According to a report from Korean website Yonhap News which was translated by the cool guys over at Team Liquid, it appears that Blizzard has given up trying to negotiate with the Korean e-sports Players Association (KeSPA).
Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime and COO Paul Sams discussed the situation with Yonhap. “We’ve been negotiating with the association about intellectual property rights for the last three years, and we’ve made no progress at all,” said Morhaime. “We’re going to stop negotiating with them and look for a new partner.”
“Blizzard obviously has the IP rights to the StarCraft series,” Morhaime continued, “but those rights aren’t being respected, and we can’t keep having these fruitless negotiations with the release of Starcraft II at hand.”
Being an American company, Blizzard is having a difficult time protecting its IP in South Korea, where StarCraft is the centre of a massive eSports movement. So much so in fact, that large companies are shelling out sponsorship deals.
Blizzard obviously wants a slice of the pie, and even attempted to make inroads with their own televised South Korean StarCraft tournaments – efforts that were thwarted by the KeSPA threatening to eject players and teams from their league if they participated.
Blizzard isn’t the small company they once were, and are likely to maintain an iron grip on anything StarCraft 2 related. Blizzard were dealt a slight blow the past week however, with the game receiving an 18+ rating in South Korea, effectively cutting off a large portion of the South Korean game playing and viewing public from their title. The decision is under appeal.
Readers may recall that KeSPA is also in the midst of a match-fixing scandal, so perhaps the credibility of the league is crumbling and the rats are fleeing the ship. The release of StarCraft 2 is bound to eclipse the popularity of the original, which will instantly become a classic retro title. For now, it seems that Blizzard has had enough of the dubious dealings of KeSPA and will likely forge ahead with their own eSports plans.
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