This is only a problem because businesses are trying to prop up competitive scenes for arbitrary games from nothing, which is a silly way to go about this.
They're games, people play them for fun. Let the competitive scene develop organically and then go in with investor money for better broadcast equipment and sponsors and shit and draft a team to compete in the existing competitive scene.
Trying to just create a competitive scene for random games out of thin air when players haven't even shown they're going to stick around for it is insane.
The default approach for any unproven competitive game should at most be "hey we're hosting an official tournament with a modest prize pool in the hope to drive adoption of our game, if it works we might do it again next year" not "we're investing millions into regional teams and stadiums out of thin air like we're bootstrapping the fucking NFL, and don't you dare host your own tournaments.".
This comment would've made sense 10 years ago, but it doesn't today. The modern gaming landscape is generally incompatible with organic competitive scene development, and really anything else that might be considered "organic". The developers want to have full control over the game, how it's played, when it's played, and who plays it. They don't want anything to develop "organically" without them having a hand in it so they can extract as much profit from it.
> They're games, people play them for fun.
There's another big problem right there: this isn't really true anymore for most multiplayer games. Most that released in the past few years (and some games that were older but were updated) come with dozens of "features" designed to force people to play them even when they don't want to: battle passes, limited time events, endless grinds, etc, this is done to maximize engagement and profit and effectively turns the games into chores rather than something you do for fun. Doesn't help that most of these games weren't really fun in the first place.
>There's another big problem right there: this isn't really true anymore for most multiplayer games.
I was recently introduced to the game Rust. In chat within a server a player asked "How do I keep my base from being destroyed when i'm offline?", the answer that the crowd provided him was "Set your mobile to alert you when your base detects people near it.".
It then dawned on me that there are probably quite a few players who will wake up out of a sound sleep, dash to their computers and rush to defend a virtual base from players in distant lands -- sacrificing their personal lives and sleep health not due to the enjoyment of the game, but simply because someone somewhere antagonized them in an environment they were disconnected from entirely.
I can understand pulling late/all hour sessions due to a personal obsession ; game/coding/hobbies/etc. I've done that way too many times throughout my life; but the marathon represents to me a stream of enjoyment and fascination.
It's tough for me to consider pulling late sessions and deriving myself from sleep as a constant response to antagonism in an always-on persistent world.
I guess what i'm trying to say is that I totally agree with you; games aren't only played for fun now -- they're played sometimes in an entirely reactionary form to either gain from the current limited time event, a fear of missing out, or a fear of loss of competitive advantage -- and all of these concepts are being orchestrated by the game developers and the industry at large.
I have absolutely no idea what to do about it, but I recognize the problem and absolutely agree. The move from pastimes being an entertainment value to a constant worry surely plants more asses in seats, but it feels entirely unhealthy and psychologically damaging.
> I was recently introduced to the game Rust. In chat within a server a player asked "How do I keep my base from being destroyed when i'm offline?", the answer that the crowd provided him was "Set your mobile to alert you when your base detects people near it.".
About twenty years ago there was this german browser game "Ogame" (It's still around, but I have no idea how it works nowadays). I was looking for my scifi gaming fix, found "Ogame", decided to try it out and encountered the o so usual game mechanics for the first time: Timers, timers timers. Everything took time. from minutes, to hours to days. I noticed on my first day, that even to have modest progress I would have to set my alarm clock at arbitrary times to start the next "process".
But it gets even worse. You build your fleet and the only mechanic to not have it destroyed by random other players while you are not around is to send it travelling from one star system to another. So you had to set an additional timer/alarm clock. Not just to progress, but to avoid having all your progress taken from you.
Oh man, I remember that “game”! Ironically, I lost my fleet while I was on a plane to Germany to visit a friend doing a semester abroad over there. I logged into a computer lab at his school, bore witness to the destruction of my fleet and shrugged my shoulders and logged off that game for the last time.
It sounds like you just dont find that fun. Theres been a pretty popular online game called Utopia which is a 24/7 kingdom management game. Its been out for over 20 years and even won some Game of the Year awards [1]! You have cooldowns on things like attacking other kingdoms that are, e.g. 3 hours long. The most dedicated kingdoms used to set their alarms to get up in the middle of the night to attack other kingdoms if in a war. This was fun as a teenager / young adult. I wouldn't find this fun now. You just arent the target market, I dont think theres anything deeper needed in the analysis.
I havent played in quite a while. Like I said, my life now is not as conducive to that style of game. But also, the game lost a lot of appeal for me in the current day of browser automation, data aggregation, etc. That 24/7, data analysis heavy style of play is really charming/addicting if everyone is _actually_ playing and _actually_ analyzing data. But when so much of the game loop has been taken over by computers, it doesnt have the same draw.
Unfortunate, but Utopia really was a great game for a group of friends back in the day. We would have to find ways to get into the library at school during the day so we could tend to our kingdoms. I still receive their "new age announcement" emails. Its an inside joke to forward them to a group chat and ask if anyone else is going to play.
Reminds me of several "html4 games" before smart phones went nuclear. The only one I can remember the name of was "hobowars". There was a colonize planets/solar systems and a medieval variant.
It was little bit fun as a novelty, plus getting top ranked in some of them promised a prize like money or xboxes.
It's a lot less fun when every game does it and wants you to pay to win, and when you win you get nothing but the credit card bill.
The day I quit playing WoW Classic was the day the guild I was in started implementing a system to wake up people using Discord alerts on their phone for world bosses spawning.
Stuff like this is why people overestimate "market effects" and under estimate just group think in industries. Sure it is "more profitable" in some sense to do it this way, but you'd imagine someone somewhere will make a small fps that doesn't have this overly controlled crap and then win big, taking a share of the big guys' profits, and then the cycle churns into a new area of phase space.
The reason that hasn't happened yet is because a) gamers are just too dumb or lead by hype to try small non-triple A titles (which isn't quite true) or b) the groupthink in the industry is too thick for anyone to even try it. I feel like it's a combination of these two, probably more of b) but enough of a) justifies developer's collective illusions about what is proftable (that is, b))
New gamers with disposable income and generally little education or world experience are produced cyclically. Middle and high school students have the time to no life games long enough to become truly great at them in ways that no adult with only a few free hours every week can compete with. So the adults with jobs and families and kids drop out of the AAA games using FOMO as a crutch to prop up sales and engagement metrics. The kids, lacking fully developed PFCs get enamored by these exploitative tactics and every now and then one of these games get this perfect and print billions. With a declining population, incoming generations who grew up with modern video games and their tactics, and increasing scrutiny of psychological manipulation of children by video game companies I expect these companies to maliciously double down on their tactics instead of increasing investment into original content and novel games that present too much risk for the boring and greedy money men running the companies and investment funds.
Maybe the sports model doesn't apply at all, and it's arguably pretty unimaginative to try to force the proven sports model onto computer games.
Is there another way to play as a collective experience, and to monetize it (not that I care to monetize it, but obviously some do)? Or another way of approaching the issue, do we need more than what's already in multiplayer online games? Should we just add something to those that is more of a mass collective interaction?
The regional model definitely doesn't make sense for video games given their non physical nature. At a continent/country level it does (because people too far away wouldn't be playing together because of latency).
Fighting games are a bit of an exception because historically they've been in person only, again because of latency. Modern rollback netcode has made this less of an issue though.
My first thought is that online communities should have their own teams, what game would HN play competitively?
I’m not sure I like the name “Bike Shed Painting Simulator”. Let’s spend some time coming up with something more succinct. Should we schedule a meeting to discuss?
Dwarf Fortress hot potato is fun. Each player takes care of the fort for N hours, and then passes it on to the next player. Every time someone manages to lose the fort to FUN! they're eliminated and the remaining players start up a new one.
Sounds like strategic seat-ordering and sabotage is the name of the game. Five minutes before the end of your slot, destroy everything, unleash the kracken, etc.
I wonder if you could fix the incentives by giving everyone multiple "lives", and half penalizing players who went right before the one who lost the fort.
I’ve done it in the past, and it’s much more dependent on the group of people than the rule set. If you have a group trying to game the system, then there’s only so much that the system can do to correct it. If you have a group trying to one-up each other on megaprojects, captive beasts, and over engineered defense mechanisms, then the extrinsic motivation becomes unimportant.
> try to force the proven sports model onto computer games.
Yeah, trying a bit too hard there - every single person in that industry that i've met goes out of their way to use sports jargon to desperately try to make that model work (ie "esports athletes" when referring to the players )
Yeah it's mighty annoying. It's even worse when they take some "pro" with "actual sport" experience and they start throwing jargon around, ye, good job talking about baseball or handegg to international viewership that don't have clue what those terms mean.
Pretty much. Just looking at biggest titles, they are all designed to appeal to any skill level of play and "just" be fun PvP game
Games "designed for esports" are trying to push horse before the cart. Game needs to get the playerbase first, be interesting and competitive in the long run second and then you can scoop people on top, put them in funny named teams and make them duke out to the public you get from having a big playerbase
While I'm inclined to agree, when it comes to developers with a strong reputation for making fun competitive games, I can understand how it could make sense to just jump in immediately with lots of money.
The goal is obviously that if you make a big investment into a competitive scene, that may attract top tier talent from other games, and that talent will itself bring in more regular players and viewers.
Gaming is the reddest of the red oceans. People only have so many hours in a day so if they are playing X they are not playing Y. Huge first mover and network effects to be the popular game.
Yeah this is a fair take too. Riot seems to have been largely successful in this approach with Valorant. Blizzard tried with Overwatch but imo they tried to push an overly structured approach with too much top down control way too far.
I agree. It seems like if companies are pulling out its probably best for the scene. I think people still want to have fun and compete against each other, and it will be more interesting to see organic competitions instead of the large corporate sponsored ones.
Its a chicken-egg situation. You need talent to attract attention, and you need attention to attract talent. You have to bootstrap prize pools etc IMO to hit critical mass until it becomes a "self fulfilling prophecy" and keeps the players invested. Otherwise, the next thing that offers a more legit prize pools and sponsorships is the "correct" choice if they are trying to make this their living.
I don't think it really is a chicken and egg problem though - hardly any of the competitive scenes for the biggest games historically got bootrapped like this:
Counterstrike: Organic community, Valve only started putting effort/money into it after it had already proved itself.
Starcraft: ditto
DoTA: ditto
AoE2: ditto
Smash: Nintendo is practically actively hostile to the competitive community, it persists regardless.
DoTA 2 and LoL arguably weren't bootstrapped either - they relied on players jumping ship from the already existing and proven OG DoTA scene.
It seems you are arguing that the _competitive scene_ exists, which I dont dispute. I was under the impression we were discussing the _ability for a player to play the game as their career_. i.e. The equivalent of a pro sports athlete but for a video game. The players are for the most part going to move to where the money is (and esports are unique in that way, where skillsets are more transferable between games).
That said, DOTA 2 is a large part of the current "esports" wave of payout-driven hype trains. The International was an unabashed marketing play to drive interest ("It drew attention due to its staggering $1.6 million USD prize pool, the highest prize pool of any single esports tournament at that time." [1]).
If you let it develop organically before investing, there’ll be more money chasing from more people who recognize the potential by the time you invest, so you’ll get smaller upside, having to pay more for a similar share.
The few scenes I've followed (so two) have died because funding disappeared and the games stopped getting updates, with one ladder being taken off the internet entirely.
I am hesitant to bother getting into any new esport.
As far as I can tell, two groups are making plenty of money off of esports:
1 - The companies that make the game. Whether it's Riot and Blizzard selling slots in their leagues for eight figures, Valve using their annual tournament to sell in-game cosmetics, or all the companies ultimately owning broadcast rights to their game, this is the biggest difference between esports and traditional sports.
The New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers make money because they sell their own tickets and broadcast rights to their games; even though MLB does control the streaming revenue, they share it out to teams and ultimately have to bow to the wishes of a majority of team owners. What you don't see is a single company MLB inc that owns the copyright to the game of baseball, sells broadcast rights to all teams themselves, charges teams to play in the league, and can kick teams out of the league at a whim. That's the situation in esports.
2 - Individual players, with streaming. Players can first make a name for themselves in competitions, then stream on their own Twitch channel for revenue. This is not that different from athletes acting as social media influencers and signing endorsement deals, but the biggest difference is that by streaming on Twitch, they appear side-by-side with tournament broadcasts. It's as if LeBron's instagram account where he streamed his workouts and pickup games were just one change-of-the-channel away from ESPN, and people would consider it normal to flip between the game and individual player streams.
Lots of esports orgs, as part of signing players, get a big cut of the player's streaming revenue. But the revenue for an individual player's twitch stream, while great for an individual, usually isn't going to be significant enough to maintain a whole organization, and when a player brand does get big enough that their stream could sustain an org - that's when the player will be heavily incentivized to go independent, and make more money from streams than they do from competing.
Ultimately, I think esports has a bright future - overall total viewership continues to rise, even though some games like League of Legends - which is more than a decade old now - are starting to fade. It's just the business models of the offline sports world don't carry over, and that's especially apparent with these organized teams.
Point two reminds me of how some university professors make most of their money doing consulting and serving as expert witnesses. While their university salary pales in comparison to what they get from their other activities, it is their status as professors at reputable universities that makes the other income possible.
Twitch recently lowered their payouts (again) [1], making streamers and creators furious. More blood from the stone.
Twitch is bad for discovery, and they're continually losing creators to YouTube(Gaming).
Amazon doesn't report all of the key financials from Twitch, but it's expensive to support infra for everybody who wants to be a streamer. Only the top 1% draw an appreciable audience, and the ads cater to a demographic that doesn't have substantial disposable income.
If Amazon didn't have other interests in gaming (Luna, their own MMOs and game studios, etc.) that synergize well with Twitch, they would probably cut the losses.
As a comparison, Reddit recently cut their own streaming product [2].
This is a good reminder of Google's advertising economies of scale.
It doesn't surprise me that Twitch is struggling. TikTok could suffer the same fate as Twitch: their payouts aren't as good as YouTube (Shorts) on a per view basis. The only thing that's keeping TikTok in the game is their reach. Once reach hits parity, I wouldn't be surprised if TikTok succumbs to YouTube.
By "continually losing creators to YouTube" you mean YouTube paid a few top streamers million dollar contracts? I don't see anyone prefer streaming on YouTube over Twitch unless you already have a big channel on yt.
Discovery is still better on Twitch. There's raids and hosts, and simply picking a catogery/game you like and see everyone who streams it. How do I find a Dota livestreamer on Youtube? There's not any intuitive way, if I search it I just get videos.
