G4TV interviewed StarCraft II Game Director Dustin Browder and Senior eSports Manager Joong Kim. This interview is entirely about eSports, both past, and future plans. The status on World of Warcraft eSports is also briefly mentioned.
What are you focusing on regarding eSports right now?
Dustin: On the software side, our whole game, in many ways, is basically built around how important it is for us as an eSport. The whole game is designed bottom up as an eSport. We’re also doing a number of things; obviously as the service continues on Battle.net we want to try to get people to share more replays, be able to see more professional level games, and we recently introduced the Master’s League. We’re also going to be introducing the Grand Master’s League to call out visibility to the high end players that maybe aren’t competing professionally yet but are almost good enough to be able to do so, so we can all see who the top 200 players are, in any given region around the world.
We’re working on new leaderboards, and new call outs for the low end shoutcaster. For the guy that doesn’t have an entire production department at his back, to create graphics for him, to show who the players are in a game and in order to show what’s going on in the actual game. So we’ve got what we call our sort of Madden style; stats popping up on the screen, graphically pleasing, so it’s easier for the little guy to learn how to be a shoutcaster, to put his stuff up on YouTube and be able to show it off to other fans.
Joong: On the community side, we want to make sure that everybody and anybody who wants to run a StarCraft 2 tournament can run one. And we will help promote them and bring awareness to their sites. We talk to a lot of fansites around the globe who are interested in running tournaments on the smallest scale to the largest scale. From a mom and pop tournament to the Global Starcraft League (GSL) in Korea. We support tournament organizations and tournament play of all levels.
