StarLadder Product Manager: "We still hope that CIS will get the Major it deserves"

On the last day of StarSeries i-League Season 4, we managed to sit down with StarLadder's Product Manager Sergey Bidzan and discuss their tournament, the company's goals and the current state of the CS:GO landscape.

StarLadder entered the CS:GO tournament organizing field in 2013 and have been a constant presence since, putting together a number of memorable events. The company is based in Kiev, Ukraine, where they held the majority of their tournaments which either took place in the Kiev Cybersport Arena, their "home base", or the National Palace of Arts "Ukraine", a theater-like venue that fits almost 4000 people.

Bidzan is still hoping that the CIS region will get the Major it deserves

To get to know more about StarLadder, who haven't been as exposed to the public as some other tournament organizers, we arranged an interview with the company's newly appointed Product Manager, who shared his thoughts on not getting a Major yet, exclusivity deals with streaming platforms and more.

To start it off, can you give me a short introduction of yourself and what you do as the Product Manager at StarLadder?

I was the Events Director at StarLadder for the last two years working on most of the events that StarLadder did. One month ago I stepped in as the Product Manager for StarSeries CS:GO and started to manage the project and rebuild the team. Basically, I'm going to work on StarSeries and Invitational events to improve the product in the following seasons.

How do you see StarLadder, compared to other tournament organizers that are in the space? From your perspective, how do you stand out and what makes you special?

Our main strength is that we came up from CIS. We are the main esports operator in the region with huge local audience, fan base, and the teams which are only getting stronger. We have a good base here in Kiev with studios and venue. We have a solid foothold to develop from.

The global goal for StarLadder is to grow out of CIS and become a worldwide operator with local presence in North America, Europe and other parts of the globe.

One of the things you stood out with, I would say two years ago already, was production, the in-game observing, you introduced the smooth cameras and added different designs in the maps, now we see different funny camera shots that you find in the game and put on stream. How has that been developing as a part of, I would guess, your branding and how you present the game?

We were always very curious about what we can do in-game. At that time everyone was doing mostly the same things in the broadcast so we tried to do something special that could make us stand out among other tournament organizers. We did a big research on the in-game possibilities and found how to replace the files, textures, what to do with the server to have live graphics on the walls, etc. We did some really cool things like the gloves on the player's hands which are very common now and been used by everyone.

So far we remain limited in our actions by Valve's restrictions but we do prepare some unique innovations for the next season which we would like to implement in the production. I think that no one except us has done them so far. However, we need to go through the approval process to see whether we can use them or not. If yes, that will be great.

StarSeries i-League Season 2 and 3 took place in the Palace "Ukraine", Kiev's culture and arts center

I presume that even before you stepped up to the new position, you understood the difficulties of scheduling and overlapping in the scene that have been going on for some time now. How do you see that problem at the moment, in 2018? Do you see an improvement in terms of how it was last year or in 2016?

I think in 2017 we found a right way to cooperate with other organizers in avoiding overlapping between the events. But it's still very hard and almost impossible to schedule in advance for one or two years ahead. The only reason is the absence of schedule for Majors from Valve. The announcements appears, in the best case, half a year before the tournament. With such timings it's difficult to find a proper venue, to arrange the teams and qualifiers, sales after all.

My opinion is that if Valve do not step in and make a solid schedule for a couple years in advance - we will not move far ahead. That still slowing down everyone on the market.

Let's touch on this tournament now. Obviously different in the way that it's a full BO3 Swiss system, so there is a lot of matches. How did you decide on using this format, considering the obvious difficulties you get with it, and the benefits?

We believe that Swiss BO3 system is close to an ideal solution for the CS:GO scene. It reduces the chance of randomness and almost guarantees you the best line-up of teams in the playoffs. I think that the results of our group stage just proved that.

But every system has its own pros and cons. The worst side is that it will be very hard to implement such a system on a regular basis into an already oversaturated CS:GO schedule. Also the presence of parallel matches in the group stage makes it hard for the viewers to follow their favorite teams if they are playing in the same time. But this is not something we can deal with if we won't do 13-days event, which is obviously too much.

So far we receive predominantly positive feedback but we will dig deeper after the event, review the results and metrics, go through all the feedback from players and audience and then make a decision whether we will keep it for the following StarSeries events or not.