And then there's twitch prime, the supreme chatting experience of twitch etc.
You mean the stream of high-pressure shit is ejected at higher rate ? That's pretty much "chatting experience" on any big channel regardless of platform...
Riight. I've been following a bunch of Twitch streamers for years, none have migrated to YouTube. (as much as I want them to, I personally find the viewing experience on YouTube live, is much better then Twitch)
The latest League Worlds was gigantic and viewership peaked at 5.1 million. These big finals are the eSports equivalent to the Super Bowl, and a lot of people tune in even if they're not active players.
My favorite moba is Heroes of the Storm but I still check out League Worlds and DotA2's The International, despite not playing either game.
StarCraft 2 is a decade old and viewership is still pretty solid for big events. Brood Wars is two decades old and they still get thousands of viewers!
Can you cite figures for SC2 viewership? I sometimes watch it but from what I've heard from announcers on Twitch, SC2 viewership outside of Korea is basically dead. The last SC2 event was last month, Dreamhack Atlanta and it only managed to get a peak viewership of 26k for the finale. The average viewership for SC2 was 15k.
That's abysmal, it's not even on par with people who watch competitive hot dog eating.
LoL events get 100-200k streaming viewers because Riot pours money in to promoting them. SC2 tournaments look amateurish in comparison because they are self-sustaining, i.e. funded by the sponsors and viewers with no support from Blizzard. The question is not why SC2 doesn't get more viewers, it's why a 10+ year old game that barely even gets bugfixes can still support an industry of professional players and commentators.
It's a matter of perspective. If the Superbowl struggled to sell tickets, but more people than ever were playing football in parks, would that mean the sport is dying or thriving? I think that's what this article almost managed to figure out: esports isn't failing, esports in a big arena with cheerleaders and fireworks is failing, while esports in the form of streamers cobbling together a decent paycheck from youtube+twitch+patreon is surprisingly popular.
LoL doesn't get 200k viewers, it gets 2-5 million viewers [1].
Blizzard officially sponsors the ESL Pro Tour and DreamHack SC2 Masters [2].
LoL is also older than SC2, it was released in 2009 whereas SC2 was released in 2010.
I am not going to argue that esports is dead, I don't think it is. I will argue that SC2 is dead, just looking at Twitch right now, there are only 1.2k viewers for the game as a whole. As I write this post, there are three times more people watching a single woman doing nothing but eat Jello than the entirety of people watching Starcraft 2.
How many people are watching American football on Twitch? Does that mean it's dead? You can't just pick one metric and decide that's the important one.
LoL might be technically older than SC2, but surely you would agree that SC2's heyday came a long time before LoL's, yes? My point isn't to compare them and say one is better than the other, but to say that SC2 is further along than LoL on the same curve. In other word's, LoL's future probably isn't "bigger than soccer" nor "totally dead", it's "chugging along with a small steady player base and a few hundred people playing it professionally, but not filling arenas", which is where SC2 has been for 5+ years.
edit: as for investment, I think Blizzard's "sponsorship" amounts to letting them use the logo. Certainly they're not paying for things like professional caster studios and advertising, like Riot does.
Not sure what you count as a heyday, but LoL was always more popular than SC2 as an eSport. LoL's first championship was in 2011 and debuted with 1.69 million viewers. The peak viewership for SC2 of all time was WCS 2018 with a peak viewership of 176k.
As for your statement about Blizzard, I think instead of guessing things further and just speculating on this subject, you should do some basic research. Your claims have all been wildly inaccurate. A simple Google search would inform you that Blizzard paid over 8 million dollars in sponsorship towards ESL Pro Tour, including 1.9 million dollars in prize money for 2020-2021 circuit and 2.4 million dollars for the 2021-2023 circuits.
The idea that Blizzard's sponsorship is nothing more than the rights for ESL to use a logo is so comically false I have to wonder if you're actually trying to discuss this in good faith or just trolling.
I admittedly did no research, I am just (accurately, I think) passing on the view of the community, which is that Blizzard has all but abandoned the game. How sure are you of those numbers, in particular how sure are you that they're not including the "value" of the logo, and/or money that actually came from sponsors? FWIW, at your urging I did do a belated search, and the first source I saw shows 1.9M as the entire prize pool for ESL 20-21, not Blizzard's portion. It can't all have come from Blizzard, unless they plaster "Intel" all over everything just to be nice.
Look, maybe I undersold it, maybe Blizzard does chip in a non-trivial amount of prize money. But would you agree with my point, which is that Riot spends way more than Blizzard on the trappings of esports, and also that Blizzard used to spend a lot more than they do today? Who do you think pays the LoL casters, and who do you think pays the SC2 casters? And would you also agree that one day LoL's popularity will wane to SC2-like levels, and that the most likely outcome is that it will more or less resemble SC2 in the sense that it is still a real esport with real tournaments and people playing it professionally, but would constitute a "failed esport" in the sense that this article is portraying esports as failing because they don't pack arenas like regular sports?
You'd be better to compare it to Dota2, although no doubt you're going to get more things wrong..
Dota2 have all levels of competition historically Valve did "just" the big tourmanent while letting various orgs that popped out of the scene to handle them, it feels way more organic vs LoL/Riot approach of having iron grip over everything competitive
That seems unnecessarily combative, considering how minor the thing we're discussing is.
But since I'm being called out, a) I meant regular LoL events get at least 200k views; I was emphasizing how high it is compared to SC2, so pointing out that the championships got even more is not disputing that, b) I don't know how much Blizzard spends on tourney money, nor Riot or Valve; but I do follow SC2 casually, and the consensus view among the people who would know about Blizzard certainly seems to be that it has dwindled, and c) I looked, the NFL's twitch channel has 62k subscribers and hasn't streamed in months, but I didn't say "Gotcha!" because when I see something that seems way wrong I like to default to assuming that either I misunderstood or they misspoke, and in either case it hardly seems relevant to this discussion.
>I don't know how much Blizzard spends on tourney money, nor Riot or Valve; but I do follow SC2 casually, and the consensus view among the people who would know about Blizzard certainly seems to be that it has dwindled,
Avoid getting information from biased sources. Gaming communities are notoriously bad when it comes to remaining objective about topics or presenting quantitative data that can be independently verified.
>I looked, the NFL's twitch channel has 62k subscribers and hasn't streamed in months, but I didn't say "Gotcha!"
That's because NFL games aren't streamed on the NFL Twitch account, they are streamed on the following account:
"Twitch received 10.8 million views for “Thursday Night Football,” for a total of 2.2 million hours viewing time, per the announcement."
Your false assertion about the NFL's Twitch channel is once again, comically false and goes to show that you simply do not understand how to properly research this topic, getting your information from biased sources and based on people's feelings instead of looking up authoritative sources that can be quantifiably verified.
I would advise that you refrain from taking that biased misinformation and spreading it further.
>in either case it hardly seems relevant to this discussion.
Then why did you bring it up? If it was never relevant, why did you decide to waste both of our time by making an issue out of it? This is what I mean about discussing things in good faith, you placed the burden on me to look up information that you sought, and then when I point it out and it turns out that the NFL is wildly popular on Twitch getting 10s of millions of views, you decide to do a 180 and declare that it's not relevant.
I brought up the NFL in response to you saying, "As I write this, there are [not many] people watching SC2 [on twitch]." I meant that casually checking Twitch can give a false impression of something's popularity. I wasn't suggesting the NFL was unpopular.
I also thought I made it pretty clear that my response to your comment about NFL viewership was that we were likely misunderstanding each other, as opposed to accusing you of being wrong. Please consider doing the same next time. This has been a very unpleasant conversation.
To the extent that you've made verifiable statements, involving actual concrete numbers or claims that can be sourced, they have all been incorrect so I'm not sure what there is to misunderstand.
It's very unpleasant for me too when someone just makes uninformed statements and then places the entire burden of researching and fact checking those statements on me, as if I'm the one who's supposed to verify your claims instead of you.
There's a sort of Internet principle known as Brandolini's Law [1] that states that one reason there is so much bullshit on the Internet is that it's significantly harder for someone to refute bullshit than it is for someone to spread bullshit. That's basically how I feel about this conversation, and I am tempted to continue discussing it not because I care specifically about you, but because esports is a subject I am personally involved in and care about and so I have a vested interest in putting in the effort to avoid others from being misinformed by the bullshit you seem to continue to spread unapologitically.
When I said LoL events get 200k views, do you understand that was correct? Because, in context, I meant, "at least that much and often more," not the opposite? If you had understood my comment, you wouldn't have had to look anything up - you would've known that LoL events do indeed get more than 200k views without checking. Right?
That requires considering the context and interpreting ambiguous comments charitably, as suggested in the HN Guidelines: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." When you misinterpreted my comment and triumphantly declared me wrong and accused me of bad faith, well, that's the opposite of that. Anyone can misunderstand something, it happens, but you need to be willing to say, "Either that guy's crazy or I'm missing something" and default to the latter rather than the former, like I did about the NFL thing.
Also it might be worth taking a step back and considering the topic, and whether such a combative tone is appropriate for it. And while you're at it, do you even disagree with the point of my comments, as opposed to the numbers? If so, I missed the part where you said so.
Imagine we were talking about the population of countries, and you made the assertion that "4 million people live in Canada" and then when I point out that "No, 40 million people live in Canada" you get into a hissy fit about how I misunderstood you, I don't understand context, I'm being combative and not charitable.
That's how silly you sound right now. You made up a number and pulled it out of nowhere in order to make your argument seem more legitimate than it was, and when I pointed out that you are wrong by an entire order of magnitude along with a source you could use to better inform yourself, instead of just acknowledging you were wrong, you decided to double down on your ignorance. Now instead of discussing the actual topic at hand, you want to derail the conversation into one about etiquette, politeness, HN Guidelines and how unpleasant this conversation is for you despite the fact that no one is forcing you into it.
You certainly don't need to publicly admit you're wrong, I don't care one way or another what you personally think... but you also shouldn't attempt so desperately to save face either.
I'm sorry dude, I definitely meant at least 200k, not no more than 200k. Source: I am the world's leading expert in what I meant. I honestly can't see how that can be misunderstood, either. You said SC2 gets 25k views, and I said, "The reason LoL gets 100-200k is..." and then went on to talk about how much better funded LoL is. How can you read that any other way than, "The reason LoL gets so many more viewers than SC2 is..." ?
> ...by an entire order of magnitude...
I chose such a low number, ironically, to avoid a conversation like this one. When you're suggesting that a number is high (as I was), it makes sense to choose a lower bound because it makes your claim stronger. Suppose I had said that LoL events get 5M - then you could've replied, "Nuh uh, here's an event that only got 1M views!" If I had said 1M, you could've said, "Well here's one that only got 500k!" I chose the lowest number I could that would still support my point (which, again was that LoL gets a lot more viewers than SC2), to be more confident no one could argue with it.
If you respond, could you please clarify what you think my argument was? You said I made up a number to make my argument more legitimate. What argument? What could I have been arguing that would've been strengthened by suggesting LoL's viewership is lower than it really is?
>I chose such a low number, ironically, to avoid a conversation like this one.
Don't invent numbers or facts to mislead people into thinking you know more about this topic than you do. If you don't want to discuss specific numbers, then don't state specific numbers, say that "More people do X than Y" without trying to get specific about how many people do either.
When you invent facts to justify your position, you mislead people who don't otherwise know any better and misrepresent yourself as being more of a knowledgeable authority on a subject than you really are. This is how misinformation gets spread.
Finally, when someone calls you out on incorrect facts, instead of playing the victim card and getting all defensive about it, own up to the mistake and use it as an opportunity to learn something new. As humiliating as it seems right now, I assure you not even one week from now you'll forget all about this bickering between us. The worst thing that can happen is you decide to continue believing incorrect facts all because you were too embarrassed to admit you were wrong about something that can be independently verified.
This is how we end up with people believing all kinds of wrong and harmful ideas, because they're just too proud or embarrassed to simply admit they got something wrong.
I've said all I care to about this topic, you can have the last word and all the best to in the future.
> If you don't want to discuss specific numbers, then don't state specific numbers, say that "More people do X than Y" without trying to get specific about how many people do either.
No. It was a fleeting thought in a casual conversation about video games, not a wikipedia entry. Read more charitably. Assume good faith. And maybe consider not arguing with someone unless you understand their point well enough to be confident you disagree with it.
> I've said all I care to about this topic, you can have the last word[s]
Home Story Cup still was 5-10+k viewers for the last time very time I looked. Half that for other larger tournaments. I think it still is surprisingly solid, myself I watch only very infrequently these days.
I'm reporting what I see in the channel counter. Since I'm still subscribed to some major SC2 channels I see the numbers even when I don't watch myself.
Tp me this is far from "dead", but I don't care about tens of thousands of viewers and lots of commercial activity. Just look at what this kind of "success" did for soccer. Maybe a bit more would be better, mostly for the Korean casts by the Tastosis duo, which unfortunately disappeared from Twitch and one has to go and watch it deliberately.
The other one I watch is Back2Warcraft (my only WCIII channel, so I name it directly instead of the game - but it's the biggest one anyway). 1k regularly, a few times that for the bigger events. Even the casters could not ignore the disaster that WC III Reforged was, and in quite a few ways still is.
Fair enough but at least we can quantify what people mean by solid.
I think for most people, viewership of 5-10k is absolutely abysmal, basically dead. You can get 5k people to watch almost anything, including people eating copious amounts of junk food.
GSL tournament streamed a few days ago and posted on youtube has ~100k views.
Personally, I sometimes catch some GSL broadcasts live or later on youtube, but SC2 outside of that context is basically dead to me. I haven't played ladder since the few months after the original release.
> Also for reference the last Superbowl was watched by 100M viewers.
Getting precise numbers for marquee sporting events is difficult, especially outside of the major US sports leagues, but the Super Bowl is on the shortlist for most-viewed single sporting event. Comparing only among US sports leagues, the Super Bowl has more viewers than the final game of the next several leagues combined--the next largest finals seems to have somewhere around 20M viewers.
By contrast, the smallest of the "big" US sports leagues can only manage around 5 million viewers for its final games.
At this point I don't think it's really "sports" event, I wouldn't be surprised if many people turn in just for it while not being interested for the rest of the year
How much sports game viewership is just TV's with the game on for background chatter, or people watching the Superbowl for the half-time show? I think viewer rewards is something to take into consideration (I certainly used to idle in OWL twitch streams for free skins) but I think it's a bit disingenuous to claim all of them are untrustworthy.
