There are some who say that Demigod has "not enough depth" or is "too easy to master" to become a successful E-Sport game. For those who think that is true, let me tell you a little Episode from the Year 2004: Giga TV, a german gaming Television hosted a league called "Giga League". In the first Season they picked 4 Games to be played : CS, UT, Warcraft III and Starcraft Broodwar. As the activity in the qualifiers was rather low they decided to have a qualifier between different games for the next seasons so only CS and Warcraft III were in automatically and all other games had to do a knockout-style tournament to have their game in the finals. The Price pot was about 6000 Euro per game I think. In the 2nd Season Starcraft had to face Worms 2. Worms 2 won and 3 Worms players got the 6000 Euro. I think we all can agree that Worms 2 isn't really a game suited for E-Sport and even less suited for having it commented in Television. The Worms 2 Community was also a lot smaller than the Starcraft Community, but they were a lot better at mobilizing so for outsiders they seemed to have a huge community. In the months after that a lot other online leagues had (smaller) cups for worms 2 as well as a result of this. The Cohesion, Organization and Activity of a Community is at least as important as their size

Demigod is a lot better suited for E-sports than Worms 2 and if it gets a Community large enough to have at least about 2500 players online at the same time in average, Demigod really can be established as "The Counterstrike of RTS". However simply having that Community Size is not enough. Demigod needs a good e-sport concept if this has a chance to become Reality. There are 2 ways to achieve it. Either you do the EA or Sierra way and spend lots of money on a concept which leads to an active e-sport community for a few months or a year at best (like in World in Conflict or all the C&C parts) but after that time the game in dead in multiplayer. Or you can have a smart low-budget concept which keeps the multiplayer and e-sport community alive for a lot longer. 

When I speak of supporting E-sport I don't mean putting money into a few top players/teams in the first place. As all sports the foundation of e-sport is the large playerbase who enjoys multiplayer and enjoys playing a tournament or a league just for fun. So the most important thing is to cater those players by providing a tournament/league infrastructure and small incentives to participate - be that awards/icons or maybe a 10$ voucher for impulse a random participant of a tournament gets; Its crucial that everyone profits in some way, not only the top players or you will have a hardcore player only e-sport population in Demigod. Games like World in Conflict failed because there was only a few "pro" teams who played the game competively without having a large foundation .It was like having the champions league but no premier league, no 2nd division and no 8th division. 

Secondly, Money Tournaments don't need very high prize purses to attract players. I have seen the whole non-korean starcraft experts playing tournaments with only had 100$ for the 1st place. Right now the ESL runs a Major Series (Qualification Tournament, Group Stage and Knockout Tournament) which has a total prize purse of 1000 Euro - enough to get the attention of everyone and all the major e-sport coverage sites. Now if you compare that to the two 5000$ Tournaments GPG hosted for Supreme Commander, they were very nice indeed for the SupCom Community, but it was a large sum which gave no return of investment in form of being covered by the e-sport media. So all tournaments should be hosted in cooperation with an established e-sport league. As the WCG is at least 2 orders of Magnitude to big, and both CPL and ESWC are having big financial troubles, that means in cooperation with the ESL. With sponsored External Tournaments Stardock has the chance to not only advertise Demigod but also Impulse while internal tournaments only get noticed by existing customers.

Its a bit of a crazy idea but what about sponsoring a 250$ Starcraft and a 250$ Quake Tournament and let the Top 3 players of both Games battle it out for another 500$ in a match of Demigod. Or maybe even having a poll where the 2 most voted for games get these tournaments. This way you reach existing audiences and have a innovative event which might get a lot of attention. Strelok/Mondragon/Nony vs K1llsen/Cypher/Winz would be an epic match both the quake and the starcraft community would watch (need observer mode for the caster first though ). Maybe its a bad idea but I think some guerilla marketing in some form or another can be nice to catch attention. And Frogboy should totally mention that he played in PGL and also does it because he likes e-sports (even when we all know that it is about return of investment in the end ), I mean the CEO of a publisher being a former "progamer" is quite a nice story which gives a lot of street nerd credibility.

Thats my Ideas and Thoughts for now, feel free to rip it apart and add your own