Evolving the esports scene in Southeast Asia — why is MSC 2022 important for the region?
MSC 2022, one of the most popular esports tournaments of the year, ended a little over a week ago. The best Southeast Asian Mobile Legends: Bang Bang teams came to the capital of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur — they determined the best one in the first half of the competitive season. Esports Charts visited the championship and in this article tells how ML:BB gained love of local gamers, what the organizers want to achieve, and why the Malaysian Minister of Youth and Sports attended the tournament.
It's no secret that gamers in Southeast Asia love MOBA games a lot, and local esports athletes have succeeded in them. For example, a native of Malaysia, ChuaN, is one of The International Dota 2 champions, and despite the fact that players from Southeast Asia have not won top League of Legends championships, the nicknames of Levi- and Slay are known far beyond their native countries. But in the past few years, these games have gone far into the background and have been eclipsed by Mobile Legend.
MSC is a kind of analogue of MSI in LoL: it also takes place in the middle of the season, and its participants are the best teams of the major leagues. The tournament in Kuala Lumpur was the fifth in the history of the series, which has been held since 2017 (we should remind you that the event in 2020 was canceled due to the coronavirus). Indonesia and the Philippines were the only hosts of the series, but now Malaysia, the third largest region for the game, took its turn.
The tournament was held at the highest level in the pavilions of the largest exhibition center in the country, Malaysia International Trade and Exhibition Centre. More than 200 people organized the competition, and a quarter of them were technical specialists, who were responsible for the broadcast of the tournament, which are incredibly important for the competition: there were just over a thousand spectators at the finals, but the online audience of MSC 2022 was several million people!
The event was attended by a huge number of VIP guests — not only top players and content creators, but also the Moonton executives, including the heads of the MPL leagues and even the Minister of Youth and Sports Ahmad Faizal Azumu, attended the event. The attendance of top government officials at such events demonstrates both the status of esports in South-East Asia and the ambitions of the publishers.
MSC 2022 became the second major international event in the discipline (after M1) held in Malaysia. ML:BB and its esports scene is not on the same scale as the Philippines or Indonesia, but publishers are determined to change that, and MSC 2022 has played a very important role in this: as MPL Malaysia officials said, the main goal now is to raise awareness about mobile esports, and only then to increase interest in it to reach new audiences and thereby attract new sponsors. At the same time, MSC is important not only for the growth of the Malaysian scene. E-athletes from various teams have mentioned time and again how much ML:BB has changed their lives. For some of them it gave an opportunity to visit other countries, but for others it became a ticket to life — Falcon Esports can tell you that.
Myanmar, where the MPL league functioned successfully, was plunged into a political crisis at the beginning of 2021, and as a result, the armed forces seized power in the country. All this affected the esports scene there: the local league was suspended and esports players were cut off from the international scene. MSC has rectified this injustice: the organizers had separate qualifiers for teams from Myanmar, and the winner, Falcon Esports, took fourth place in the event — the best result in the history of local teams in tournaments in the series. Unfortunately, very few of the fans came to Malaysia, but they were some of the most active during the matches.
As for the main rivalry of the tournament, the representatives of the titular leagues in the discipline — Philippine and Indonesian — clashed again. The Philippine teams were the most successful in recent years, and it seemed that this trend would be broken at MSC 2022, as RRQ Hoshi, the champion from Indonesia (and the most popular Indonesian team at that time), moved very confidently up the tournament ladder. The team had no problems with its playoff opponents, and in the final it faced RSG Philippines: all pre-match expectations predicted that RRQ would finally take the long-awaited title — even the Philippine journalists were sad to admit this. But the point about any competition is that it's not always the clear favorites who win. Something unbelievable happened in the final — RSG PH crushed RRQ Hoshi 4-0, but most fans of the game would probably have believed in a quiet opposite result before the game.
Right after the last won map, one of the RSG players, 15-year-old Nathzz, ran onto the stage, grabbed the trophy first and provocatively turned towards RRQ. Many fans of the game from Asia were surprised: Z4pnu from OMEGA Esports (the team team finished third in the tournament) is considered one of the main treshtokers against the Indonesian team, but no one expected that from a young RSG player. The players were indeed overflowing with excitement, and that's very cool.
Another Philippine victory only created more excitement for the upcoming World Championship, M4, which was announced during the final day of MSC. The competition takes place in January 2023, and it's going to be hot for sure.
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The return of MSC to the offline format is not only a real festive occasion for the teams, but also an important case of how the organizers are approaching the expansion of both the tournament itself and the entire mobile esports community in Southeast Asia. While ML:BB has already captured the hearts of MOBA fans throughout the region, there is no doubt that there is more to come.
Text: Alexey Borisov
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