The difference is that people will be talking about football well after the game is over. There is SportsCenter, there are the blogs, the social media....all of these things matter to advertisers, perhaps even more than the base metric of how many were watching the live broadcast.
The post is about the economics of eSports. One of the big revenue sources is advertisers. The viewership numbers are inflated with low value incentived users so that the gaming companies can misrepresent their true audience size and get more advertising revenue
The problem with this take is that some of the advertisers in the esports scene like Intel and HyperX have been around for over a decade. I’d trust their marketing department /somewhat/ to also be taking engagement into account and not just viewer count.
It’s not until super recently that other brands have been going into esports advertising. Those newer brands, sure I can see them being lured by high viewer counts. But as an example, you can see the sponsors list in this page for the World Cyber Games 2005 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Cyber_Games_2005
> and a lot of people tune in even if they're not active players.
Do they? I played (completely casually) till 2013, and stopped watching after the 2014 championship. I didn’t understand it anymore. Too many new champions, meta changes that I didn’t keep up with. Patches that changed the behavior. I have a hard time seeing how inactive players keep being interested.
I grew up watching a lot of regular sports but also playing some games. Same deal, once I became busy and decided to stop keeping up with meta changes, champ changes, etc I stopped watching. But I had younger friends who had more time who kept hyping these events so I felt pressured to watch. Then their younger friends would hype up the events and watch. I also have some actual streamers in my friend group so they socially pressure me to watch as well. I've finally gotten old enough that most of my friends have largely stopped watching eSports for fun. Funny enough I still watch regular sports because the meta really doesn't change that much at all.
Based on your explanation it sounds like a good thing that investors and sponsors are pushed out as they are middle men and rent seekers. Allow those with skin in the game (womp womp) to profit.
100% agree. I started getting into Twitch during the beginning of the pandemic and got to know a lot of people who make money via online tournaments. The main channels I watch are Call of Duty and Super People. It's fascinating watching these streamers compete.
It might be interesting to note that during Starcraft Brood War's heyday as a major esport in Korea, it wasn't really touched by Blizzard. They weren't pushing out updates or expansions, or leveraging control of the IP e.g. involving themselves in managing the competitive scene.
Blizzard basically treated the game as "done" and the competitive scene turned into a major esport organically.
Correct, the release of Wings of Liberty marked the end (IMO) of the glory days of brood war. Largely because, as you mentioned, blizzard started to leverage their IP in an attempt to control the esports scene and transition people from BW to WoL.
To give them credit, they don’t pump out a new half finished StarCraft every Christmas, like others do. SC2 was in almost every aspect a better game, both for players and audiences.
Starcraft 1 in Korea was defacto managed by Kespa not blizzard, you can look them up, they are a Korean association, they both Kespa and blizz actually had strong spats and disagreements on it, Kespa would run sc1 not exactly like an sport, but somewhat similar to a "teenager's reality TV show" with the backdrop that the teens were playing video games competitively rather than doing wherever competitive reality TV shows do these days
Running esports like actual sports is not really how esports came to be, which is why I very much believe this to be the wrong way to go about it. These days tournament organizers care more of storylines of players battling each other than the actual sport, because that's what's relatable to viewers, humans are hardwired to like stories so now they try to leverage that more than it was done back on 2016 or so
Anyone can play football (even if maybe they can't use the name?) using FIFA rules and even incorporate their own. However, you cannot legally play starcraft 2 without blizzard's permission.
Soccer's history is very interesting, there used to be several competing international or local bodies fighting each other for control over soccer rules and therefore how people "ought" play soccer and therefore power
Blizzard vs Kespa is very much that situation happening again. Now days in soccer the field is the way it is exactly because of fifa's ever present hand
It's not a big problem given that SC2 is free right now. Unless you mean that ToS (not toss) is somehow a big barrier that keeps StarCraft from getting bigger.
Not sure the case for "older" sport like soccer/football,
But in US, MLB owns baseball. NFL owns American football. What I mean is, they literally own the mechanism of play for these two sports and allow the individual teams to compete in the leagues, which they must make many concessions to be a part of. aA "copy" of MLB can't pop up and play the same exact game, MLB owns every part of it.
IE; your "problem" with competitive gaming infrastructure is exactly how competitive sport is and has succeded. Apples to oranges of course tho
How many kids play baseball in the US and don't pay royalties to MLB? How many kids play football and don't pay royalties to NFL?
All these same kids -- when playing Starcraft have already in someway paid Blizzard money. You cannot play Starcraft legally without paying them money. You can play football in your backyard whenever you want.
> when playing Starcraft have already in someway paid Blizzard money. You cannot play Starcraft legally without paying them money.
Strictly speaking, you can: both StarCraft 1 and StarCraft 2 have free versions.
You do need to pay for the HD graphics for SC1 though, and for SC2 you'd have to pay for some campaigns or co-op commanders. And it's quite common for eSports to be free to play, with mostly just charging for cosmetics.
I get what you mean, though: even if there are free versions, it's still explicitly under the game developer's control.
I think the point is more that you can't play without blizzard's consent. You can't just download the game and host your own server to play with your friends. If blizzard changes the rules (makes a patch) you need to play with the new rules. You can't host a server if the starcraft 2 servers are down (not that uncommon nowadays). If blizzard decides to stop the servers (or if it just goes under), you can't play anymore.
That's a very different relationship from NFL or MLB.
You are generally correct, but this being HN I'm gonna do some informative nitpicks anyway:
* SC2 works as you say, but from what I remember SC1's Korean leagues were run without Blizzard's consent/management. Obviously with SC2 they then 'fixed the glitch'. Probably the same for SC Remastered as well.
* There's an interesting case where the old C&C games are being slowly reimplemented in full by open source coders, in which case I imagine EA can't do anything even if they wanted to: https://www.openra.net/
How about ice hockey? If you're on a team in a league in the US, you're probably paying USA Hockey something. (Not sure if USA Hockey is related to the NHL, but it seems related to the olympic hockey teams).
You don't have to pay the NBA. Hell, you don't even have to pay Wilson, the official basketball manufacturer of basketballs for the NBA. You could buy a Spalding, or any random brand.
The MLB doesn't "own" baseball nor does the NFL "own" football. Both of them are gestalt entities comprised of the member clubs.
The NFL are the 32 member clubs. MLB are the 30 member clubs. You can't start a football team and compete in the NFL because the 32 member teams don't want to play against you.
Any concessions a team makes "to the league" is really a concession made to the other teams. For the NFL, every year, the 32 owners get together and vote on various rule changes. Same with the MLB.
MLB is a little weird in that it does have a government allowed monopoly on professional baseball, but no other league does. Like, you could start a rival baseball league, but MLB could take whatever action it wanted to squash your league (assuming all those actions were legal otherwise). But nothing except very anti-competitive practices are stopping you from starting your own baseball league. Just, good luck airing your games, or finding fields that can seat more than 500 people, or being able to sell tickets online, or advertising. MLB can make agreements to exclude rival leagues from everything.
The NFL can't do that. Which is why you get the USFL, the XFL, the Spring League, the AAFL, the XFL again, Arena football, etc. It's just that no one is capable of putting up the money to compete with the NFL. You're either overpaying what any NFL club would pay for a player or fielding players no NFL club would take. And that's not to dismiss any of those guys in terms of athletic ability. Being in the top 1% of athletic ability is still pretty fucking good. But the NFL would be more like the top 0.1%.
But no one is doing that. Average salaries for all of these leagues were under the average salary for the NFL of the time. There just isn't the money because there's no base. And it's because the NFL has built its brand(s) over decades. The NFL makes money hand over fist because they've gotten there over the years. And they essentially got in when the competition was on their level. New competitors on the scene have a much harder path.
The biggest difference is that professional sports leagues are essentially team owned and team run. Collectively, but still.
A better analogy would be Wilson, Rawlings, Nike, Spalding, etc. Wilson make a football called "The Duke". It is made to the specifications set forth by the NFL. They also make the NBAs basketballs. Rawlings makes the baseballs for the MLB. Wilson/Rawlings gets exactly zero input into how the game is played. The people who agreed to play each other do that.
Whereas in eSports, the maker of the equipment (essentially) is the one dictating how to play the game. It would be like if the US Playing Card Company decided to start dictating how the World Series of Poker was run.
So what you have is that eSports is seen as advertising for the game rather than the product itself. That's what separates other leagues from eSports. Every other professional sports league treats the competition as the product. Mainly because they have to. Riot, Epic, Blizzard, Valve, WotC, etc. all see their "professional" leagues as advertising avenues for their "actual" product.
Just more to the point. The MLB has that weird monopoly in the US only, but there are no shortage of leagues outside of the US. The same can't be said about fortnite, starcraft, counter strike, etc. Those are world wide monopolies (it's their IP).
The USFL exists. It doesn’t really compete with the NFL but that’s more due to NFL teams having much more money with which to buy nearly all the top talent.
No. Formula 1 is owned by Liberty Media. FIA does not own any racing series. FIA is a governing body.
> The FIA is the governing body for world motor sport and the federation of the world’s leading motoring organisations. Founded in 1904, with headquarters in Paris, the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA) is a non-profit making association. It brings together 244 international motoring and sporting organisations from 146 countries on five continents. Its member clubs represent millions of motorists and their families.
Yes, the commercial rights, but who decides on the regulations of the sport? Who determines the penalizations when teams/drivers do not follow the rules?
But anyway my point was that F1 is not "open source" and it's quite successful.
I’m a huge F1 fan, but I’m also confident that the total annual viewer hours of F1 pales in comparison to any other major sport. F1 was a sport born by the rich for the rich. Unlike every? other mainstream sport, you cannot and will not “play F1” in schools.
There is no “amateur” F1. You can go to track days in different cars. You can go karting. The gulf between that and F1 is huge.
Unlike football, or basketball, or cricket, or rugby, or volleyball, or…
Yes but still, F1 is quite popular in some countries even considering how inaccessible it is. Globally it is much more popular than rugby, volleyball, cricket, etc.
My point is simply that the popularity of sports is really a cultural phenomenon.
Are you saying that MMA is a counter example? I'm not an MMA fan but I've seen far more Bellator matches than UFC ones despite working with a UFC team while they were on The Ultimate Fighter. That doesn't track with UFC owning the sport.
I share the same feeling as OP. Open source games can essentially live forever and others can pick up where the previous entity left off. For instance, starcraft 2 still has big mass of players, even though it's on life support (servers die sometimes, bugs go unfixed for years/forever, maps are not updated as frequently anymore, etc).
That's one aspect, the other aspect is that the opensource base can end up becoming the reference implementation of a genre. It can become a more sustainable environment, where people are trying to improve the game (and get paid through the organisations that run tournaments and such) rather than create a competitor.
That's all well and good, but you'd have to make the case that players' adoption would be significantly affected by whether the game is open source, and I can't think of any plausible causal mechanism, let alone evidence, of that.
Open sourcing the game opens the possibility of different groups changing the game in different ways and directions to optimize it for viewership and entertainment, the fact that it is open sourced would lead to different groups optimizing it in different ways and creating competition in these niches
Mentioned elsewhere is the case of Kespa vs Blizzard. Kespa would run starcraft Broodwar like a reality TV show where the entertainment of thhe viewer would come first to demerit of the competition (think added randomness into the game state), whereas Blizzard would strip the reality tv angle and randomness and focus near soly on the actual sport/competition angle rather than optimize viewer entertainment
Very few games are open sourced, specially AAA games. So, it won't be easy to find evidence. I think the point is more that it's more sustainable and it can keep up indefinitely.
Long term, I think esports are going to be fine. However, I think it's too early for them to really take root and embed themselves into any sort of mainstream or stable culture.
Physical sports have been around since forever and even if we're talking about some of the biggest games around at the moment we're talking about things like football which was invented in 1863. Plenty of time to shake out all the details such that everyone understands the game and some stability evolves.
Not only are videogames much newer, but the medium is up to the whims of large corporations with a history of making crazy decisions just to squeeze another dime out of the consumer.
Give it a couple of generations and I'm sure it'll earn it's place and become a staple of lazy sunday afternoons.
I think you have provided an argument against eSports: a popular sport is "timeless" and is played for generations.
Games are ephemeral. It's very rare for a game to be popular for more than 10 years. There might be popular franchises like Counterstrike, but they are still different games that will eventually be replaced by something better.
That means you can't build up the same history, traditions and attachment.
A year or two ago I was reading about a 17 year old SC player who was creating new strategies that were being effective.
tetris for sure is having the same thing.
And while I don't watch SC, I do watch tetris. It's a guildy nerd-pleasure of mine, if you will, but I can tell you the events aren't huge nor glamorous and it doesn't take away from the m at all.
But I think I would consider both to be timeless at this point.
League of Legends has been around for over a decade and is still in a really healthy state because it's continued to change and get better over time - every season brings pretty significant updates and new champions. The history, traditions and attachment are there - Faker, CLG vs TSM, etc.
Honestly think we'll still all be playing Minecraft, League of Legends and Fortnite in a decade or two.
This is the correct take I think. So much of sports is about tradition and routine. Esports needs the build up that base of "I watched this league every sunday with my dad growing up and he watched with his dad when he was growing up" etc. to be taken seriously. Will probably take another 40 or so years, and esports will continue to improve in the meantime too.
Importantly this requires long lasting games. Currently most people switch the game they watch every 5 or so years. Having a long lasting league that can create generational fandoms requires a game that can be enjoyed for a lifetime. MOBAs might satisfy that, remains to be seen, but that type of commitment is absolutely a pre-requisite.
On this note, I think people underestimate how intrinsically important things like our relationship to our physicality, and face-to-face contact are to us as human beings. Just in the last few decades have virtual worlds/networks/games been seriously present in our lives, and I feel like a wager has already been made that our lives will continue to become virtualized ad infinitum. I think we are starting to witness the human limits of this notion with corporations like Meta pushing virtual shit no one wants, and game companies trying to force competitive scenes unsuccessfully. Video games are rad, and watching them can be rad, but 'esports' feels like a forced experiment.
I was thinking along the same lines, but on the other hand, will specific video games be able to have as much staying power as physical sports?
The way I envision longevity playing into the sports industry is by having generational playing and viewership, with parents teaching their children about the game rules, playing with them, and explaining while watching a broadcast game. It's not the only way people get into (traditional) sports watching, but I believe it is the main underlying word-of-mouth mechanism.
However, with videogames being driven so much by graphical improvements, gameplay evolution, and other trends, will there ever be an eSport which stays in vogue for long enough?
