Due to the overwhelming number of requests I have received to comment on the Tetris Tournament Online III grand finals broadcast, I felt like I could not ignore them any longer. I’ve given my opinion to a few different people in individual conversations, but like always, what I say always gets changed when passed along. So, I decided to post another official announcement again, this time regarding the results of the tournament.

For those who are completely unfamiliar with the Tetris Tournament Online, it is the world competitive Tetris championship tournament, sponsored by the Tetris Company, the copyright holders of the Tetris brand, and organized by Hard Drop, the largest Tetris community in the world (as of today).

One of the most frequent questions I got was why I didn’t stream or cast anything in the tournament. I already answered this to a decent level of thoroughness back on October 19, 2013. In case you missed it, you can read it here:

http://parkzer.com/2013/10/19/

The next most common question is how the tournament went. I managed to get the statistics for TTO3 from Twitch, Hard Drop’s primary streaming platform, and can give you a comparison to TTO2 from last year, which is the tournament where I hosted the stream and casted.

• Unique visitors. This is the number of different people who saw at least some part of the broadcast. TTO2: 37,963. TTO3: 3,340 (8.8%).
• Max concurrent viewers. This is the largest number of people who were watching the stream at the same time. TTO2: 2,049. TTO3: 604 (29.5%).
  • An interesting supplementary piece of information – after TTO2 was over, we did fan games. During this time, the max concurrent viewers was 624. This means that we had more people watching fan games last year than the tournament had overall during the main event this year.
• Average minutes per visitor. This is how long, on average, people watched the stream once they arrived on the page. I’m not 100% sure how to interpret this correctly because they’re displayed as ranges on a per-hour basis, but these numbers are taken straight from the Twitch statistics. TTO2: 3-45 minutes. TTO3: 7-14 minutes (25.3%).

To put things simply, TTO3 was massively less popular than TTO2.

The next main question I received was why this happened. The cause of this is simple – the leadership behind the tournament this year was insufficient. Hard Drop was not prepared to host the tournament yet, but an unqualified individual took over the lead and pushed this tournament to release without proper preparation. The founder of Hard Drop did not stop this because all he was interested in was to get something happening in the community.

Finally, the last question is if I will ever be re-entering the Tetris scene to revive streaming and broad­casting with high-quality production value. Unfortunately, I have no answer to that at this point. The primary determining factor is if the Tetris Company will start making an effort to promote their brand again. If they make an effort to improve the official Tetris game (which at this point is Tetris Friends – they can either improve it or make a new one), and become more motivated to get people involved with Tetris, then yes, I may consider re-entry. If not, then I will not.