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EGCTV There's quite a few reasons:
- Getting to see the actual players play - for most people it's different to see the player who's actually playing on stage even if you're seeing them thru a twitch stream, it adds more of a personal aspect to it.
- More Hype - A problem with online tournaments is that they can feel somewhat repetitive, if you were to give someone two streams from two different online tournaments the differences wouldn't be that obvious hence why a new tournament will obviously get some hype going but it can be difficult to get hyped for something that feels very similar. On the other hand with LANs there's normally a lot of build up, an online stage before to help with this, and general excitement in the community for it.
- Audience - An live in person audience does a couple of things. Obviously it gives personality to the viewers of the tournament in a way that twitch-names unfortunately can't, somewhat similar to the first point. It also generates some level of revenue which helps cover the costs/increase profit. With an AOE3 tournament over say 3 days I think it'd be very easy to charge lets say £80 just for attending and it wouldn't be surprising to me if you reached an audience above 100 people.
- Community benefit - Relatively hard to quantify, but if you want to build a community having in person events is huge for increasing that sense of community. If you go to an event you feel far more engaged with both the players and the figures that you're used to seeing/hearing online. Specifically in AOE3 I know there's a significant number of community members who would go to a LAN for the social aspect of seeing friends they've only known online rather than the tournament it'self.
- Building a brand - Although Escape failed with it's ambitions to create a long term centre for AOE content they did, in the short amount of time they existed, create a Image of excellence for production and hosting of tournaments. Escapes downfall can be chalked up to a number of reasons, too many to note here, but I would argue that if Escape started now as they did in late 2018 with both AOE2DE and AOE3DE out and with AOE4 on the horizon i'd aruge that their plan may have ended up being relatively profitable. Overall for building a brand a Lan, especially in AOE3 and arguabily AOE2, does far more than hosting showmatches or online tournaments. Lans are far larger events overall in the history of a game, think about how many tournaments have run for AOE3 and how many people look back on the WCG Lan or the Escape Lan compared to equally funded events.
Overall I honestly think if you were to go down the route of hiring out an Lan area, which again can be relatively cost effective depending where you host the event, charge a reasonable amount for attendence and limit costs such as flights, a LAN for AOE3 and especially AOE2 can be incredible value for building a brand that's without accounting for Sponsorships (which honestly with the size of the streams etc we're seeing now I can see as plausable, espcially for AOE2) or other partners helping with costs, ESOC & Microsoft are likely to help out.