Quick research on eSports:
Tetris is the oldest at 30 years (for the World Championship version), still a popular game with a competitive scene. Smash Bros Melee is 20 years old and very popular as an eSport, as well as StarCraft with a lesser but still decent viewership as I understand, though Quake and Street Fighter 2 from around that time are not drawing much viewership (nor casual popularity). 20 years ago was also the appearance of CounterStrike which is massively popular, but has had multiple titles, with only the latest version of 10 years ago still being played. All other major eSports are from that time period of 10 years ago or newer as far as I see.
Physical sports also have a purpose that esports cannot adequately address: the need to discharge physical energy and aggression. There is something primally satisfying in defeating someone in say basketball that cannot be matched in my experience by non-contact activities.
While that's true, there are also advantages to being non-physical:
* You can play way, way more of the game on a daily/weekly basis because you don't really have to worry about endurance/recovery in the same way.
* With a few clicks you can grab opponents and teammates of comparable skill near-instantly, at any time, whereas finding a game for a given sport is much more beholden to schedules and other logistical difficulties.
I suspect eSports works better for the long tail because of that second point: much harder to develop a critical mass when people have to be local. If you think about how many different sports vs competitive video games you could find a match for with modest effort in the coming week, video games would probably win by a least an order of magnitude, maybe two orders.
My main argument against esports is somewhat similar, though in a different direction. It's odd to me to watch something anyone can do, with minimal investment. Why watch when you could just play?
With baseball, football, or basketball, I'd have to not only find a field or court and a bunch of willing participants, but also be in good enough shape to run a bit.
Watching Esports is essentially watching someone sit at a computer - something anyone can easily do. I don't mean to discount whatever skill is involved in being a good player, only talking about barriers to entry.
The barrier to entry for football is very low. Someone brings a ball, put down a couple of markers for each goal, and there you are; kids play street games all the time. Being out of shape might stop you playing well, but it doesn't stop you playing.
Even owning a gaming PC at all is a much higher barrier (a lot of people watching esports will be doing so on phones).
Funnily enough esports also somewhat exist in mobile phones. Take a look at Free Fire [0], here in Brazil (3rd world country) It's pretty popular and has brought some people from poverty to a comfortable living.
Also I still believe after the initial investment for a PC or game console then playing competitively just has too low of a barrier compared to normal sports. Remember to play a real sport you need friends, or at least people who accept you, there needs to not be raining (or for there to be an indoor space), everyone needs to be available. Since in videogames you can do matchmaking with low latency with a whole continent that means finding VERY competitive matches is easy, while in real life the skills of each players varies a lot, making the games played day-to-day much more casual. The difference between a casual football game and a FIFA WC game is insane, the difference between a well-played high rank match in CS:GO and the ones played in torunaments is minimal in comparison, specially if using something like Faceit to matchmake.
But playing football or basketball is that easy. I have the same objection about football, so many people love watching it, but relatively few of them play. I never understood why, if you love something, surely it is a lot more rewarding to play it yourself. Local kids in my area play basketball almost every evening, I regularly see them coming from work. How is that different from computer games?
Are we talking about American football or association football/soccer? With American football, you can play it casually, but the rule changes you have to make in order for people not to get clobbered turn it into a very different game from what you see in a pro or college setting. (The level of working out aggression is different too.)
Absolutely - that was one of the first things that came to my mind. Though personally, I find skilled chess players much more talented than skilled video game players.
There -is- a market for it, obviously, but it's not and probably will never be a considerable fraction of the market compared to more 'out of reach' sports.
Given that there are pro chess players who are also pro competitive gamers, I doubt the gap is nearly as big as you are imagining. The skill ceiling for some video games is extremely high. I would in fact be unsurprised if it was possible to objectively compare difficulty and come to the conclusion that there are competitive video games which are significantly harder than top-level chess. I realize this sounds ridiculous, but the breadth of competitive gaming is very large, and many video games have extremely huge meta games, come down to millisecond-level reaction time differences, and so forth. There's even a physical aspect, as a lot of video games can put immense physical stress on specific muscles. I think most people think of the bigger spectator games, like Fortnite or MOBAs and the like, but those games are not necessarily the upper echelon of eSports; plenty of niche games make for very interesting competition. Like NES Tetris with CTWC even! NES Tetris is mostly about solo execution, but there are other puzzle games, such as Puyo Puyo, which is maddeningly difficult to become even casually decent at, and has a huge sprawling metagame in versus matches. Then there's fighting games. So many fighting games. The interactions between matchups in fighting games have made for such interesting and divergent strategies that games literally nearing 30 years old are still having their metagame evolve through innovations in play style, honing in execution, or even just very carefully studying game mechanics.
(Note: I am not suggesting there are necessarily CURRENTLY video game competitions where the top competitors are as "skilled" as top chess players, but chess play has had much longer to evolve than any video game. That said: due to the internet, I do think skills of average players has gone up much more rapidly than historically, and I am just suggesting there's likely games with similar or perhaps higher ceilings, with top competitors in a similar wheelhouse. This especially since video games can take advantage of more kinds of skills due to the technology.)
It's easy to write off pro gaming, but in my opinion, it's full of surprises. Honestly, I think you can even forget about only competitive gaming and alone; a surprising number of people tune in just to watch people "speedrun" video games solo. The art of speedruns or speed demos is probably one of the most fascinating subcultures, and the amount of work poured into the "perfect" run is completely unfathomable. Maybe even crazier to me that people just do it for the love of the sport.
I think the "spectator sport" potential of video games mostly has to do with how fun it is to watch rather than how high level the competition is. The latter can help, especially if you have competitors with running storylines, but let's face it: a huge part of it is the game itself (some games are very amusing to watch, like say, Rocket League) and the audience's connection to it.
I don't really think it's hit the ceiling. In fact, I agree with the notion that it is limited in large part due to the tensions with business models. You can see this very clearly with Nintendo, a company notoriously bad at community outreach and sparring with their own playerbase. Even if their games were not the best competitive gaming experiences ever, it feels like they often can't reach their potential in large part due to legal issues, and that is probably not too uncommon. Valve and Epic Games seem to be a lot better about supporting their respective communities, but it still feels like by and large, there is a growing tension in eSports and it has little to do with the games themselves.
Note to all financiers drunk off zero-interest capital: not every new thing has to be jammed into 'unicorn' clothing. Some things can just exist as cottage industries.
I first saw a televised StarCraft competition in South Korea in 2001. That still exists AFAIK. Maybe it can't expand too far beyond that, but at the same time, maybe it shouldn't?
Trying to manufacture celebrity gloss and betting markets around eSports like it's professional field sports is just sad. How many actual fans want to see the industry go that way?
As someone who played a lot of Starcraft back during SC1/SC2 Wings of Liberty days, Starcraft was a game I loved watching other people play - mostly due to fog of war knowledge asymmetry in the audience.
If I was someone who didn't play video games, I think Rocket League would be the title I would be interested in watching others play.
I just can't fathom any non-gamer ever finding Call of Duty, League of Legends, DOTA, Overwatch, Valorant, etc. interesting enough to watch. I played many of those same games at some point and even I don't find them interesting to watch. First person shooters in particular seem so confining in terms of spectating.
So I stopped gaming soon after the original Xbox came out. Rocket League is about the only game I understand now. I have the new Xbox now and started playing it and find it extremely difficult. I improved a lot with some practice and even studied some other players. Until then, the whole concept of Twitch didn’t really make sense to me. Anyways the point I wanted to make is Rocket League has some mass appeal as a game to watch tournaments. However, it kind of falls a part because of how the pros play. It just looks like the game is glitching out. A layperson is just watching some weird physics without the context of how difficult some of those moves are to perform.
I think for esports to be as huge as a traditional athletic sport, you need mass appeal. Most sport fans don’t play those sports they watch. But they can appreciate the difficulty and it’s not easy to appreciate the difficulty of a video game you’ve never played.
Agreed. Starcraft in particular is fun to watch because you can see some longer term strategies at work.
Compare to CSGO or COD. I have no idea what's going on, only that one side has better mechanics than the other. I know these games have strategies / formations as well. But they're a lot less apparent to me, and engagements are so quick I can't grok what's happening.
I play SC2 and watch from time to time. I don't see how you can claim there are longer term strategies at work when the average game lasts about 6 minutes, and the first minute or two of the game are basically "filler". I think one reason SC2 is kind of boring to watch is because you get maybe 1-2 minutes of actually interesting game play, and the rest of the 4-5 minutes is just repetitive.
Each race has 8-10 viable “standard” openings and 2-3 “cheese” openings… sure, if you just watch one player who leans heavily on “skytoss” or “1-1-1 Terran” it gets repetitive, but also watching how each player responds to the increasing info about their opponents build from scouting is also interesting.
You make it seem like 8-10 openings is diverse. 8-10 openings gets very stale and repetitive for a game that only lasts about 6-8 minutes with only 1-2 minutes of actual engagement (and 4-6 minutes of setup).
Note that the statistics say 11 minutes, but that's 11 in-game minutes and since tournament games are played on "Fastest" mode with a 1.4 multiplier that translates to roughly 8 minutes.
If you want to see how actual tournament games are played, here is the most recent GSL playlist, which is considered the premier SC2 tournament:
Feel free to breeze through any random game of your choice, most finish within 8 minutes, a lot of them finish within 6 minutes, and on rare occasion you get games that go 15 minutes or longer.
I decided to take the very first 12 games of the playlist and averaged them out, it comes out to 9 minutes and 23 seconds. I don't have a way to automate this and don't have another source for how long modern games take, but sure, for the sake of argument we can say a game is closer to 10 minutes instead of 8 minutes. It doesn't really change anything.
- professional SC2 games are definitely longer than 6 minutes.
- not all strategy is action oriented, scouting early to discover your opponents strategy is a thing, for example
- in professional SC2 it's also about the meta-game. It's a game of bluffs and predictions. If a strategy doesn't work out both opponents have to decide if they're going to change or not in the next game in the series. Sometimes your strategy failed because the other player used the counter-strategy. But if they keep the same strategy and you use THEIR counter-strategy, you'll win the next one.
That last point is much larger than you might expect. It's a bit like poker.
The only evidence I can verify online, based on replay packs of DreamHack I managed to download, this link below [1], and other quantifiable sources such as discussions on the Team Liquid forums suggests that professional games are shorter than 12 minutes and about 7-9 minutes. But even for the sake of argument if you want to go with 12 minutes... 10 openers per race is incredibly small for a 12 minute game and only reinforces the point that for the average viewer, SC2 is quite repetitive.
Compare that to DOTA or LoL where the average match at the professional level is on the order of 30-45 minutes and the level of diversity in both of those games is astronomical.
Dota2 (really most PvP games) have same information asymmetry tho ?
It even has a bit of metagaming like SC2, there you pick the opening build and in Dota your team picks/bans heroes and decides where they go on a map in early game.
As someone has followed the industry for quite some time, I would say that the hype isn't really dying down, but rather that teams are finally having to address the elephant in the room: Pro player compensation is completely out of whack with regards to where franchising revenue/merch sales are. Salaries need to come down maybe 50% in the West for the numbers to make sense.
The flip side is that compensation is not terribly attractive to the players.
I’ve heard that players are dropping out at young ages not because they can’t play anymore but because it is not a good living.
I had a LoL habit for a while. I was definitely a fan of Yiliang Peng but spent a lot more time playing LoL than I did watching the pros. I don’t think I generated much if any revenue for his team. There is not a big money train like there is for the NFL.
I only follow pubg esports, but I'm just not seeing how a pro player in an expensive country can afford to make a living. The competition is brutal, the hours to be at the top are very high, and unless you're a top streamer the income is very low.
Now this can all be hand waved away with "they're just playing a video game, they're lucky" but I think that misses the point. To be a pro at one game, you have to dedicate everything to that game. Revenue sharing has to go up for longevity of esports.
> and unless you're a top streamer the income is very low.
For rocket league, the content creation scene is much bigger than the pro scene. As a developer once said, is very GIFable. Combined with the flexibility of the game itself, you see nearly endless possibilities for content creation. More than half of the top content creators for this game are "casual" players[1]. Casual is quoted because they're still grand champion level but nowhere near the pro level. There are also pros turned content creators that are familiar with unreal engine and create really cool stuff (eg lethamyr). On the other end of the spectrum is sunless khan who creates video essays about rocket league[2]
Rocket League is very watchable by people unfamiliar with it too. It's just Pong in 3D. It's 3v3, and you can manipulate the paddle in very creative ways, but it's basically just as simple.
I was pretty much done with gaming until I found Rocket League. It's one-of-a-kind in so many ways, I'm not sure it'll ever be outdone. If it can't survive an industry crash, I don't think any eSport game will.
Aren't they getting a salary for those hours of practice? That's what I mean with pro, as in professional, as in having gaming as their profession.
Honestly, $17.7k for _18th_ place, in PUBG of all games, seems very high to me as a prize. But I am sure they split a lot of that with their organization, coaches and whatever they have, and taxes on top of that.
Even so, people work for minimum wage so it all just, depends.
A lot of the teams aren't organizations, and the ones who are can sometimes get pretty low salaries, from what I understand. With how much movement there is in the leaderboard year to year, the team who came in first in 2020 placed last in 2021.
For how many hours of time played, it's well below minimum wage. And of course it is different, playing a game has plenty of benefits, I'm just thinking about longevity of esports as a whole.
I don't believe that's per person, that's total for the team. So <18k for 4 players and a coach. The tournament went for 20 days, so missing out on any income you could generate from another job during that time, excluding the coach that's 4.5k per tax, on the largest money making opportunity all year.
I don't know anything about e-sports, but I know something about professional sports - and the prize money at the top end is small compared with the endorsements. Tiger Woods only made 10% of his fortune in prize money, for example.
And yet he made $120,895,206 in tournament winnings. It just emphasizes both that the orders of magnitude is nowhere the same in the direct compensation side, and a universe of difference on the sponsorship side.
The reality is that top players can make more from streaming/content than playing. To take your Doublelift example he has been full time streaming for 2 years but is coming back to LCS this year. He's taking a massive paycut by playing LCS vs. full time streaming/content.
These inflated pro salaries are good for the lower tier players who don't have the entertainer personality
Is it simply a shot at women? As the only way women can make money that way is if there is an audience of men willing to watch and spend money on them.
Yeah you see it in the NBA/NFL with a lot of players building their personal brand via Youtube/TikTok/Podcast/etc. It will be interesting to see how this plays out over the next decade. Will businesses keep dumping money into influencer advertising, or will it die down and go back to just the mega stars getting deals.
