What would it take to get the top 8 of EVO on TV? ESPN2, G4, The Travel Channel, etc.
As much as I enjoy watching it, the World Poker Tour would be infinitely less interesting to me than a well produced EVO top 8 complete with player interviews, coverage of the event, and expert commentary. It seems like it would be huge boost for fighting games to bring it to the masses in this form. I, for one, was drawn in because I became really interested in the fighting game culture and the hype surrounding old school players. I had no idea that any of this existed yet I had seen and played SF in the arcades casually since the 1980’s. What do you guys think?
there is no way a TV channel will air evo footage for 16 hours straight. It’d probably have to be finals day and they’d have to pick one of games otherwise it’d take up too much air time.
Those crowd shots were from 2007, they’re 3 years old. Yes, for a fighting game, those are pretty impressive crowds… for its time.
However, this makes those crowds laughably small. Nobody except a small percentage of the people on this forum would want to see MvC2 top 8 on tv over SFIV. Alongside it? Yeah sure, it’s always nice to feel nostalgic (haha, I kid I kid)
Hmm ill give you that but last time I checked what game was the hypest of all time and will always be! What players are DOMINATING sf4 and from which community did they come from? What carried evo to what it is today? What game is still being played after 10+ years? What game is making a years salary in 30mins (over 26,000$)? Think about it for a sec before you respond…
If you want television opportunities, SSF4 is really the only choice. Top 8 SSF4, ESPN. If they can televise motherfucking Scrabble tournaments they can televise this.
This is exactly what I’m talking about. Scrabble tournaments, tractor pulls, model airplane races… Why couldn’t something far more exciting (to most of us, at least) like SSF4 Top 8 (edited after the fact) be on ESPN or G4? It seems like there are a few companies that could stand to really benefit from it in terms of sales. Sony, Microsoft, Capcom, Madcatz, Hori to name a few. It would be interesting to hear Mr. Wizard’s thoughts on this or if they’ve ever thought about trying it before. I guarantee people who don’t even play fighting games would watch it if it was done right.
SSF4 is easy to follow and understand for people who don’t play fighting games as well. It’s very spectator friendly, while Marvel really is sort of confusing to watch until you know what is going on. But, who knows…if SSF4 could do well on TV it could lead to other televised fighting games.
Umm… lets be honest. There’s another reason this won’t be on TV… are we going to have the bleep button on standby? I mean this is nothing against the community at all, but I would hardly call top 8 in any match on the big screen PG… If a TV orgaization wanted to pick it up, they’d have to find a way to have expert commentary that wouldn’t cross the boundaries and that would use terminiology that casual fans and channel flippers could latch on to… I love the commentary from Battlefield Arcadia for instance… but if I didn’t know who Chris Hu was and I was just another guy flippin’ through channels… my head might explode. Or if someone else was talkin’ about ‘being free’ or ‘pringles’… I’d be so confused… But commentary in the community currently exists in a fashion to highten the experience for those involved, not to bring outside viewership in.
All that being said… if you could fix the commentary problem, if you could PG the event a little bit, I think EVO could make for very exciting television. I mean World Cyber Games WC3 final and SC final in Changhai had over 10,000 people crammed in like Sardines and the WCG was carried live in quite a few places around the world to decent ratings, but the event was very PG, the commentary was in English, and they did a great job of explaining mechanics and helping viewers understand what was going on in a very simple way then building up to higher understanding over the course of the broadcast.
So the moral of the story is, to get on TV, EVO might have to put on a little more of a coat and tie and play nice for the kids, the question is, if it did that, would it be the same event for those who travel there and could we train announcers and people who follow multiple games to commentate in a language closer to native English as opposed to GamerSpeak?
I think there are a few people out there who could pull off the commentary easily while keeping it clean. S-Kill, UltraDavid, Skisonic, and James Chen all come to mind. We all know Dogface pulls off excellent player interview segments. You could also have someone going around the floor talking to people after or before their matches. I think you would really just have to hit the edit button during post production. It would not have to appear on TV live. It could be something pre-recorded like the World Poker Tour.
you guys all must be from 2009. Evo was televised on G4 like 2 years now.
SF4 brings the bigger crowd, MvC2 brings the bigger excitement/hype. This should not be argued. So for TV purposes, SF4 should win because it grabs a small amount of top players plus 1000+ losers from around the world playing