StarLadder used the same venue for the groups and the playoffs of StarSeries S4 due to scheduling issues

Was it also a big task to put it together because of the costs, considering you need a talent team double or triple the normal tournament size, and also the same for the Russian stream? How did you manage to balance that? Was transferring from last season's venue, the Palace "Ukraine", that had more space for viewers, to the Cybersport Arena, your home base here in Kiev, a part of the trade-off you had to do?

No, we tried to book the same venue for the playoffs but it was already taken and we couldn't move the artists that had contracted it for almost a year in advance. Thus we chose our studio as the main venue and were focused on the studio style event instead of the stadium-style we had in the concert hall. Because of that, as you know, we had a challenge to completely rebuild the setup within 24 hours from the group stage to the playoffs and add bleachers to extend the audience area.

Of course, a nine-days event was a challenge for us in terms of the expenses. The venue rental is nothing because we are the owners, but all the equipment rental, especially LED screens, amount to a lot. As you mentioned, double costs for talent for two languages is very painful, as well as the accommodation for such a long period.

But there is a positive side, because of the long duration and a lot of games we have excellent time watched and good sales. Having the best teams in the world, except NiP who didn't come, helps a lot. So far we're satisfied with the event and are aiming to do the same at the following StarSeries season.

The stage was rebuilt during the day off, creating an intimate venue for the playoffs

Regarding making revenue as a tournament organizer, one of the things that have been done recently by other tournaments and one of the talking points in the community has been moving to other streaming platforms. You've obviously been on Twitch for the whole time and you are still there, but has changing the platform been an option? What do you think about other tournaments moving to YouTube and Facebook, is that something you are willing to explore in the future?

It all depends on the bargain you can make with the platform. I assume that ECS has a very good deal with YouTube and they are satisfied with the money they can get from it. ESL most likely just ran for a big name and I don't think that it will be a successful cooperation or will last for long. As we see so far the viewership on their stream is comparably low and even if they earn much from the deal with Facebook they still suffer in terms of a tournament value. The audience isn't satisfied with the platform and who knows if it will change?

As for us, we are very happy with our cooperation with Twitch and believe that it will be a very long-term cooperation. So the answer is no, we don't think of moving to another platform at that particular moment.

The third-place decider match that you had was a hot topic, can you give me your view on it? Obviously, people are complaining because it's not competitive, or it's a waste of time, people don't want to play it and so on. As a tournament organizer, what do you think about it and why did you add it? Also, did you consult the players before the tournament and what did they say about it?

To get proper viewership at the grand final you need to warm up the audience before the game. And with that goal you have quite limited choice of effective methods. You either do a showmatch with a mix of talent and players, which is a very common thing at events, or you do the third place decider. We already did a couple of show matches in the past and weren't satisfied with the audience feedback. However, I need to admit that we need to work better on that.

We, of course, talked with the teams in advance and they agreed that they can play that match. So we made a decision to make it as our warmup for the audience for this time. But, for the future, I assume we may move away from it and try to do more interesting show matches to avoid such disputes like we had today.

Yegor "panda" Kolomietc drawing matchups at the end of a long day in Kiev

Panda has been stepping up as kind of a figure for StarLadder recently, he has been showing up on stream, interacting with people on Twitter. For those that don't know him, probably just saw him drawing the matches this week, can you tell us about his role in the team? And has putting him out there to build a brand something you have been doing on purpose?

Panda is the chief referee for CS:GO at StarLadder. He is doing all the CS:GO tournaments that we organize and that's not only StarSeries and the Invitationals, but a lot of white-label products as well. There is an insane amount of work and he shows himself as very experienced referee.

As for his role at the drawing, he is the main referee, who talks with the teams and other tournament organizers. He is like a bridge between players and StarLadder and everyone trusts him, that's why he was chosen to do the draw.

Regarding him being a representative of StarLadder in the community. Well, no, that is not his job. But the point is that we weren't working very well with the community in the past years so he might stood alone in that role for some time. But we are going to change that soon.

Let's touch on the cooperation you have with WESG that has been going on since last year when they announced the first tournament. How happy are you with it and how did it even come to happen?

For the first year, in 2016, we became a partner of Alisports in running WESG. We did the regional qualifiers in Africa & Middle East, Europe & CIS and the Americas. We were also participating in the Grand Final by doing the English production, the referee side, the editing and video team, the organizing team and a lot of other things. It was the very first year of WESG and they couldn't make it by themselves because they had a very small team to run the project. In 2017 they have created their own team which can particularly run the project by themselves and we became a vendor as for a white-label product, we just sell some of services to Alisports. So far we are satisfied with the current relationships we have.