I know right now even people with 10-20k followers on a platform can still get brand deals because it is a new form of targeting. I think the hard thing to solve for is how do you measure the ROI besides use code "XYZ" for 20% off your first month or whatever.
In most sports leagues the vast majority of player income is salary from their team. There is something approaching a power law around endorsement money, even in the NBA it’s really only the top 10 earners who make more than 20-30% on their non-basketball revenue streams.
Not really. Endorsements and Advertising are a good cut of the money but most of the big money in streaming is coming directly from fans, whether through premium subscriptions or donations.
The flip side is that the earning potential of the top players are incredibly lopsided, whether that be the top competing players in terms of winnings, or those most able to be a personality in terms of streaming. It's not clear the teams themselves contribute much to either of those areas - training is most often self directed or with play groups that may not align with teams, and it's not like e.g. soccer where there's big physical infrastructure like stadiums that clearly the players need an organisation to provide. Instead the venues for in-person events are provided by the tournaments, not the teams, and pretty much everything else the players need to earn money is online.
I believe Faker was the first million dollar salary in eSports on 2017, IIRC LoL moved to a franchising system for it's leagues, which brought in a ton of 'naive' capital, the combination caused a gigantic inflation in NA player salaries and a significant one in EU.
This was recognised as a bubble by veterans in the industry and talked about on various talkshows at the time.
I completely agree with your point about salaries and really just want to add that this has been expected for years. ESports is still growing, it's just the rate will seem more sane to those in the know.
That’s essentially the thesis of the article, yes. Hype here refers not to the players or the fans but rather to the business side. Investors are looking for returns and not finding them.
There is way less team loyalty.
Teams are not geographical, so no physical attachment.
Teams change players too much for me to become a fan and buy their merch.
Some teams are geographical. For example: Overwatch league.
> There is way less team loyalty.
My only real experience is with Dota. There is a lot of nationalist sentiment in tournaments, but you're right - most people follow players, not teams.
In Dota, in particular, Valve has tried to make changes to encourage team stability, but the fundamental problem is that pay is so heavily stacked towards winning a few top tier tournaments per year, that people become very mercenary.
I think the big challenge is that it really doesn't cost very much money to run an esports tournament. There is no need for an expensive stadium (except to sell tickets to fans). Basically anyone can create the new premiere tournament by just paying a bit of money to organize the thing and have a prize pool bigger than the current biggest prize pool.
This really cuts into the power that a franchise model could potentially have - they'd have much less power to control the sport in the way that the NBA controls basketball or the NFL controls football.
> Some teams are geographical. For example: Overwatch league.
OWL never made it to a full home-and-away season; they planned one in 2020 but never executed it. Are there any esports leagues that play in home-city venues?
Dota Esports started as kind of region based there was a big rivalry between Chinese and Western teams it was always hype when one of the top Chinese teams like IG, LGD or DK etc would get invited to a Western tournament and vice versa the metagames across the region were different with each region prioritizing a different play style.
I'm pretty sure The qualifiers for TI (largest Dota tournament) are still region based. But nowadays the scenes have become much more homogenized. For a while the winners of TI would flip back and fourth (West would win one year then China and so fourth) it was a really good story to follow.
I think it started to change after TI 4 you began to get "Super Teams" which would just stack the best players on a single team, you tended to get very volatile rosters and team stability was basically non existent. Teams would form for one tournament then break up almost immediately afterwards. As a result you tended to follow players you liked rather than the teams.
Similarly, my only real experience following is Dota - I blame my teenage years in War3 mods with that fascination.
Aside from the payout & incentive structure for players, the game is very much dependent on aligning player skillsets, heroes in the meta, and player attitudes/communication styles -- So much so, that some teams thrive some years, and completely disintegrate the next.
Plenty of examples of teams feeling they're being brought down by 'those one/two players', while they keep the "streaming stars" for the player fan base.
> In Dota, in particular, Valve has tried to make changes to encourage team stability, but the fundamental problem is that pay is so heavily stacked towards winning a few top tier tournaments per year, that people become very mercenary.
And ironically, Valve is the organization that created this problem.
Agreed, it seems odd to be a fan of a team when they aren't "your" team, as in you can go and actually see them on a regular basis.
Racing and golf are examples of successful sports that don't have geographic ties, and they're both mostly individual-driven. Racing has teams, but nobody really cares about them.
Maybe we will see national eSports teams if the fan base blows up over the years. But as for the existing teams, they're more like soccer clubs, and shouldn't be restricted by region, it allows money to be invested to bring in the best players, which is a good incentive for players to shine.
Regional isn't so much about the players. But that they play every week or every other weak in same stadium with same core group of fans easily being present. And on smaller clubs at least in Europe there is clear pipeline for juniors to the main team players. Thus bulk of the players can be locals.
True but remember most of these teams have existed for a long time before it became possible for fans to support or follow teams abroad via TV and internet. So teams in smaller markets (eg Scotland, Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden) have had the chance to build a local support base without necessarily “competing” for their loyalty with those in bigger markets (eg England, Germany, Spain, Italy).
Note that I’ve put “competing” in quotes because I’m talking about fanbases and therefore money to build and develop their teams. Interestingly in the past when they did compete on the field things were much more equal. Before the explosion of TV money thumbed the scales in favour of the bigger players, it wasn’t such a huge shock for, say[0], Dundee United to beat Barcelona or IFK Gothenburg to beat Internazionale that it would today.
[0] in fact both of these results happened, in the semifinals of the 1986/87 European Cup
I cannot speak for other eSports, but I follow Rocket League and it has this rules which gives players the power over the clubs. If two players out of three decide to stick together and either move to another team or form a new Org, they can take their ranking and qualifications with them. So at least for this specific esport it's hard to build loyalty around an Org and it's formed around the players instead.
I really feel like Esports should have been built up slowly around more first principles. Keep the overhead as low as possible in the beginning. You're just going to be losing money in the beginning so why not minimize that cost. Pay the players a liveable wage, and cover their expenses to travel to the venues. As they become more popular do paid meet and greets with fans. Raffles for merch as well as other video game paraphenalia (peripherals, consoles, games, computers etc), and start acquiring sponsors. Have a promotional Amazon link. Make YouTube videos documenting the process, and get the adsense.
The two main goals would be consistent placing at tournaments and breaking even, then becoming cash flow positive. Slowly increase player salaries in line with the profits and larger sponsor ships.
But that isn't what happened. People started creating the teams and spending millions on player salaries. This put immense pressure from the beginning to getting cash flow positive, placing first in every tournament etc. And now we are seeing the ramifications of this.
Don't get me wrong there were other external factors as well. I wouldn't try to create an esports team around any Nintendo Ip for example given their track record. And the collapse of OWL due Blizzard management doesn't help.
Esports look exactly like the venture capital industries that propped them up. Lighting money on fire for the sake of scale was a natural play for them, and arguably the only way they got those ad/sponsor dollars in the first place. It's not surprising that they reflect the environment they grew up in.
But you are correct that now the question becomes who can create a sustainable model in the ashes of what came before.
> I really feel like Esports should have been built up slowly around more first principles. Keep the overhead as low as possible in the beginning. You're just going to be losing money in the beginning so why not minimize that cost.
that was also tried. on the surface, it looks like eSports has come out of nowhere, but people have been trying to make the economics work out for decades now. the earlier attempts looked a lot more like the scrappy model you are describing.
disclaimer: this is a counterstrike-centric history bc that's what I was interested in at the time. I understand the starcraft (for example) pro scene was a bit more stable.
CPL was started in 1997, and distributed a mere $3mm in prize money between then and its 2008 demise. then there was CGS, which weirdly tried to replicate the American football TV experience. that league was notable at the time for actually paying players a salary (though only about $30k iirc). then things were mostly dormant (in terms of capital investment) until twitch took off and the game companies themselves took a more active interest in the scene, leading to the massive prize pools and tournaments you see today.
maybe we just haven't hit the right moment for esports to be economically viable, but to me it seems like something is fundamentally broken with the idea. it's telling that top twitch streamers make more money than the world's best competitive players of that game. imagine a world where ray lewis in his prime could make more money live streaming random pickup games and reading donation messages out loud. the NFL could not exist in that world.
I think the problem with your approach is competition. If you did as you described, a competitor would see the opportunity and start their own league, offering bigger salaries to get the best players. So anyone seriously trying to corner the market kind of has to go in with the big bucks and hope that eventually the popularity catches up.
I think you need to compare the fate of newer e-sports endeavours like heroes of the storm which were very heavily inflated by blizzard support, and those that evolved a bit more from grassroots like starcraft or dota to see what's sustainable. The starcraft scene has weathered its decline as blizzard lost interest and while it's shrank to a more manageable size, is still clearly capable of continuing without blizzard doing more than not shutting down the game servers (the SC1 scene, not even requiring that much). While heroes of the storm collapsed without Blizzard, as will overwatch.
This is a minor take from someone who used to play CoD at a very high level (cash tournaments, wager matches, GB/CMG/UMG front page teams). At least from the perspective of games like Call of Duty and Overwatch, I think at least some chunk of it is that the quality of games is rapidly decreasing and it's killing off the fanbase. I remember back when it seemed like everyone I knew was following the CoD pro scene, watching the streams, tournaments, championships, etc. Nowadays I don't know a single person who still engages with that content and the responses I get from them are that they don't enjoy watching the games anymore. The current CoD (MW2 remastered), there are pro players making commentary and tweeting about how much they hate the games design. The person who is probably the single best known pro CoD player Scump is retiring now and he's said in side comments that it definitely has to do with how bad the game is designed. People seem to be losing confidence in these companies that make the games with the biggest esports scenes. Overwatch 2 now has also received quite a bit of negative press. There's probably a good chunk of anecdotal experiences inside my view but this is my take on things.
I think people are just split up over more games now. Every few years you get a LoL, a PUBG or a Minecraft where it seems like the whole world is playing at once. Then a good chunk of people move on, and there's not always a big thing to move onto. But some people remain. And I think people generally prefer the eSports of the games they know how to play.
Right now off the top of my head there's eSports for Overwatch, CSGO, dota 2, lol, apex, Fortnite, hearthstone, rocket league, pubg, valorant, rocket league, sim racing and countless fighting games.
And those are all still active and updated with new content coming out (except overwatch rip). Sure the market got bigger but it feels like back in 00s and early 10s a games life was shorter and more people tended to play the same thing.
If that was true, you’d see people playing old games. And sometimes you do. Age of Empires 2 is more popular than Age of Empires 4.
Considering the majority of people are still playing new games, that would suggest the newer games are better. You maybe getting old with your friends and no longer have interest in watching esports anymore.
> Considering the majority of people are still playing new games, that would suggest the newer games are better.
Following that logic, mobile games must be much better than non-mobile ones. Surely soon we'll start seeing competitive Candy Crush being played with millions of viewers
It seems like fewer games are being successful at becoming competitive esports. Many of the ones people play had their origins in mods: Counterstrike, Dota, various battle royal mods, and so forth.
Companies now often don't want mods, as they interfere with selling cosmetics, loot boxes, and so on.
Much worse, companies don't want to let you play their game without being under their direct supervision. Imagine if you weren't allowed to play soccer outside of a stadium built and staffed by FIFA. How popular would it be?
I don't follow esports much except for Age of Empires 2 (Definitive Edition). It is a comparatively small community, but nonetheless very impressive for a 20+ year old game. I have been surprised by the increasing number of top-level tournaments (with good prize money) that are being organized. Very excited for the future of this game.
I've been watching pro StarCraft Broodwar since 2005. 2 decades soon! If they had released new mechanics since then they would have killed the community. Modern esports lack the locked in balance that leads to nuanced play and decades of viewership, save for games like Cs and starcraft bw that avoid chasing the 'next gen' marketing ploy. Blizzard did it's part to try to kill scbw esports but they failed
I can't speak for DotA, but isn't LoL's business model to continuously add new characters? This constant change never lets the true balance of the game be discovered the way it is with SC:BW. Players constantly need to adapt to new characters and modified game elements. It's not necessarily bad, but it's very different than leaving a game alone for a long time. For example, chess never got any patches, but new techniques and strategies developed for ages.
I agree that modern esports fail in many aspects e.g. stability, simplicity, readability, etc., though worth keeping in mind that "chess" was not a standardized/codified game for the first thousand or so years of its existence, and many of its newer developments (e.g. the pawn's two-space move, castling, en passant) could be viewed as balance patches.
For anyone who isn't familiar with Dota's history, the above poster is effectively lying (yes, lying).
Starcraft and Warcraft 3 had what they called "custom maps" that people would play competitively online, with completely different styles of gameplay than the original game.
There were probably thousands of custom maps, but over time "genres" of map became more popular than others.
Dota is one such map, but it became so popular that in 2013 Valve released Dota2. Valve got involved because a few of their employees were fans of the original Dota mod and they wanted to build a modern sequel.
Dota, in terms of esports (aka Dota 2), is less than 10 years old.
Dota as a genre can draw it's LINEAGE back to the original mod from 2003, but that's about it.
The first International was held in 2011, over 11 years ago. Invites to participate went out to the existing highly ranked dota esports teams - DotA was already established as an esports game at this time, which is why they were able to source teams from around the world to play.
In regards to your claim of lineage, in the same way that chess does not change between a wooden board and when you upgrade to one carved in marble, I'm curious as to why you see these as two separate games? Dota 2 was purely an engine upgrade rewrite of the original mod, without any gameplay mechanics changes. Dota 2 and Dota 1 maintained parity with each other until Dota 1 was deprecated in December of 2016: https://dota2.fandom.com/wiki/Version_7.00
I said effectively lying, everything you're saying is technically true.
But it would be akin to claiming modern day esports started in the late 1950's because Tennis for Two was released and is a competitive game.
No, modern day esports can trace it's _lineage_ back to the late 1950's.
It'd be akin to claiming Counter-Strike has been an esport since the early 2000's because people would get together and compete in very small tournaments. CS:Go was the first version to be explicitly made for competition and it was released in 2011.
I played LoL for 10 seasons, watching last worlds there was plenty of champions and mechanics and changes that just made me unable to appreciate nuances and ultimately enjoy lots of stuff.
You can't have stable viewership for long with an ever evolving and changing game.
>" There is one huge problem behind esports: their viewers are always going to be limited by the actual game's userbase."
Is this true? I know many people who watch e-sports of games they don't play, and professional outdoor sports are often watched by people who rarely if ever play the game (football is a good example of this).
