Winter StarCraft 2 Arena

For the last 3 weeks MLG has been streaming a series of qualification games leading up to a big live event this weekend. They're paying to fly the 32 qualifiers in to New York which seemed pretty cool. Especially when you consider a good chunk of these players will be coming from Korea! I've been watching the games and have been enjoying myself. 6-pool all-ins! Cannon rushes! Mothership+Archon insanity! I haven't actually played SC2 in many months but I still enjoy watching the games. I have a MLG membership so I was expecting to get to watch the finals this weekend when I heard a bit of a bombshell on one of the streams...

The arena is going Pay Per View. The standard MLG membership is good for high quality streams of their big championship events but the arena is something new and falls outside the standard membership. My first reaction was of annoyance. But then I thought about it a bit more and probably part of the reason they're charging individually for this event is that they're paying to fly all these guys in from all over the world. They're apparently going to stream every single game live with 5 streams going at once. They're bringing in a lot of the top commentators. And maybe they're even testing the waters to see how much the community cares about 'eSports'.

I think I'm going to give it a look this weekend and see. I have hopes that they'll end up with a lower number of people watching (while still actually making more money by charging $20 a pop) which will result in improved stream quality. But I haven't had any complaints about previous MLG major event streams so I don't know how much that will actually matter...