ZeroEmpires: The story of Escape, the hardest year of my life

[edeholland]

I guess there's no big difference between a projector and a big screen, but is a projector even cheaper than a screen ? I'm not that sure.

Hosting the tournament in someone's garage is not really possible. How many people can you fill there ? 10, maybe 20 ? Definitely not all the people who were here. I guess flying the casters wasn't necessary, but from what I heard, the first aoe2 LAN didn't go well so they wanted to be professional.
As for the food, they kinda had to considering people paid for it, and it was great.

So all in all, they maybe could have saved money by not flying the casters and getting 2-6 players at their house, but that would have been less professional.
Anyway, from what I read, the aoe3 LAN wasn't a disaster, the big issue was the aoe2 LAN.

What happened at the AoE2 LAN?

The short answer, they didn't make nearly as much money from donations/subscriptions as they expected/hoped. Especially if you compare it to people T90 or a tournament like NAC which generate a lot of subs.

[Goodspeed]

A common thought seems to be that the tournament format (team league) was not hype enough. I tend to agree. I recall not being into it as much as events like NAC and Hidden Cup (still watched all of it though). The production and casting were excellent, that couldn't possibly have been the issue, so it must've been the tournament itself. 1v1 events are just more hype.

[edeholland]

That, but also the fact that EscapeTV didn't really seem to need the support in terms of subs and donations. They invited a third team to play in the tournament because they had money left over, creating the illusion they had a very healthy financial situation.

[[Armag] diarouga]

Team games in RTS are just less interesting for the viewers than 1v1 events, although they might be more interesting to play.

[bobabu]

Team games in RTS are just less interesting for the viewers than 1v1 events, although they might be more interesting to play.

Ofc the whole thing would've been less professional but do you really think we as the viewers would have punished them for it. Also for the people watching live, a professionally organized tournament is nice but I think the main reason to go to Manchester was to meet the community and the players behind age of empires. All would've been possible on a smaller scale. It's not like there were professional lan tournaments before and we came to expect a certain quality like in dota.

[Astaroth]

The LANs were all great and Escape did a great job, but their biggest failings were imo:

- having a huge overhead (renting a big space for a long time, having many employees)
- at the same time, having a limited amount of money
- not communicating that to the fan base to raise more money
- acting like a "corporation", resulting in less incentive for fans to donate
- not promoting their big events enough

Their biggest mistake was imo: believing that people will tune in to watch a big LAN due to the quality of the LAN rather than primarily because they were already fans of the casters/players, knew what was happening, being engaged beforehand. It's a bit as if I opened a new Twitch channel with 5 viewers, did 1 random stream of chess every weekend, and suddenly hosted a big 30k AoE2 tournament. Barely anyone would watch it.

[almalek]

Eugenic Stagnation Observation - Community .net

Where we now discuss the degradation of humanity and failure of evolution due to a small streaming game service that failed.

You can't be choosy when it comes to where inspiration comes.

You could be on the throne, plopping poop, while gaining new insight into why gravitation bends spacetime.

ye you can have inspiration on several ways

[almalek]

Eugenic Stagnation Observation - Community .net

Where we now discuss the degradation of humanity and failure of evolution due to a small streaming game service that failed.

You can't be choosy when it comes to where inspiration comes.

You could be on the throne, plopping poop, while gaining new insight into why gravitation bends spacetime.

ye you can have inspiration on several ways

while the failure of evolution could also be due to missed info,some reason u provided,

[Mr_Bramboy]

Thank you for the insight O great Almalek