There are still a lot of complicated things related to WESG because of the size of the project they are trying to run. It's huge, most likely the biggest tournament we have at the moment. And not only because of the crazy prize pool, but number of games and participants and all of the difficulties of national based tournaments with worldwide qualifiers. They still need some time to be able to handle it by themselves. Until then we may remain as a vendor for them.

StarLadder has been cooperating with Alisports on the WESG project

You had the Invitational in Shanghai and even with the StarSeries events, you had a lot of Asian teams playing, and we already touched on WESG. So is the Asian market something you are specifically trying to target and develop yourself in that regard?

The Asian market is huge. Obviously, everyone wants to settle on it. We have a partner in China, ImbaTV, whom we are working with on the Asian market for a few years already. We see a lot of potential there, particularly considering the fact that CS:GO was recently released in China.

When we do joint events we try to invite as many teams from Asian region as we can afford to keep the balance between the strong European and American teams and less experienced but potential Asian teams.

You mentioned CIS at the beginning of the interview, you recently started the Bets Challenger, which is quite a big league and has a division for CIS. How focused are you on developing CS in CIS?

CIS is our base and our home. Of course, we are working on the developing of the local scene, we always try to have CIS qualifiers to be separated from European. We keep running amateur leagues and are trying to grow the local talent by providing more opportunities for them.

I think that every single player which came up from CIS went through our leagues and tournaments. All the teams that now qualified for the Major and even went into playoffs, they all grew up on StarLadder's tournaments, went through the Minors we ran etc. Without these tournaments, without growing this market, we wouldn't survive for these years. This audience and these players are growing with us and I think that is a great symbiosis.

StarLadder sees a lot of potential in the Asian market and cooperation with local operators

StarLadder has been involved in CS:GO practically from the beginning, the first tournament you had was in 2013, when the game really started. At lot of tournament organizers have got the opportunity to hold a Major, you still didn't get that shot. How does that feel, do you think you think you've been skipped for a good reason or not? Is it a bit frustrating?

It's a little bit of a sensitive topic for us because we are trying to get a Major for the last three consecutive years. We aren't sure on the exact reason why we didn't get one yet but we keep working on the improvement of the product, from season to season. We are working hard on the offer we are sending to Valve every time.

My personal opinion is that besides all other possible factors, our strength, the CIS audience, is also our weakness. Valve is obviously more oriented on the European and North American market and it is completely understandable. And when they have two proposals and need to choose between a CIS company and a CIS Major and, for example, ELEAGUE with the American television and all the value of the North American audience - we will definitely be second in a line.

But I think it only means that we need to work harder on our offer and keep improving our product to become more interesting to Valve. We still hope that CIS will get the Major that it deserves.

Bidzan feels that their strength in CIS is a double-edged sword

Have all your Major pitches been for events in CIS or have you been offering other cities, European cities or maybe places somewhere else in the world?

We were offering European cities as well, but as it is known, we are the strongest player on the CIS market and that was the main option in the proposal.

Of course, you can't reveal all of your plans about what would you do if you got a Major, but can give us a feel of what would be special or different about your Major? What do you think needs to be done differently?

We still didn't reveal some innovations in the in-game and live stage production, holding them for a Major as tricks up our sleeve. If it doesn't happen in the following year we will probably reveal all of it on our own event. That's the main thing we are seeking a Major on.

Do you think anything needs to be done differently with the whole Major system as it is right now? The Minor, Major Qualifier, Major cycle and how the invites have been dealt with so far?

I guess that the current system is good enough. There aren't a lot of improvements which I could done there. From my perspective the main issue is scheduling which I mentioned already. If you can't plan in advance then that affects the whole market and limits the growth.

Besides that, I think that the regional qualifiers should last longer. Instead of the couple days long tournaments they need to grow into small leagues which would be made by local organizers which are interested in the quality, numbers, and coverage. Because having situations where we have a Minor without a regional language broadcast seems unacceptable and makes me super sad. This is something I would improve to make the regional qualifiers more valuable.

The StarSeries i-League trophy will be lifted two more times before the end of the year, in May and in October

What are the upcoming plans for StarLadder?

The upcoming events... I can say that we will have two more StarSeries seasons this year, season 5 and 6. The next in the end of May where we're looking to having the same Swiss BO3 format. Another one is in October, most likely in a different format because of the dates availability. Additionally, we will have a few smaller tournaments like Invitationals which will happen outside of CIS for sure.

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