There were a significant prize pool, but prize is not enough, when the structure doesn't work. I think Escape Champions League was a failure. With 60 000 $ prize pool, you could have many exciting high quality tournament. Of course there were many excelleent games in ECL, but in theory you could have 6-12 Hidden Cup 2 and King of the Deserts -level tournament with 60 000
This is so wrong, and i don't really get all this negativity in the previous posts. Maybe the ECL hype drecresead after the open streaming policy, but calling it a "failure" is just dumb. The tournament provided a whole year of consistent and high quality games, and the players had the chance to earn a decent amount of cash of it (at least for aoe2 standards). This is exactly what Zack pointed out many times before they launched the Escape studio, and worked perfectly imo, so the event was a huge success in that regard. Viewer numbers are important, but we need to give credit to Escape for keeping the pro scene alive and semi-profesional, which is not really possible with only 3 "big" (i.e., $10K~) tournaments in the year.