Why Korea is Boycotting the First Esports Olympics Event
Put some respekt on my name
There’s been a great deal of commotion ever since the Olympic Council announced their decision to include eSports in the Asian Games, the second largest multi-discipline sporting event after the Summer Olympics, boasting over 45 participating countries and 10,000 athletes. A gamer now potentially has the same power as traditional, laurel-leafed athletes to bring medalled honor to their country. This is welcome news from the perspective of South Korea, as most eSports are dominated by Koreans ever since the time of Boxer in Starcraft in the early 2000s. The best RTS players are Korean, the best Street Fighter player is Korean, the best LoL players are Korean, best Overwatch players are Korean, and so forth.
So there was great surprise when the Korean eSports Association (KeSPA), a government ministry, took the step on May 25th to boycott the first ever Olympics-recognized event that features eSports, the clumsily named Asian Indoor and Martial Arts Games, to be hosted in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan. However, delving just a tiny bit deeper into the situation provides a lot of answers for why this unfortunate boycott is taking place.
The most obvious issue is the games. Dota 2, Starcraft 2, and Hearthstone are the primary games to be played in the 5th iteration of the Asian Indoor and Martial Arts Games. Now each of these games are great. Dota 2 was the most viewed eSports game on Twitch, according to Newzoo, and regularly crowdfunds its own eSports scene to the tune of scores of millions of dollars in prize money every year. Starcraft 2 and Hearthstone are highly competitive games that lead their respective genres (Real Time Strategy and Card, respectively). But the problem lies more in the omission of certain games, name League of Legends and Overwatch, which are not only hugely popular but are also games that are dominated by Korean stars.
The League of Legends vs Dota 2 discussion is definitely the most flagrant point of contention. League of Legends has a player base of almost 100 million unique players per month, which is nearly ten times greater than Dota 2’s player base. The revenue disparity between the two games is equally great, as LoL brought in 1.6 billion dollars of revenue in 2016 compared to 260 million dollars for Dota 2. So from just a player base and revenue perspective, LoL has Dota 2 beat by at least 9x.
From Korea’s perspective, the sheer number of star LoL players that are Korean is a huge advantage especially when compared to the dearth of Korean Dota 2 stars. Because Dota 2 is a failed game in Korea (see: reddit thread) that closed down its Korea-based server due to its lack of adoption and whose eSports infrastructure fractured into disparate, irredeemable parts.
Note also that Korea recently shut down their Starcraft II e-sports league, and that the Hearthstone scene is not very active these days. That means that all three of the games are games where there is no official KeSPA presence. Was this intentional? And are there hidden connotations of disrespect included in the choice of games?
The answer to both questions is — probably. Because what events like the World Cyber Games has shown us is that Korean eSports dominance leads to very redundant events. Perhaps the event organizers wanted a more level playing field, or wanted to choose games that would allow for more varied regional parity. Or maybe they’re tired of seeing Koreans holding medal after medal?
We’ll never know for sure. What we do know is that KeSPA took this as a slight, and declared their boycott in a firmly worded statement, saying:
There was no consideration given to countries with strong medal potential, and in particular the absence of Asia’s most popular eSport game, League of Legends, leads us to believe the selection of games was quite haphazard.
Is KeSPA ultimately posturing for a more favorable game selection in the upcoming 2022 Asian Games? We shall see. For now, the Asian Indoor and Martial Arts Games will march forward without KeSPA. Perhaps for the first time in recent memory we’ll see a winners podium without a single Korean.
