. CranK doubles as Korean caster and recruiter for the tournament – he’s our point of contact for all the Koreans.



Basically it’s very sustainable. We get good views both on Twitch and on YouTube, we have tournament VODs approaching 100k viewers. I believe each tournament is somewhere between 60-100k unique viewers over the course of its 7-hour-runtime. We’re making a decent amount of money from it. If we were just using the money we get from ad revenue to pay for the event, the prize pool obviously wouldn’t be as big – but it would still be pretty substantial. I don’t take a salary or any form of money from the event other than the stuff that I’m able to raise through my own YouTube channel. I think both Blizzard and TING are getting great money from it. It’s a relatively small investment compared to the number of viewers we get.



You’re now free to give any shoutouts you want!



Of course we’d like to thank Blizzard Entertainment for providing both logistical support for the tournament and of course prize money. We’d like to thank our new co-sponsor TING who will be providing extra prize pool. It’s great to work with them again, they were great partners for SHOUTcraft Winter. They’re really enthusiastic about StarCraft, that’s the best sponsor to have. I’d like to thank the work of CranK and Olivia in particular – CranK is going through some really hard times with his family right now. The amount of work he does for us is far beyond what I would expect of anybody. He’s been an excellent partner and friend over the past few years. And of course big thanks to all the players in our events and, of course, our viewers.





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