English e-sports commentator highlights globalization
English e-sports commentator Nicolas Plott speaks during the finals of Global StarCraft 2 League at Children’s Grand Park in Seoul, last Sept. 10. / Courtesy of Kenzi
By Yoon Sung-won
BUSAN ― Nicolas Plott, who is better known by his nickname “Tasteless,” is a veteran e-sports commentator. He has delivered commentary for worldwide e-sports competitions happening in Korea in English for almost a decade.
As one of Korea’s most experienced English e-sports shoutcasters, Plott said Korea’s e-sports industry should push to globalize its brand.
“Korea’s e-sports industry needs to globalize as much as possible. Korea can continue to expand to the rest of the world and host tournaments in Shanghai, Europe or maybe in South America. It might be a big step,” he said during an interview with The Korea Times at a hotel near Gwangalli Beach in Busan, Sunday. “Korea has the best players and it can leverage that to draw bigger audiences.”
In particular, Plott stressed the high potential of China’s e-sports market.
“One place that hasn’t really been tapped into is the Chinese market,” he said. “For instance, there is a tournament called Global StarCraft 2 League that I host in Korea and our largest viewership is from China. It’s just so huge. The e-sports scene is growing really fast and I think the industry is struggling to catch up.”
Plott also said Korea’s e-sports teams can globalize in terms of sponsorships.
“Many Korean tournaments have only Korean enterprises as sponsors. I think that’s Korean style,” he said, “I’m not against big Korean companies sponsoring events but the more global sponsors you can get, the better you can capitalize it.”
The e-sports shoutcaster stressed that Korea has many strengths as a destination for e-sports events.
“Korea generally produces the best gamers. Korea also has regular studio broadcasts that happen daily unlike the rest of the world. If you go to Europe or North America, there is a special event that happens over the weekend only once a year,” he said.
Plott said he believes the launch of Blizzard Entertainment’s “StarCraft: Remastered” will revitalize the popularity of e-sports events not just in Korea but also around the world.
“I think it has a big chance of rejuvenating the game. I hosted a tournament called the AfricaTV StarCraft League and we were really surprised by how many viewers we had. We had 22,000 concurrent viewers even for the English streaming, which is very good considering most English speakers would have to wait until 4 a.m. to watch the tournament,” he said. “I also think there is big potential for StarCraft to grow outside of Korea. StarCraft is still played a lot in Eastern Europe and in many regions without high-performance computers such as South America.”
When the original “StarCraft” was released in 1998, Plott was a middle school student. He played it on a professional level. When he was at the U.S. StarCraft tournament finals in 2005, he had the first opportunity to commentate for the game.
“At that time, I noticed there wasn’t anybody who was able to do commentary. So I offered to do commentary,” Plott said. “The broadcast company was happy with me so they sent me to Singapore to do commentary at the world finals.”
Plott received a job offer as a commentator in Korea. He dropped out of university and came to this country.
“I’ve been living in Korea for nine years doing commentary,” he said. “Since I was a little kid, I always wanted to come to Korea because this is the place where the StarCraft tournaments were started.”