That's very ignorant. It's had unusual longevity. Despite it's age it has maintained a surprisingly dedicated following as a competitive game. In case you haven't noticed, the RTS genre hasn't had a lot of new titles recently, and none of them have managed to displace Starcraft as a staple of the genre.
Granted, most of the professional Starcraft gaming scene is based in Asia (mostly South Korea), not the US. But "professional" gaming in general is much more mainstream there. Starcraft is still one of the major titles for competitions even in the US.
The games that typical gamers are playing at home change every year, so an 11 year old game is ancient by normal standards. But when it comes to competitive gaming, there are different standards. If it's to be taken seriously as a "sport", then it can't completely change the rules and switch to all different games every year. If it's going to develop like a sport then it requires some stable platforms for people to become experts at, with some basis to compare one years results against another. In an RTS stability is even more important than in a shooter, sports game, rhythm game, etc, because the strategies can completely change due to even very minor tweaks in rules. In other genres they can switch to a newer title in a series and still apply most of the skills they'd learned playing earlier titles, but in an RTS, even if they come out with Starcraft 2, it would require learning new strategies from scratch, and there would still be some hardcore competitive folks playing Starcraft 1.
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15 years ago
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Anachrony
15 years ago
You can speculate all you like, but the fact is that you're wrong. There are only a limited number of games that get played at the WCG world competitions, and Starcraft is one of the most popular events.
Professional is not just a synonym for hardcore. The defining characteristic of a professional as opposed to an amateur is whether you get paid for it or not.
The professional gaming scene for Starcraft didn't even take off until the game was already 5 years old, so by your standards people weren't even playing it anymore by then, but you happen to be wrong. It's easy to see how you could have overlooked it, but you obviously aren't too well versed on the difference between professional competitive gaming versus just hardcore gaming.
Again, a lot of this is based on South Korea. It's a small country, but professional gaming is much bigger there and it's far easier to make a career out of it there than in most countries. It's no coincidence that WCG is run by a Korean company, not a Western one.
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kandis1
15 years ago
LOL we are both speculating. Dur dur dur dur. As I've said before, a professional gamer is nothing more then a glorified game tester or they are just that A GAME TESTER, get real. When a professional gamer gets paid like a professional football player you might have an argument there. The FACT <-- of the matter is the only difference between hardcore gaming and professional gaming is that one of them gets paid, and majority of the time it's a laughable salary. Period, nothing else. And as said before, the best gamers are the ones with no jobs who spend countless hours competiting online. You show me one person on that panel that has been on the leaderboards. Just because it has the WCG label doesn't it make it anymore valid. As I keep saying, the real competition can be found online. The more you place a mainstream image on video gaming the less it is about the actual gaming. It's common MTV sense.
I'm glad you admit that Starcraft is no where near as popular as it is in South Korea, because you would think that the Starcraft Champ would be from there. Also, he wasn't the world champ he was the USA champ, WOW. Before you go on arguing your point, go on to Starcraft online and check out how many people you find, then go to Warcraft III online, or maybe even check out World of Warcraft. You still wondering were most of the Starcraft players went?
Death Awaits You
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overkill_78
15 years ago
a professional gamer is nothing more then a glorified game tester or they are just that A GAME TESTER, get real.
That is where you are wrong. Professional gamers spend hours a day playing a video game to refine their skills so they can compete in tournaments. Game testers are people who spend hours a day playing a portion of an unreleased game over and over and over again to find glitches, bugs, etc. and also to give feedback on the difficulty, gameplay, GUI, things like that. Sometimes they don't even play at all, they watch people play.
The only common denominator there is the fact they're playing games, but then you can say Tiger Woods is nothing but a glorified businessman because they both play golf.
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kandis1
15 years ago
I can't believe the arguments you people come up with. Thank you for turning this entire discussion stupid. The point is, they are playing video games hours and hours a day for so called "skill." WOW, was that hard to understand?
By the way, golf is a physical human skill that requires REAL physics and REAL strength. Video games is pressing buttons in precise timing. There is a difference.
Death Awaits You
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