shadowsword87 posted...
People who speak english.
Except the English speaking casters are boring as fuck and often not correct with their commentary. Even if I didn't know any Korean, I'd rather watch it in Korean.
Life Sympathy posted...
The match fixing scandal by Savior and others mostly drove away sponsorships but those were gone by the time, not viewers. Savior was well past his prime and most people were following the TaekBangLeesSang fandom by that point. Savior was playing so few games at that point that he destroyed his legacy more than anything.
As for the sponsorship, we went from the early 2000s with big hitters such as Coca-Cola, SKY, Panasonic, Gillette. By the time we were at 2007 and onward, sponsorships were looking more like begging EVER and Incruit for more seasons. OGN still managed to find big hitters like Korean Air which would give rise to the JinAir (low cost subsidiary airline to Korean Air) Greenwings team.
MBCGame was getting royally shafted on the other hand. They were begging for sponsors from the likes of ClubDay Online, Lost Saga, Hana Daetoo Securities, BigFile, etc etc. MBCGame was hemoraging money long before the decision to axe it came through. Remember that mini series Hyungjoon (K-Pop Star) Becomes a Progamer? That was before the match fixing scandal came to light and that was writing on the wall that MBCGame was extremely desperate to keep their channel alive. Hyungjoon didn't even take it seriously and goofed off for the entire series.
Let's also not forget KeSPA's extremely arrogant attitude around then too. Remember when GOMTV tried to bring official content to the global audience with the Star Invitational Tournament? KeSPA said no and refused to count any matches as official KeSPA matches and forbidding any of their referee services from participating. That chased off teams and killed that initiative real fast.
There were deep rooted issues far beyond that those two events within the scene that were easy to keep hidden from the global audience due to us only having second hand stuff presented by TeamLiquid. Most people will point to around 2007 being the golden age of the scene.
Bruh, Savior still had one of the biggest fanbases just because he was good looking(automatic female fanbase), and the fact that he was a bonjaw and still showing signs of brilliance here and there. Yeah, I forgot to mention kespa's dumbass bullshit that was driving fans away too(far more than what you mentioned, like disqualifying players for mistyping gg, disqualifying players for accidentally typing ppp instead of pp for pause request, and many many more bullshit events). MSL always had trouble finding sponsors because they had the 2nd place image to OSL, but they still managed to get Pringles twice, ABC-Mart, etc... They still had good ratings that made them good money.