I think the long-standing MOBAs such as League and Dota have a unique advantage in this area.
Many people grow frustrated with playing the game themselves, with most games being ruined by uncooperative crybabies or just straight trolls. Losing at 10 minutes but being held hostage in the game regardless is incredibly frustrating.
You don't have these issues while watching someone else play, or watching a tournament. So its become quite common to continue watching these games even if you barely ever play them yourself.
As one of those players, I stopped when I finally realized ranked in league wasn't actually competitive because Riot had no interest in making it competitive.
And because I no longer play I have, over time, completely lost interest in watching it. Part of that is that the OG players I used to watch have pretty much all retired save a select few.
I'm sure there are people that continue watching it long-term after they quit playing, but I doubt it's a hugely large percentage. The only exception is going to be championship games, where I'll still sometimes tune in (especially worlds) until NA falls out and then I don't even bother watching the actual final game.
Or at least until competitive games become as enjoyable to watch as, say, a soccer game. It's true that most competitive games just look like a mess if you haven't played them. I guess game devs should start optimizing animations, camera and effects for viewers, rather than just for players, perhaps with a "viewer" mode that is different from the player mode.
> I guess game devs should start optimizing animations, camera and effects for viewers, rather than just for players, perhaps with a "viewer" mode that is different from the player mode.
They've put a lot of work into this for league of legends.
> Making matters worse, viewership for League of Legends’ Championship Series, one of the most mainstream leagues in esports, is at a five-year low, according to data aggregated by Esports Charts. As viewership declined, broadcast and streaming deals became less lucrative or less common for US and European esports leagues.
I don't know what the viewership numbers are, but as someone who watches a lot of LoL across all the major leagues (LCS in North America, LEC in Europe, LCK in Korea, LPL in China), I wouldn't be surprised if LCS viewership falls even while others do well. The standard of play in LCS is far worse than the other three regions, and there are no redeeming features either (LEC is worse than LCK/LPL but they do a lot of fun things with their production that makes it entertaining to watch overall).
> Esports are here to stay but the dreams of any videogame being able to catch and retain viewers for decades is just never going to be there.
It's true that the userbase is often the choke point, but don't discount the longevity of these games. The three largest games by tournament size (League, CS, Dota) are on average 18 years old at this point. Both CS and Dota are past the 2 decade point, and CS is still growing: https://steamcharts.com/app/730#All
And who of the hundreds of thousands that watched the CPL or ESWC CS competition on hltv in 2002 is still following csgo esports without playing the game?
That's what I mean by retaining viewers for a long time.
This is why websites like Twitch do well, they're game agnostic which will be the same for esports, the same way that the success of a movie is defined through its viewers.
Esports will grow, but not because of one game, but because of many games coming and going in popularity over time.
The only game I really see viable as a true nationally broadcast e-sport is counter-strike. Dead simple concept, intuitive mechanics even to laypeople, and the meta game can be explained in 10 minutes.
Maybe besides COD, everything else is too complex and requires to much prerequisite knowledge to really get into. I could probably get my dad to watch counter-strike. He would probably wouldn't go for valorent. Almost certainly not something like overwatch. And definitely would never watch something like league or dota.
Sure, there is money in e-sports catering to the communities that form around the games, but I think for most games they'll never reach outside their player community.
The thing about computer games that I think will put off most people is that they exist in a custom reality.
In regular sports people can rely on their intuition to know what can and can't happen, to some degree. No football player is going to start flashing yellow while taking off down the field. A lot of video games are packed to the brim with custom physics and mechanics. No solid intuition, you really just have to learn them.
CS benefits from more or less functioning exactly how even a 75 year old lady would expect it to. A sniper is a sniper. A pistol a pistol. An assault rifle is an assault rifle. Bullets kill quick, and bombs go boom.
I think the biggest argument against the idea of CS becoming a household sport like football is the fact that, today, nobody bothers to watch competitive paintball. The fact that it's a simulation means it can do things you can't do in real life, sure, but it also means that it's harder to care about what's actually happening. In a real sport, you watch the players. In an esport, you watch avatars. People don't empathize with avatars nearly as much as they do with flesh-and-blood humans, at least not today.
"Do you feel like this applies to American Football?"
Honestly, yes. Protestations that it's too difficult to understand seems to me to stem from people who literally want the game explained in three seconds or less.
The core is simple. Team have ball. Team want move ball that way for points. Other team want stop them. Work out the legal ways for them to score points and move ball around as you go. The super detailed lacunae of what penalties are for what exist in all sports, it just isn't generally noticed. The FIFA rules for soccer run 144 pages: https://www.amazon.com/Official-Rules-Soccer-U-S-Federation/... Not a huge book, probably not huge pages, but a great deal more detailed than you'd try to "explain" to someone just learning what soccer is.
Most of the meta around passing plays versus running plays can be explained easily.
It really isn't that complicated.
To the extent that it is, all the sports are. At the top end everything gets complicated, hence, Moneyball and that sort of thing. Basketball is a simple sport of putting the ball in the hoop while dribbling it, but at the top end you start talking about matchups between this guy and that guy and how being 3% better at three-point shots affects this team's matchups against that team... but that's not something you have to care about to watch it, any more than you have to care about what the name of every position is in every sport initially.
The difference lies in the fact that a really popular spectator sport mostly comes from a game people have already played at some point or could naturally conceive of(e.g. auto racing as an extension of driving, MMA as an extension of street brawls), and therefore don't need explanations for. Although Counter-Strike has a huge legacy among video games, it hasn't entered the school curriculum like baseball/basketball/football AFAIK, and it's only loosely related to a kind of live combat scenario that few people witness in person.
There's a step-function there where if a major educational institution started pushing a video game, it'd have the awareness to be a sport. But they don't, so the path forward is tied to the whims of the market.
It may work out that the 20th century pro sports model is just not going to be part of this. That model came from an era combining fast travel, broadcast media, and a small number of large sponsors. At first it was teams who travelled by rail and had their games casted over radio. Later, jet planes and TV. But nowadays, with the streaming model, it's diffused to being able to watch live speedrun attempts, an activity which can resemble watching paint dry at times, but which does bring in some income within a long-tail niche audience.
Esport is on the curriculum in some schools in Denmark. Mainly continuation schools (efterskoler) or certain high schools. I guess how it turns out is going to be an interesting experiment.
But you could say the same for most video games: Here is the object. Team shoots their way through until they accomplish the object. The rest is just arcane knowledge of experts.
For newer class-based games like Overwatch, the classes behave so differently and exuberantly that people are going to want to know what ever new flashy effect means. In football, the "classes" blend together and share a common goal. The difference between the Offensive Guard and Offensive Tackle are minuscule to the layperson. However the difference between Reinhardt and Winston are huge, both in terms of playstyle and presentation. Compound this with games adding new classes sometimes as frequently as every three months. That's hard to keep up for the casual viewer.
However you are correct that the objectives in games are usually simple. Push this thing from here to there. Don't let enemy stand here alone. Shoot enemy until no enemy.
I disagree here. I've watched professional sports a fair bit in my life, and I've watched eSports (and played their respective games) a bunch, and from my experience eSports are far more difficult to pick up.
To try and give a reason others haven't really mentioned, professional sports tend to have predictable camera angles and pacing, making it easier to get a complete picture of who is doing what and when. In eSports, the arenas are typically strategically complex, requiring similarly complex camera angles, making it difficult to get a sense of what's going on at any point in time.
> In eSports, the arenas are typically strategically complex
I think that is a key point. In most sports the arenas are quite simple. Most ball sports have some rectangle and you can judge intuitively whether a team is likely in a better position than another. And even in marathon or triathlon or such the course itself may be complex, but you can reduce it to "X meters till finish line" and "athlete A is in front of B" to get a good enough understanding on the situation.
Of course all sports allow for some amount of tactics, when to play a bit more passive, when to attack, ... but you don't need those for some basic experience while watching.
In eSports the arena is complex and hard to preceive, the physics aren't exact as we all know them, the virtual equipment (weapons, boosters, ...) are unknowns.
And then eSports typically are quick, which makes learning hard.
You could trivialize any sport/game down into 3 simple sentences. The problem is that in American football, there really is only 2 type of players that have different rules: QB, and non-QB. Maybe kicker. Same with soccer too, goalie and non-goalie.
In League, there's (at the time of this writing) 140 players (champs) that each have different rules and capabilities assigned to them, because they have different abilities and are used differently strategically. Top/mid/bottom/jungle really doesn't matter much more than player placements like tight-end, offensive tackle, howver.
Counter-Strike has 1 character type, 2 teams, and is so simple to explain. I can explain counter-strike to my mom in one sentence. The places where one should get anxious or excited are immediately obvious to a layperson. Explaining the goal of league is easy, however I'd struggle to explain enough of league to my mom so that she can understand why she should be excited when one specific champ is getting fed, or why the enemy team should be careful about clustering, because of a unique situation in this one specific match that is not always going applicable to a different match.
I'd probably be done explaining a handful of characters by the time the match is over, and she'd forget within 10 minutes. I know this because I've been trying to explain Pokemon since the 90s. She 100% understands football and baseball, however.
"But you could say the same for most video games:"
For games that involve shooting at people, I'd agree. A particular first-person perspective may be difficult to follow but the core is simple and you can pick up the pieces as you go. Quake deathmatches have a lot of interesting arcana to dig into if you want to play at top level, but you can just watch one without any particular skill. From there you can incrementally pick up that shooting someone before the player even saw them is impressive, or that identifying, acquiring, and plinking them with a rail gun in <500ms is pretty impressive. The speed of these things might be inaccessible, but it's not the rule set that is.
Most things have a novice-level entry ramp. My sons seemed to pick up the basics of American Football in about 5 minutes when they were 8. It really isn't that hard. They didn't encounter their first "safety" until quite a while later, for instance, but their lack of knowledge of what a safety is didn't bother them. I've been watching for a lot longer and still couldn't simply whip off the names of all the positions or anything myself.
Not all esports have that, though. I can say from personal experience though that DOTA is impenetrable if you don't know what's going on. I've been at a local restaurant that was playing some matches for whatever reason. I know about video games in general but know nothing about DOTA. I suppose you could say I understood what it was I didn't understand, but I had no idea who was winning, what a good play was, etc.
I mean, at least with real life sports there are no hacky obtuse contrivances because, it's real life, not a videogame with a meta that includes knowledge of engine exploits or intimate knowledge of map geometry. Someone pixel-aligning themselves to throw a blind smoke that bounces off of invisible above-the-map geometry to eliminate a sightline or someone blind firing though a wall-bang because they've counted the seconds since round start and judge someone might be there is obtuse to anyone onlooking via a stream. In football, or golf, or soccer, all the elements of play can be observed all at once without multiple angles needed to explain what's happening.
Football is dead simple, even simpler than CS: One team wants to go one way with the ball, the other wants to stop them, drive them back or, ideally, get the ball away from them and go the other way. They get four tries to go at least 10 yards and if they don't the other team gets the ball. If they make the 10 yards, they get another 4 tries.
There are a lot of fiddly details in offsides rules, incomplete passes, extra points, etc. but they aren't necessary to understand and enjoy watching a game.
You can even simplify even more. "They have to cross the line" instead of discussing 10 yards. And as humans have a rough understanding of the world we are in, even somebody with no prior knowledge of football can understand how complicated it can be to catch the ball. Input to eSports, which buttons there were to press at which time and how the game's physics model would react isn't as intuitive.
American football to me sounds very messy and extremely overly complicated? Like sometimes they throw, sometimes they kick, there is some goal but not goal thing. And stopping all the time? Like why not immediately get up and start running away? Or just dripple the ball all the way across the field? What is the point anyway?
You could probably find a video or article and understand all this in a few minutes. You have four attempts (downs) to move the ball 10 yards or you lose possession. Nearly everything else makes sense with that context.
The difference with American Football is although there have been subtle changes in the rules, it has been mostly the same for over 50 years. With esports (like in the case of Overwatch) they do not have that lifespan. So unless you are someone who is currently playing that game, you don't know how it works really. And if you were someone once playing that game 5 years ago, as in the case of Overwatch 1, they literally shut it off and it can't be played anymore.
The other difference is that American culture lives and breathes football, right from pee-wee to middle and high school, to the state college team level.
It's easier to build a multi billion dollar business around something people have been exposed to since birth.
>Do you feel like this applies to American Football?
As someone that grew up in the US and watching it with family, no, it's not the same. What is the same is watching Cricket. It probably has an even larger viewing audience than American Football in the US. As someone that has grown up with it, and they will start spewing rules at you that might as well be spoken in Klingon for the sense they make, but are perfectly understood by those that grew up with it. To be fair, reversing the conversation for me to explain rules to them is met with looks like I have 2 heads.
Video games are similar. I grew up in the "golden age" of home console games starting with Atari 2600, NES, and through today. However, I still spent time doing other things other than games. So to me, sitting around watching other people play video games is a non-starter. Maybe if I was at a bar and it was on the screen, but usually I just find a different screen. For people that are younger that don't have memories of playing outside and only know "playing" involving a computer device of some sort, then this seems perfectly reasonable that's what they'd rather watch.
just curious, how old are you that you think current youth have no memories of playing outside? what an amusing and out of touch statement, have you been outside in the past decade? Maybe not in a populated area because I see kids playing outside basically everyday. I also don't believe that you've never watched someone play a game, you didn't have siblings or friends growing up?
American football in 20 seconds: You have 4 opportunities to advance the ball a cumulative 10 yards, upon doing so, your 4 opportunities reset. Advance past the goal line = 6 points + opportunity for 1 additional. Fail to move 10 yards? Ball possession transfers to opponent. If it's 4th down (final opportunity) you can hedge -- punt the ball (transfer possession, but about 40 yards further away) or attempt a field goal (place kick through yellow uprights), which is worth 3 points.
Obviously there are nuances but that's 90% of it right there, in a lot less than 10 minutes.
Try to get to the end zone, if you do you score 6 points. You have 4 attempts to move forward 10 yards, if you don't, the ball goes to the other team. If you have more points, you win.
That's it, that's all you need to know to watch it and enjoy it. Sure, there's more ways of scoring and the details of each position, the routes they are running and play-calling in general is interesting, but it's not needed to just watch the game.
Ok but you can say the same about Counterstrike. The object is to diffuse the bomb. You shoot your way through the enemy until the bomb is diffused. The rest is just details for experts.
