When the GOG sponsorship of Axiom eSports was announced, videos were promised of progamers trying their hand at classic GOG real-time strategies. The first of these is finally here (it has, in fact, been for three days now):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgSxtn7DA-I

Behold, as Axiom's players Impact (2nd place, 2014 Dreamhack Open: Bucharest) and Heart (3rd place, 2012 MLG Winter Championship) face off in one of GOG's hidden gems: Battle Realms.

Oh hell yes, I might actually watch these even though I despise watching other people do things.

Well this is just fascinating. I have heard a lot of things about a lot of places in the world. Why is someone's age different in Korea??? Or am I just reading that completely wrong?

Perhaps an age group for league gaming or something along those lines?

If you understand any of it, you're welcome ;)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Asian_age_reckoning#Korean

Totally awesome. :) Thanks! I like how the list of players on that site gives Korean ages for the non-Korean gamers as well.

They definitely have to lower the sugar on their mice :P

That was a neat share. Looking forward to more of their stuff. :P

Interesting.
I'm a more turn based guy, but definitely interesting.

Another video from TB .

I wonder why Battle Realms isn't already on the top sellers list .

I found it curious to note that two people who play a real-time-strategy game for a living had apparently not tried any other games in that genre. If you like something enough to make it to pro skill level, surely you would try other things like it?

Or they don't do it because they like it but because they figure there's a good chance of them becoming part of the elite in it and gaining honour, fame and wealth ("it", in this case, being Starcraft and/or Starcraft II). In which case knowledge of other similar games (or games at all) is quite worthless.

It's like enjoying Street Fighter but never having played Mortal Kombat, or liking Call of Duty while not being into Unreal or Quake. Going from Starcraft to other RTSes isn't *that* closely related, though I think the main issue for them is that they might be too young to have known the older ones and that the current RTS market isn't really that big of a scene outside of Starcraft anyway. At least after EA killed of C&C and Sega took over the 'other' market of Company of Heroes/Total War.

With that in mind I can't really blame them. They're also spoiled with new features that didn't exist in the older ones, so I don't think they would go to the classics just for fun on their own time. Paid time, it's whatever TB wants reviewed. ^^

We tend to think of these things as playing a game, liking a genre, trying new things and having favourite brands, but it's different for them: they're professionals. They do this for a living. They play StarCraft 2 for 10 to 14 hours a day. It's distilled into precision science, with every second and every key-press studied to the point of instinct. There's very little entertainment, as such, left in this. Whatever spare time they make for themselves, they don't really want to spend it playing another RTS, of all things.

If any of these kids have ever played another RTS before this, it was Brood War. The players who remember a time before StarCraft are long past their prime and mostly retired. Outside Korea, there are a few pros who came from SupCom and DoW backgrounds, but most are either former Brood War amateurs, Warcraft 3 players, or direct-to-SC2 people.