Something exciting: the most professional-looking and run StarCraft 2 tournaments in Kenya just came to a close, the Safari Cup #3.
We take this opportunity to all the players and the organisers of that tournament. Kudos to them all. We hope that everyone who took part had a lot of great fun.
For those who have no clue what StarCraft is:
StarCraft is a military science fiction real-time strategy video game developed by Blizzard Entertainment. The first game of the StarCraft series was released for Microsoft Windows on 31 March 1998. With more than 11 million copies sold worldwide as of February 2009, it is one of the best-selling games for the personal computer in history.
Many of the video game industry’s journalists have praised StarCraft as one of the best and most important video games of all time, and for having raised the bar for developing real-time strategy games. StarCraft’s multiplayer is particularly popular in South Korea, where players and teams participate in professional competitions, earn sponsorships, and compete in televised tournaments.
Right now in the developed world, StarCraft is very very hot and is helping to grow the worldwide competitive computer gaming scene. It has seen the scene grow immensely in the last year, with huge tournaments being held monthly and extremely large corporations taking part as sponsors (think Intel, AMD, Nvidia, CocaCola etc).
This is why I feel that the growth of StarCraft in Kenya is important for several reasons:
- It puts Kenya at the forefront amongst ‘developing’ nations. We are among the first of these nations to have professional competitive StarCraft.
- Our youth are able to engage in a positive activity that may lead them to earning quite the living (the highest earning players worldwide this year clocked in more than $200,000 and this is only going to rise)
- It markets our country: as a tourist destination; and as a tech-savvy place ideal for outsourcing IT services to. Both of these are things that our government is trying very hard to market Kenya as.
I do hope to see StarCraft grow bigger and bigger in the country.
Unrelated interesting fact
The Naivasha Jaza Resort was one of the sponsors of the Safari Cup #3. Through this modest sponsorship, they got unparalleled international exposure and have reported that they got quite a number of international inquiries when the Safari Cup was noticed prominently in the StarCraft community. Is this something that your business may like to experience? Talk to kalongo.com!
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