Rod 'Slasher' Breslau caught up with Injun Kim, head of Dota 2 in Nexon Korea for an interview. In that interview, Injum Kim talked about their game plan to bring Dota 2 into South Korea and their broadcasting choices for their upcoming league.
Two weeks ago, Nexon, Valve Dota 2 distributor in South Korea, announced a prize pool of $1,700,000 for Nexon Starter League as part of their plan to break the game into the South Korean market. This move while bold and risky, is very meticulously calculated.
Today, Rod 'slasher' Breslau of Gamespot caught up with Injun Kim, head of Dota 2 for Nexon Korea for an interview regarding Nexon's move. In the interview, Injun Kim mentioned that they will continue hosting big tournaments such as this in an ongoing effort to make Dota 2 bigger in South Korea. Besides that, Injun Kim also said that their upcoming league will be produced by GomTV.
The following is an excerpt of the interview:
Why have you chosen GSL to run the production, as opposed to someone like OnGameNet?
We’ve been in contact with every production studio we know of in Korea, and in the end our needs and requirements were met by GomTV’s proposal, in terms of broadcasting schedule and quality production setup. We are always open to working with other studios for future events, but it was simply not feasible to work with OGN this time due to their schedule constraints/conflicts.
Will there be an English broadcast for the broadcast partner, or an English-speaking broadcaster partner brought in?
We’re actually in talk with some of the western broadcasting studios. We would like to let as many languages casts as possible. We’re in touch with western studios for an English broadcast, possibly for other language casts too. GomTV will host Korean live from their Gangnam studio. We will be announcing our English partners shortly.
With Korea only now getting Dota 2, what is the plan to get people playing the game?
I have to admit that it’s always tough to get people to play your game for the first time. We don’t have a magic formula. Rather, we are trying to be approachable to the community and reaching out to community leaders and casters of note. This will allow us to not only build connections, but also to gather greater insights into what needs to be done. Everyone starts loving Dota 2 after certain amount of exposure. We just need to figure out how to keep them interested until they reach that point where they love the game.
Secondly, we’re planning to run as many and various leagues as possible, in hopes that we can send out a consistent message that we take competitive gameplay seriously. From this point on we will work hard to deliver the best possible experience to both participants and spectators. Our goal is to help the community build more teams and pave the way for Korean teams excel in global competitive scenes.
You can read the rest of the interview at Gamespot.