I assume in this scenario the terrorist team is trying to plant and detonate the bomb, thereby diffusing its (perhaps damaging, poisonous, or radioactive) components over a wide area, while the counter-terrorist team is trying to defuse the bomb and prevent it from exploding in the first place.
Not to entirely disagree with you, but comparing football to Counter Strike is kind of an apples-to-oranges comparison - you're comparing an introduction to something new with something that most American viewers have probably known for their entire lives, so that factor of "explainability" doesn't exactly apply to it.
As someone who has worked for several European companies try explaining american football scoring to a non-american and let me know how easy that is. That's basically just scratching the surface of it.
Saying you can boil it down to one side moves a ball the other side tries to stop them is pretty disingenuous. You can boil down basically any game to that. Counter strike you just kill the other team, mobas you just destroy the other teams base, etc. I know you didn't make that point but that's what most of the arguments in this thread are.
The difference: I have an intuitive understanding how hard it is to catch a football if a bunch of people runs towards me. Even if I never touched a football in my life. I have no intuition on what the eSports player can and can not do with their controls and the physics engine.
Eh, I'm not American and I found American football pretty straightforward, at least until you start looking at the play-calling and formations and all of that.
And you could say the same about CS, your market is probably "anyone who has played a first-person shooter"
American Football is extremely simple game relative to other games. It also is piece-wise fast paced. The game goes really fast, then gets a small break. it lends it self easily to television broadcast with its timeouts, changing of sides, etc. I am not of fan of american football, but I can see how it became popular.
As a longtime FPS player one area of complexity that is easy to forget is the maps.
When I play the game, I can learn a new map pretty quickly.
When I watch a game played on a map I'm not familiar with, it takes me much, much longer to develop the same understanding. It doesn't load into memory the same way. Similar to remembering the route to a new location as a passenger vs a driver.
The broadcast might flip back and forth between two players, hunting for each other in different parts of the map, and unless I know it pretty well I could be totally lost until they actually meet.
The broadcaster can help by using third person / freecam. But at the same time, an FPS loses a lot of the tension and visible skill when combat is viewed from freecam. So finding the right balance of camera time between individual players' views and an overhead view is challenging for a broadcaster, far more so than in traditional sports where we're accustomed to seeing a wide open field and perhaps some tracking of the ball.
Edit:
To give a practical example, I used to dabble in Quake Live. I was never any good, but there are some maps I know well: dm6, ztn, dm13, t7. Even though I'm not a big eSports fan, I don't watch streamers or whatever, I've seen some VODs played on those maps that really held my attention with suspense. I've been surprised at how entertaining it was watching top players duel.
At some point I watched a Quake Champions duel match between Rapha and Cooller and while the gameplay was quite familiar, not knowing the maps made it far less entertaining. I just couldn't follow the significance of the player's positioning nearly as well. Before that I totally underrated how much my familiarity with the maps was adding to my enjoyment of the Quake Live tournaments.
I've never gotten into FPS eSports for this reason. To me, Starcraft is the perfect eSport - imperfect knowledge for the players. Perfect knowledge for the casters and viewers. It's a great moment when someone tries to hide something on the map, and it _almost_ gets scouted. Or to see a reaction in the player-cam when they discover what their opponent is doing.
I've played thousands of hours of Overwatch in the past few years, but have 0 interest in watching OWL.
This is genuinely the biggest barrier to a new viewer of CS. Until you physically play on a map, it is very hard to understand by watching alone, especially as the perspectives are largely first-person. It can take dozens of hours to build a proper mental model of a map so understanding the game as camera angles change in a flurry is very difficult.
Traditional sports all have the same (or routinely similar) "map", and they're mostly made up of a simple geometric shape that can generally fit in a single overhead frame.
Not Rocket League? The inverse may be true... I became a rocket league player after watching esports. So while I was outside the player base, I'm in it now. :)
Dota is kind of fun to watch even if you're not that well-educated, but the announcing/casting style needs a serious overhaul, and general popularity needs a lot of "support" from good production: information overlays, slow-motion replays, giving casters the ability to zoom out to a full-map view and draw arrows, etc.
Look at hockey, American football, and road cycling for examples of complicated sports that are somewhat hard to understand without prior knowledge, and people really enjoy watching those, too.
At one time DotA2 had a noob friendly stream that would explain what was going on in greater detail, but it's a hard balancing act. DotA2 allows in game spectating which actually means you can click in items to figure out what they do. It would be cool if streaming platforms had embedded item and hero information for users to be able to expand on demand.
Complexity is something that affects League and DotA2. It's hard to know what all the things on screen even mean, and why they're important.
Maybe I'm too conservative but I don't think Counter-strike or fps in general could make on a wide broadcast. (It still people killing other people)
We would have more chance on politically acceptable game like (Trackmania, Rocket League, ...) but they have smaller audience in general.
It is a real shame that Ubisoft Nadeo hasn't really marketed Trackmania outside of Europe (they mostly focus on just France). Streamers have been driving a ton of growth in the game (particularly in the US) because it is so intuitive and enjoyable to watch.
Unfortunately the competitive scene has quite a bit of catching up to do as it is still very France and Germany centric. They are making strides to do that with the new world tour but it is going to take awhile before some new players get up to the level of the primarily European professional base.
During the pandemic real reacecar drivers turned to the e-version of their sports and there was even some coverage of mainstream racing channels of those virtual races given they couldn't do the real thing.
For anyone who has tried virtual racing (especially with high-end setups), the level of authenticity of the experience is actually incredibly high, and racing simulation is even actively used as part of real life driver training and car development. I think there's a healthy community in virtual racing as is and I can easily see continued and growing investment in it... its an incredibly compelling way to bring people into the sport and can easily be a revenue generator in its own right.
I still think drivers should remotely pilot cars with about half the mass of the current ones that wouldn't be designed around protecting an occupant. They could go 300+ mph and show us a new frontier in human driving skill. All the "too dangerous" racing technologies would be allowed, and the track would have loops and crazy features like a video game. There would be no restrictions on car design aside from size, weight, a 360 3d camera array, and a standard telemetry interface.
What about a game like rocket league? It seems to have a pretty strong competitive and streaming scene and it’s mechanics are pretty straightforward to understand (most people can understand “football with rocket cars” pretty well).
Do they have good camera angles for Counter-Strike? Showing the game through a series of first person perspectives seems like a waste vs some kind of isometric or even interactive camera. I also don't really know of a game that has been designed to look good from the perspective of a spectator instead of just for the players.
They do. Just as they have professional casters, there are some talented folks who specialize in smoothly transitioning to camera angles above, as well as switching first person views so that you don't miss key kills, etc.
I don't know, plenty of "normal" sports have complexity that most people don't understand. Like, how many people really understand the batter-pitcher duel in baseball? That's the very core of the game but most people just see "pitcher throw ball, batter swing, random result".
It doesn't make sense to focus on a game with a declining player base like CS:GO, when you have games like Fortnite, that on average have between 2.9 - 4 million people playing at any given time.
To me, the round structure of CS is what makes it most engaging. I watch a lot of League and CS, and having many more rounds to play in CS makes comebacks a lot easier, and so, it makes crafting a game narrative and excitement a lot easier. League is exciting, but a lot harder to get out of a hole than with CS, so barring some crazy plays, it's a harder to make a comeback.
Also many of the rounds in game are miniarcs themselves. First the lull waiting for new round, then the setup, next build up maybe one or two players dying. Then it entering the crescendo and that is either it or we have post plant scenario with an other build up potentially coming to save by single player.
>Maybe besides COD, everything else is too complex and requires to much prerequisite knowledge to really get into.
I think the FGC would strongly object. It's not always easy to know what options a player has at a particular position, but it's always pretty obvious whether someone is doing well. And it's not like the theory of football is that simple either.
> It's not always easy to know what options a player has at a particular position, but it's always pretty obvious whether someone is doing well.
I really need to have at least a basic intuition for "the options a player has" to enjoy watching. As somebody who has never gotten into fighting games, watching one is about as fun as watching election results come in for Dog Catcher of Backwater County. Bars move until somebody wins, but hell if I know why or what was so great about what the winner did. It might as well have been random.
Same goes for a MOBA with 150+ playable champions. Every fight is just a mess of colorful abilities that mean nothing to an outsider. You could watch a 40 minute game and maybe by the end of it understand what the champions do, but then the next one will use new champions. These games can be great fun to play, but they will never have spectator appeal broader than the player community. Which is fine.
You might need those options explained to you, but plenty of people are fine watching in ignorance.
You could liken it to Boxing or MMA, which people will watch without understanding the intricacies of the sport. Similar to Football, it’s easy to tell overall who’s winning or if theres a big swing. Fighting games definitely have this factor.
Unfortunately it's boring as hell to watch over the long term. In a game like CS there is little setup and watching someone getting instagibbed in short engagements is no fun. But maybe the players around it can initiate some drama that keeps people talking, similar to wrestling, but then it's no longer about the game and more about the drama.
It’s similar with F1, it’s extremely boring to watch long term, most of the time it just looks like the cars are following each other, and it’s even worse live where you can only see a sliver of the multi mile long track. Yet it’s still a global phenomenon somehow.
Watching the Netflix series (Formula 1: Drive to Survive), the drama between the racers and the corporate teams that sponsor them do add that personal connection, that keeps all sports going. I am amused to learn from it that Red Bull is somehow allowed to sponsor multiple racing teams (Red Bull Racing and AlphaTauri).
E-sports is essentially advertising for computer games. More people that sub to that the more sales a company can get for computer games/hardware etc. Same goes for Twitch - yes there is community that is build aruond that but it is for the underlying reason of making more sales for the businesses.
I only got a small glimpse into this world (specifically, esports betting), but the thing that makes the most sense to me is that esports is driven by gambling. That's the economic engine under the hood.
Might be wrong, but it kinda looked like that was what was going on, just from some of the numbers floating around, and seeing that was the first time esports-as-an-industry made any sense to me at all, as far as how the economics might work out.
> E-sports is essentially advertising for computer games.
No more than live sports are advertising for sports equipment. The real money in sporting events is in the events themselves: advertising dollars, gate receipts, and merchandise. Esports isn't terribly different, except that the gate receipts and merch sales are much lower. The revenue of the game itself is secondary, especially since the publisher rarely plays a major role.
Esports and sports have extremely different revenue models. The differentiator is that no one ‘owns’ traditional sport games. Anyone can make and sell a basketball, but blizzard has a monopoly on over watch. Sport leagues only indirectly make money when people play their game, but for esports it’s extremely direct and also easier to measure.
League of Legends makes multiple billions of dollars a year, not from esport receipts, but from people buying content in the game. The NFL doesn't make a dime when you play football in your backyard.
It's important to note that Counter-Strike's massive popularity (and funding) comes largely from the skin betting industry, which is entirely built around underage gambling. I'm not sure their viewership would survive a proper reckoning with that.
Do you have any source for this? I've been playing Counter-Strike since the original beta, and it's been popular since its creation, far before skins existed. As far as the funding goes, I have no idea, but would love to see some numbers.
I don't belive that there are public numbers disclosing the funding sources for tournaments. Valve throws in a bit, and betting sites are often sponsors.
CS was totally popular before skin's. I recall the riot shield being particularly fun for me.
One of the problems in the eSports scene is that there's not a lot of room left for grassroots events to grow. Too much of eSports is propped up by deep pockets hoping to become the next money printing giant. Then when the return isn't happening, they just kill everything off. Why would anyone invest in something so volatile? Looking at you ActiBlizz, with the suddenly cancelled HGC.
I'll continue to watch Brood War and StarCraft 2. The prize pools might not be as large as they once were, but the games are still amazing.
Heroes of the Storm was a lot of fun and had a great community. IMHO, that's one of the big problems with e-sports: They're clearly at the mercy of the publisher.
Even more recently: Halo Infinite came out, was supposed to be the next best thing. A bunch of people changed games to play that, expecting a huge scene. It failed to really make an impact on the market and left a lot of players high and dry.
I think the best way (but not the most profitable way) is for companies to commit to a certain number of years with a base prize pool, and then sell team cosmetics that have a large % of the price added to the prize pool. Too many professional careers are based on streaming income, and there is very little way for a viewer to support the scene other than watching.
I think there is lot of room for grassroot events. But those events will be small and local. Maybe couple hundred people being present and couple thousand viewers. Not that much to monetize and most teams playing will be amateurs.
I would ask another question: if the "hype" about traditional sports, like football (soccer), basketball, NFL, car racing is worth the money sunk on advertising there?
I have a gut feeling that most of the money spent on investing in sports seems to be wasted - with relatively low returns. "Brand building" is just an empty promise and much better results could be achieved spending this money in a better way.
It feels that companies invest in advertising in a particular sport only because the CEO likes that particular sport; obviously the consulting companies will come with some bullshit slides to defend it.
E-sports never really managed to get this hype - and in e-sports the companies more often try to track return on investment, which is probably low.
In regular sports we have companies like Gasprom spending hundreds of millions on advertisements - why? (I mean less money for tanks at least)
On a side note: for e-sports some companies spent money so much smarter, say some graphic card companies sponsor weekly tournaments (costs them peanuts - say 1 graphic card per week) - which is probably lower cost than spending one time on some big ticket event, or sponsoring a team, about which nobody cares about - because viewers track particular players.
In general most money spend on marketing is poorly tracked and effectively wasted; anyone who actually looked more into it can see how the agencies barely even bother to track real stats. Investment in sport feels especially unprofitable - mostly vanity projects of decision makers. For example Chevrolet sponsored Manchester United - for millions, while not selling their cards in Europe.. Ewanick was fired for that deal.
I’m a pretty regular esports watcher (Apex Legends is my game of choice) and I thoroughly enjoy it. But it’s also clear that it’s a terrible investment at the moment. Seems the only ones making money are game companies themselves (obviously), the rare org like TSM, and pros that have large Twitch and YouTube followings.
With the benefit of hindsight, I think esports are more similar to the model set by the World Series of Poker than pro sports.
Well attended in-person attended always felt like a non-starter to me. I go to NFL and NHL games a few times a season, even with bad seats the field is big enough that you only look to the monitors for the replay. For a computer game you're not watching play on the field, just the monitors, so you have the same problems as a movie theater.
I get the social aspect for your tiny tournaments, or once-a-year events. But that's just not as big of an audience. I still go to the movie theater too. But unless you're there for the hype of being in a loud crowd... why go often?
FTX sponsored the World Series and F1. You can't fault random streamers from accepting money from a company that's doing ads at the Superbowl. They're not professional auditors.
Hyping crypto is a bit awkward, but that's how bubbles are.
