Hmm, this guy has an interesting point. The sponsors don't support HoN anymore because HoN doesn't get that many viewers. HoN doesn't get that many viewers because people don't care about the competitive scene. People don't care about the comp scene because they like dota1/2 more, they don't care because they're a casual F2P player, and/or they don't care because the last couple months have been lacking.
Actually now that I think about it, S2's clearly at fault. Whether they didn't nurture the community right, whether they planned poorly with the business model and didn't attract enough initial customers, whether they shipped people off to garena, and/or whether they hired shitty incompetent people to work for them.
They have the most influence on this, the shitty community is not to blame for the shitty community.
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This doesn't change the fact that communities are built from the ground up. DotA was built from the ground up.
Since you seem economically brain dead let me tell you how sponsorship works. Sponsors don't give a flying **** about games or pros, they care about the viewers. LoL, DotA, and any e-sport or sport are one thing and one thing only to them: advertising campaigns to advertise to you. When they sponsor a tournament or team they're buying their followers and their viewers. LoL bought their scene and after their first year of self funding they had their proof that they had the viewers to sell and thus advertisers lined up. Dota2's international with 2mil+ concurrent viewers was Valve's proof that they had the viewers to sell as early as beta.
HoN is trash by comparison to these. Not only is HoN too close to DotA, but its own community doesn't care for it. S2 can push a million dollar tournament, but they know it will do more harm to them than good. It's why HoNTour is meant to be an in game tournament platform for everyone; a last chance to give this community the easiest tools possible to not have an excuse to not involve themselves in competition.
New games need to prove themselves worthy of sponsorship, and the community is the one responsible, not S2. You want real sponsors? Give your viewership to tournaments and show that you're marketable. If you like a team show support.
This idea isn't new. The fighting game community had to deal with building itself, DotA had to deal with building itself. No one says corporate (lol as if) or company sponsorships are bad, it's the whole point of legitimizing these games as e-sports to the level of Starcraft (the only e-sport to date world wide). You start from the bottom if you want it to last, not the top. You don't just dump money and have a community appear; sponsors will come for a while, but they'll leave as people start complaining about money drying up just like now.
Also some bitch is trying to get people to donate money for prize pools.
http://forums.heroesofnewerth.com/showthread.php?411917-How-and-why-YOU-should-support-the-competitive-HoN-scene!