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.
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.
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
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?
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_Crisis_(video_game)
[1] https://www.polygon.com/2019/2/25/18239845/overwatch-goats-m...
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?
Those other sport leagues kept failing too and "franchises" keep switching cities.
Is that true for you as well?
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.
IOC is well known to be super-dooper corrupt and that was icing on the cake.
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.
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.
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.".
> 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.
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.
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))
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?
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?
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 )
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
Ain't nobody got time for dat. Push the new game out, organize two tournaments, recycle the game into the next iteration... Rinse and repeat.
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.
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.
I am hesitant to bother getting into any new esport.
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.
This is what's happening when you watch a competitive game of Counter Strike (Valve) or Starcraft (Blizzard).
Sure there are institutions like FIFA and Wimbledon but nobody owns football/soccer.
My proposal would be for a game to be competitive it must be open source by default -- a generous license like MIT.
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Companies now often don't want mods, as they interfere with selling cosmetics, loot boxes, and so on.
As no game grows forever at some point the popularity of the esport is also going to fall.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
It is pretty embarrassing how chess pros and streamers hyped bitcoin and online poker. The image will take a while to recover.
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.
At least for the examples I was aware of, they didn't so much hype them as simply take money as funding or normal advertising.
I was surprised by how strong and negative the reaction by fans was.
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.
I do watch SC2, and blizzcon (and now IEM) is the world championship for that.
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.
In esports this tradition doesn’t exist because esports are new. So you only watch if you love the game.
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.
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.
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].
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/21/twitch-subcription-revenue...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/pan/comments/yl5zzd/update_on_the_f...
I use reddit daily and that's the first time I hear about it. How bad they can be at marketing their own stuff on their own platform...
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.
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.
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!
That's abysmal, it's not even on par with people who watch competitive hot dog eating.
[1] https://escharts.com/tournaments/sc2/dh-sc2-masters-2022-atl...
Also for reference the last Superbowl was watched by 100M viewers.
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.
If I could invest as an average joe, I would.
Blizzard basically treated the game as "done" and the competitive scene turned into a major esport organically.
Blizzard tried to force the leagues and players to play both games at the same time.
I remember very well how SC2 fans on websites like teamliquid wanted to "kill" Brood War too, so SC2 would somehow get more viewers.
Blizzard didnt really know what to do with Brood War's popularity.
But you make a good point about open source. It would have the added advantage of being open to code review to find flaws that allow cheating.
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.
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.
And big part of SC staying power was because of community made maps and stuff.
CS (which gave birth to Valorant in turn) and TF2 (which Overwatch traces lineage to) also came from mods.
So it's not really the license just sheer fact community can take it and start modifying if it doesn't work, or evolve if it gets stale.
> 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.
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…
Honestly I dont see a problem with it.
E.g. MMA. It's going pretty well.
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.
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.
Honestly think we'll still all be playing Minecraft, League of Legends and Fortnite in a decade or two.
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.
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.
* 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.
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.
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.
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.
These inflated pro salaries are good for the lower tier players who don't have the entertainer personality
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Haven't checked the latest status, but I understood before that didn't really work out.
And ironically, Valve is the organization that created this problem.
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.
‘Nobody’ cares about racing teams?
Italians and Ferrari would strongly disagree with you
But you are correct that now the question becomes who can create a sustainable model in the ashes of what came before.
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.
Dota has been around for 20 years now and League has been around for 13. Both of which are modern esports game that are well balanced.
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.
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).
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.
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.
They've put a lot of work into this for league of legends.
League of Legends has been around for over a DECADE and the esports scene for it is bigger than it's ever been.
> 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.
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
That's what I mean by retaining viewers for a long time.
Esports will grow, but not because of one game, but because of many games coming and going in popularity over time.
Do you feel like this applies to American Football? I don't, but yet it's the most popular sport on TV in America.
What I'm saying is that I don't think your requirements are necessary for a sport to be a popular spectator sport.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Compared to that number, nobody grows up watching Dota.
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 played thousands of hours of Overwatch in the past few years, but have 0 interest in watching OWL.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/14/league-of-legends-gets-more-...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ;)
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.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WbXgaLr_eA&list=PLoBxKk9n0U...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esports#Growth_and_online_vide...
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.
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]).
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...
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
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.
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
My point is simply that the popularity of sports is really a cultural phenomenon.
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.
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.
Twitch actually has this for Dota now! On bigger streams, you can click on the spells and items to see the tooltip.
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.
They stop after a play because that’s part of the rules of the game.
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.
Born and raised in America, I never knew this. First time I've seen it explained this way.
To my mind, Football is overly complicated, with crap tons of breaks, weird jargon, and a countdown clock that apparently means nothing.
But anyway my point was that F1 is not "open source" and it's quite successful.
The FIA. But not because the sport is owned by the FIA. Formula 1 has selected the FIA as its governing body, not the other way around.
CS was totally popular before skin's. I recall the riot shield being particularly fun for me.
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.
It's easier to build a multi billion dollar business around something people have been exposed to since birth.
Most other countries dont know the sport, apart from maybe Commonwealth who play rugby at schools.
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.
And you could say the same about CS, your market is probably "anyone who has played a first-person shooter"
Doesn’t seem to restrict the ability of soccer clubs to build fanatical fanbases though
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
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
"You need to pay us for a copy but can modify it however you want" type of license from game company would work entirely fine
Actually very cool on it's own, but difficult not to categorize as cheating if it's not intended to be a programming competition.
The meta of malware clients and rare clients with the best bots will be interesting.
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.
That's a very different relationship from NFL or MLB.
* 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/
You also typically will pay some manufacturer for basketball equipment before you play.
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.
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]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=rocket+league&s...
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.
Take [1] as a random example - 18th in the pubg global championship, and they've made $53k split between 3 players in 2022.
How many hours of practice do you think they have to put in, to be 18th in the global championship and earn $17.7k per person?
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.
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 dota esports tournaments started in 2004, full history here: https://dota2.fandom.com/wiki/History_of_Competitive_DotA_(T.... The tournaments have been running for 19 years.
Even if you argue that Dota 2 was the true birth of these tournaments, The International 11 (the 11th yearly dota 2 championships) was held this October: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_International_2022
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
They're the same game.
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.
It was a completely dishonest response.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 like it for the whole back and forth between players reacting to what the other does, trying to bait them into suboptimal play etc.
Kinda same reason why I like Dota2
Is chess boring because there’s 20 opening moves? It’s all about the mid-late game.
- 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.
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.
[1] https://liquipedia.net/starcraft2/Global_StarCraft_II_League...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://escharts.com/games/lol
[2] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/mtgs-esl-and-dreamh...
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.
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.
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edit - Not a competition with lots of people, but he has 10+ "X to grand master" videos where he runs absurd builds to see if he can make them work.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/@afreecatvesports432/videos
The average viewership is 20k, with a peak of 32k.
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.
The cost of in-game rewards is in most cases marginally zero in software.
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
Samsung, Intel, Razer, etc.
Even owning a gaming PC at all is a much higher barrier (a lot of people watching esports will be doing so on phones).
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.
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.
(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.
At any rate, the average game duration for GSL is 00:07:51. You can review the statistics here:
https://liquipedia.net/starcraft2/Global_StarCraft_II_League...
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:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLo2fPnM8EiQyT0kicBS5C...
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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:
https://www.twitch.tv/primevideo
Here's a source that the NFL is viewed by 10.8 million people on Twitch:
https://www.marketingdive.com/news/nfls-audience-on-twitch-l...
Relevant quote:
"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.
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.
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.
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.
> ...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?
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.
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]
Nerf Zerg!