I don't get at all how it's awkward for people to hype online poker. Far better than slots or blackjack, and a very strategic game.
This synergizes with several other comments, but I think you're looking at another victim of the interest rates rising above 0%. It isn't just the easy availability of the money for esports themselves, it's the easy availability of money for sponsorships, ad spend, hardware, no immediate need to show profitability on the chance that maybe someday it will, a whole bunch of things. With the rising interest rates, that all disappears at once.
Starcraft II was really the only esport I ever cared about or watched. I think it is also widely considered the first esport. Make of that what you will.
I think OP confused the role / status of 1 & 2; SC1 was almost immediately huge in Korea, had its own TV channel(s), kids would play nothing else in the Internet cafes, etc. Casual LAN was also huge: you needed only one CD key to host a local game with up to 8 players (although TCP/IP was only added a bit later, with a patch).
Even if you disagree that SC1 created esports, it is definitely the one game that drove esports' early popularity like no other game could.
Then in 2010 Blizzard released SC2, and in an effort to promote it, tried to undermine SC1's success, since it saw its continued popularity as SC2's competition. SC2 was never as popular, other (often more casual) e-sports started getting popular... and a couple of scandals among very high-profile players (match fixing) drove the nail into the coffin.
Both SC1&2 scenes are still remarkably healthy (for a 24&12 year old game, respectively), there are premier tournaments with cash prizes, games continue receiving balance tweaks (although SC1 mostly through map design), etc. I play competitive SC2 casually and I can usually find a 1v1 match in less than 10 seconds (or about 1min for team games). It's never too late to get into it ;)
I think it's fair to say SC1 did introduce esports to Korea, but it was SC2 that introduced them to the west in a big way. And certainly in the west SC2 was larger than BW, probably even once you include the korean brood war scene. I think you're diminishing SC2 a bit _too_ much in your effort to point out the contribution of SC1.
Yeah, Starcraft II is as competitive or more than the original Starcraft. The introduction of the ladder means more players play SCII competitively, and the pro scene is just as good, if not better. Here's the commentary for the final match of the last in person tournament in SC2 [0].
Starcraft II did a lot of things to make controlling the game easier (Reassignable hotkeys, being able to select larger armies, screen position hotkeys). This made it easier for new players to get into the game, but the pro players were just able to find new ways to use their precious attention and keyboard presses and the skill ceiling remains as high as brood war.
I participated in several online leagues and in person tournaments for Counter-Strike and Quake III before Starcraft II was released. The Evo Moment 36 [0], still one of the most iconic fighting games match, happened in 2004, six years before Starcraft II's release. Starcraft Brood War and Warcraft III both had tournaments and world rankings. There's been a culture of in person tournaments at arcades and lans for as long as there's been arcades and lan ports. If these aren't esports, where are you drawing the line to say Starcraft II was the first?
Well, Brood Wars had a huge esports following too. It still does have a niche following.
SC is such a perfect game for esports but it's probably just too complex for many people. You really have to understand the nuance of the game for it to be enjoyable to watch. But if you do, it's dramatic.
SC does have some issues. One is huge variance in map length. Either it is couple of minutes or maybe 10 of some cheese tactic or then half an hour hour long grind. Which makes reliable format rather hard to implement.
Definitely not the first eSport. People played Warcraft 3 competitively, not to mention you also had arcade game tournaments like Street Fighter 2 that go back to the 1990s.
SC2 was absolutely not the first esport. Quake3, counterstrike and Starcraft 1 were all big (relatively) esports back in the day with professional players and teams.
For me personally it's because there are too many random events for all the different games. There is no one big tournament that many people could focus on and talk about.
E.g. even if I was interested in some particular event, it would not feel appropriate to mention it to my friends because they most likely will not care about it... so there is no community feeling.
It makes little sense to directly compare esports to traditional sports, aside from the name and the fact that competition is involved.
Esports' biggest issue is that the only real reason someone is going to start watching is because they play the game and want to see pros play it. Esports are usually not much fun to watch if you don't already love the game (neither are traditional sports).
The main reason to watch a sport is because you love the game on one hand, or you love the teams/players on the other. Traditional sports get a lot of the latter because there's history and inertia.
You don't have to love football to cheer for the Pats when you live in Boston. But you aren't going to cheer for the Boston Uprising (or even be aware that they exist) if you don't love Overwatch.
I think you’ve misread why people watch sports. The biggest reason to me seems to be nostalgia/family tradition. It’s a way to bring people together for a few hours. Beyond that I’d say second biggest reason is the thrill of competition. Related to “love of the game” but I think it’s much more about the human condition and struggle we all go through than you seem to think. Most people can relate to dedicating their selves to something and having their hard work pay off, and seeing that happen is a large part of the intrigue of sports.
This is actually my point. People by and large don’t love the game in traditional sports, they love the team and players because the history of the team is interwoven with their personal life (nostalgia/tradition)
In esports this tradition doesn’t exist because esports are new. So you only watch if you love the game.
Overwatch is a particularly interesting example to use here -- the reason the Boston Uprising exist is precisely because Blizzard went with the city based team model of traditional sports. I agree with the premise of your comment, but /most/ games have teams dissociated with locale, and OW is the outlier in that regard.
To your point, the Boston Pride are in a traditional sport and not as well known either. I'm sure Boston has a soccer club too but I wouldn't know their name.
I hope things keep going with esports and that the hype doesn't fade too fast. It's interesting to compare with the rise of American football like the NFL here in the US, since everybody is saying we are repeating the early 1900s in general.
Some 10+ years ago I helped a friend's son get a full ride esports scholarship, and it really stood out as a huge new benefit for kids like him (with a certain set of skills!) at the time. Totally launched his career in software too.
My own boys randomly announced recently that they are part of their school's esports club, and I feel the same way...they enjoy gaming and no matter how this goes, they have a new option, a group activity to belong to. Whether they really get into it as a career or not, it has been a clear pro for them.
I was involved with the London esports scene from 2010 to 2014, running events that would gather up to 500 people for blizzard and valve games.
I left the scene because I could not morally justify the exploitation of the majority of the talent. I hoped that the younger guys would be finding a way to make it work for the majority but it still irks me how many years have been wasted by young adults on a wild goose chase. Some very few were able to make a living out of it and deserve 100% what they pulled, but man, what a churn in that industry.
Devastated that TB / Odee didn't get to manifest a vision for player's union. That would have made a difference.
Esports doesn’t have to mimic traditional sports. My family watches a monthly Minecraft competition together, featuring not the best in the world but participants who are already popular streamers outside that context.
The competition is streamed from the perspectives of the participants, the teams change every month, and there is no prize money. Regardless of all these factors it’s still a fun, competitive event that delivers a good sports watching experience.
It doesn’t have the money or professionalism of major league sports, but for us it entirely doesn’t matter either.
Given the timing coincides with rising interest rates, I wonder how much of these investor and sponsor decisions revolve around cutting costs as opposed to any change in esports and their audience.
i think the top e-sports games are terrible: cs (the recoil system is a literally a hack), fortnite (F2p crap[1] and its not really a real game, you can feel the OOP system while you're playing as it takes several round trips for any action other than moving/shooting to happen), pubg (bloated amateur project). then theres valorant which aside from being F2P is largely boring as hell in the same way as overwatch. ive been told that my assumption that LoL is wonky RPG-esque metacrap is correct. only the starcraft games look alright, those are the only big games i havent played yet.
there's very little happening in the world of multiplayer games. the only ones with consistently decent netcode are COD and BF. after their first few flops (like BF2) they finally mastered it. everything else is downhill from there. theres not much you can do to make your game good when it has no substance (at the very least you need a solid implementation, let alone interesting graphics, which Lol, Overwatch, and Valorant lack) other than hype it up.
1. fortnite was acceptable for an alpha quality project in the first few months, then they got skins and the FPS dropped by 3/4 for any causal hardware, and it was all downhill from there
I wonder what else this will start happening to. The massive VC boom had a knock-on effect of pumping huge amounts of advertising spend into everything advertising dollars could be spent on.
In a lot of places, the slack is being picked up by sports gambling (one of the few VC sectors with an actual revenue model), but how long will that last? Particularly when their services are only legal for about 1/3 of the US population, and of questionable value in the first place?
I've been a fan of esports since I was downloading RealMedia replays of Boxer's Brood War games in the early 2000s, and still watch pro League and Dota2. Have gone to the EVO FGC tournament most years, as well. Plus some live League/Starcraft events in Korea.
The hype is fading because it was vastly overhyped and oversaturated to begin with. Games that should have never been made esports were turning into esports. One end of the spectrum was just bad games getting esports leagues prematurely. Remember Infinite Crisis, the DC Comic-based MOBA that had a full "season 1 championship" in beta, then the game itself ended up lasting only 5 months before getting shut down?[0] On the other hand you have games that are popular, but are really bad spectator sports. Fortnite and Rocket League are great examples of hugely popular games which have attempted an esports scene but failed to gain much traction, especially relative to their popularity. And then there's the ugly, which is Blizzard's massive investment into Overwatch League. Despite all the shady metric-gaming in the books (they used to automatically embed OWL Twitch streams into the Blizzard launcher, meaning anyone who launched a Blizzard game while OWL was happening counted as a viewer) OWL has looked pretty bad. They've even had to change the game rules multiple times to "fix" staleness in pro play, and Overwatch 2 is heavily targeted at adjusting pro play as well.
You can't just throw money at a game and have it become an esports phenomenon like Blizzard has tried; a lot of things have to go right with the game itself. The map and game state has to be easily readable to a viewer, which is why MOBA, RTS and fighting games to a lesser extent have done a lot better than FPS historically. The balance needs to be there; the GOATS[1] (3 tank 3 healer) setup in Overwatch made the game miserable to watch. The pacing needs to be right; it can't be too slow-paced or too fast-paced. This includes both any fighting that happens, as well as the overall pace of when fighting happens. If any of these factors aren't quite right, pro play is going to be a mess.
And sometimes, even with all those boxes ticked, it just doesn't take off. Heroes of the Storm is a great example here, where it was mostly pretty good as an esport on paper, though perhaps a bit slow-paced with too much healing. But the game never really took off in popularity and thus Blizzard killed its esports league.
Investors get tricked into thinking they're investing into the NBA or NHL with esport pitches, when in reality they're investing into the XFL, USFL or a lacrosse league.
You've got some great points here about companies trying to bootstrap esports out of nothing. Ideally, the activeness of the community would determine what games can support professional play; bottom up, not top down.
As for pacing and viewing experience: I'd whittle your list down even further if we're talking about the ideal esport. Most MOBAs are way too visually complex for non-players to understand what's going on. I always thought that fighting games made the most sense for a mass audience. Even if you don't have intimate knowledge of how a particular fighting game works, it's easy for anyone to understand what's going on and parse visually. You can see the entirety of the action instead of having to jump around from player to player. And some fighting games (looking at Smash Bros, Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter) are wildly popular already.
> Ideally, the activeness of the community would determine what games can support professional play; bottom up, not top down.
Yep and this is how it's happened for the most successful esports. Brood War was turned into a competitive game by KeSPA with minimal support from Blizzard (and active interference later on). EVO was self-organized and had minimal outside support for a long while. Even League, which was supported by Riot from the start, had a very bootstrapped, labor-of-love feel to it, probably reflecting the actual small indie company Riot was at the start; the season 1 championships are lovingly referenced as having taken place in Phreak's basement, and the season 2 championships were an absolute logistical mess. The huge cash investment and sponsorships didn't come until way later.
> Most MOBAs are way too visually complex for non-players to understand what's going on.
Definitely, especially if you haven't played the games and know what items or abilities do. But at least as a spectator you have a full visual of the playing field and largely see the same thing the players see.
Yeah, some of the more recent attempts (especially out of blizzard, ironically), come out of companies going "Hey, the MBA/NFL is super financially successful, we could be the MBA/NFL if this goes well, and since we have ultimate control of the game, we can even take a larger share than the central orgs for those sports", but without the grassroots support (even the NFL took decades to become large), it's only sustainable while they pour money in.
Fighting games have to compete with watching actual people actually fighting. Sure the UFC has less backflips and fireballs, but no Street fighter tournament will be able give a fight fan the same visceral excitement as watching an actual fight. Much in the same way that very few people who enjoy watching football (any kind) enjoy watching eSport football.
True, but it never really seemed to me like the two were competing with each other, except maybe in the case of something intentionally gory like Mortal Kombat. The detachment from physical injury makes it feel less like a fight and more like a non-combat sport. Could just be my bias showing since I've never liked UFC.
Hasn't this happened before? Reading the History of eSports will show 'pretty much' the same thing happening in the 80's with High Score Arcade tournaments, then in the 90's with Console Game Championships, etc...
We may see another round of interest when the new wave of gaming systems matures, but I think this will always be the case. Maybe next time people will learn from the past?
That's probably the main issue with esports. They don't really have the longevity established sports do. It's really easy to just move onto the next big thing.
I think one of the problems is that eSports games can change rapidly. For me it's easy to not watch soccer for 5 years and then watch a match and still know what's going on. But i don't have the mental capacity or even time to do the same for a valorant match. It's great for the niche, not simple enough for the masses (viewers).
I feel like simracing as an esport will be very successful sometime after we stop using gasoline even for racecars. Why even race around a track once the sims are as accurate as real life? Just put drivers in fancy g-force feedback cockpits and have them race in the virtual world!
Esports is as strong as the popularity of the games they are based on. I used to follow a few and it was always because I played the games heavily, sometimes at a decently high level. But if I stop playing the games, I stop watching the streams.
> But if I stop playing the games, I stop watching the streams.
Definitely true for me as well. I can sit down and watch a basketball game, which I haven't played in years, but if I'm not playing a video game regularly I have no interest in watching a pro game for more than a few minutes.
All major sports generate massive amounts of revenue due to in person sales and broadcasting rights. Sports also drive other avenues of revenue especially in big cities. Esports will not be on major television networks for a long time. Esports also do not have leagues with good in person attendance. Games and audiencies change too much and the best they can do is tournaments. Venture capitalists invested massive amounts of money based on hype and now are struggling to get ROI, let alone profit. The influx of cash will slow down as the venture capitalists face the consequences of their actions. Esports will not die but actually increase. Viewership numbers about League of Legends are showing decline because the game is in its late stages for competitive play. Valorant is the new rising star and others will follow in its path. Counter Strike has stayed pretty consistent which is impressive. Simply put investors will need to come up with a new strategy that is more traditional if they want to invest in this industry. To not invest though is simply an opportunity for better investors
