While eSports viewing is already popular social pastime in certain nations, such as StarCraft crazy South Korea, many gamers around the world are only able to enjoy live events broadcast over the internet from their own homes.
A new wave of public eSports viewing is emerging, and Vitriolic Gaming will be bringing South African gamers their first taste of live broadcast StarCraft matches in a common social environment – an event dubbed BarCraft.
South Africa’s first BarCraft event will take place this weekend (1 – 2 October) alongside the rAge 2011 expo in Johannesburg.
BarCraft is a movement that started in July 2011 in North America to get eSports in to bars. Vitriolic has now taken up the challenge to spread it in Southern Africa and Europe.
BarCraft will be taking place this weekend at the Dros in Northriding, which is 1.3km from the Coca Cola Dome at which the Annual rAge expo is taking place. (Directions)
Streaming of international StarCraft 2 tournaments will take place on Saturday evening (1 October) from 20:00 till late.
On Sunday morning BarCraft will be bringing gamers and barflies the finals of the DoGaming Championships and the NAG Gaming League, both taking place down the road at rAge.
This is ideal for those who prefer to watch the finals with a beer in the one hand, a smoke in the other, and a massive steak on the plate in front of them.
We caught up with Pieter “Cyrus” Venter, COO of Vitriolic Gaming, to learn a bit more about the logistics of bringing streaming StarCraft events to bars in South Africa.
“Vitriolic Gaming is an EU and ZA organisation and we will be providing all the technology required,” explained Venter.
“The DoGaming League championships will be played online so our streamers (in the EU) will join the game and start streaming with commentary. At the Dros we will simply connect to the stream and display it on their TV.”
Asked about bandwidth requirements, Venter said: “384k [ADSL] works on certain streams with low quality, but is not recommended. 1mbps is perfectly fine. 3G also works as streams take latency into account and simply delay the packets rather than lagging.”
In terms of the financial viability of BarCraft events, Venter explained “Dros will make money by touching a market they wouldn’t otherwise have reached. We will provide a service to participating bars to advertise their BarCraft events on one central place and provide assistance to help them get it off the ground.”
Venter said that this inaugural South African BarCraft event will be the first of many. “We want to get it to every major city in the country and then expand to the EU region. We already have the needed funding to achieve this, but investors are welcome to contact us.”
SA’s first BarCraft event is happening at rAge 2011 << Comments and views
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