Today Blizzard announced a Streamer Awards to give a little back to those who have promoted Blizzard games through streaming and its nice to see that Blizzard is giving back to the community. On top of this the winners will be given a chunk of a $45,000 dollar prize pool so its a big deal!
So it’s an awesome idea and should gain Blizzard some extra respect from the community but that’s not the case, this is because it has all been done strangely and I will explain why! The first issue that has been brought up is those who have been supporting Blizzard on other platforms for years but haven’t seen an award ceremony for them, the main one being Youtube. Even if a prize pool could not be given out surely just the recognition for their work would be more then enough but its never happened and only small chunks of support has been given back to the Youtube content creators, but we can look past that and just put it down to some form of issue stopping them from doing it properly.
The part that has REALLY got the community in arms is the selection for each Category, so firstly lets take a look at the “Favorite WoW Stream” Nominations, the list includes Veev, Ziqoftw, Sodapoppin, Reckful, EGazael, Swifty, Cdewx, Venruki, Hydramist and Legendarylea now those names are fine, no problem seeing any of them being in the running because they are or have streamed World of Warcraft to a large audience but take a look at that list again. Where are some of the larger streamers who have dedicated literally every day to streaming World of Warcraft like Towelliee, Ducksauce, Mufasaprime, Bajheera, Chinglish, Elvinemod and these are just a handful of names that came to mind. Why didn’t they make the cut? Surely it wouldn’t hurt to have a bigger list and even if it was cut down then why didn’t the community have a say in who gets cut?
Same thing happens over on the Hearthstone side, Streamers such as WoWHobbs didn’t make the cut, the man has literally supported Blizzard Games since the dawn of time and once more plenty of other names who didn’t make the Heartstone, Favorite New Streamer or another Nominations category. Its a strange thing for them to do, how do you create a set of awards that award people for supporting the game through streaming but miss out huge names in the community, it just doesn’t make sense.
For a second lets try to think why those people didn’t make the cut, the first thing I can think of is that some of them may have already won an award in an area that cannot be voted for by the public such as “Most number of hours streamed for Blizzard titles in 2013” as this is mentioned in the article that some of the awards are data-driven. That could be why some names haven’t been seen on the list as they have an award waiting for them! The next possible answer is they drew the names through some kind of internal voting first and then went onto give the watered down list to the public but I feel that would be very bias and quite frankly unfair. A similar situation would be if they have used a set of rules for picking the people they have, such as they need to be in a competitive scene or some form of Blizzard associate but if that is the case they should have worded the article that way and apologised to those who didn’t make the cut because of this. I definitely feel there is some factor, a missing piece to the puzzle that will clear up the names that have been picked but regardless of the reason they should have made it clear why other big names who deserved a shot didn’t get one.
My personal opinion is that these awards are great, its a brilliant idea because hey, we content creators be it Youtube, twitch or even written enjoy being given some recognition but when it’s been done so poorly why bother? If names who deserve the recognition aren’t even in the running, let alone winning I feel its a wasted effort and will only leave a bitter taste in peoples mouths. They even have the support of Twitch.tv and are doing this as a joint event but surely Twitch would have noticed the names that have been given and be like “Hey did you know you missed off this guy/girl they have been streaming WoW for X”, so I just can’t understand how such a mess has been made and a good thing has basically been turned into a bad thing that will only cause Streamer rivalry and drama unfortunately.
What do you think? The names they have selected are fair and the others who where missed off just didn’t deserve being given a chance? We would love to hear your opinions on this topic over at https://www.stratics.com/community/threads/blizzard-streamer-awards-are-the-nominations-fair.310912/