[HN Gopher] The hype around esports is fading as investors and s...
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The hype around esports is fading as investors and sponsors dry up
Author : tmlee
Score : 112 points
Date : 2022-12-12 14:00 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bloomberg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bloomberg.com)
| tacticaldev wrote:
| 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?
| tarentel wrote:
| 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.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| 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.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| 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?
| api wrote:
| Loot boxes. Gaming is all about putting people in a Skinner box
| and emptying their wallet now.
| Decabytes wrote:
| 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.
| karmakurtisaani wrote:
| 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.
| banannaise wrote:
| 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.
| Macha wrote:
| 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.
| leetcrew wrote:
| > 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.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| 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.
| kentonv wrote:
| 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".
| ChicagoBoy11 wrote:
| 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.
| yummypaint wrote:
| 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.
| crooked-v wrote:
| In all seriousness, Hot Wheels would probably offer some
| premium sponsorships there.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| boringg wrote:
| 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.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| 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.
| banannaise wrote:
| > 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.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| 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.
| nerdponx wrote:
| 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.
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| 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.
| ericmcer wrote:
| 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.
| whack24 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| MentallyRetired wrote:
| 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. :)
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Yeah, rocket league too. I didn't think of it. Although I'm
| iffy on anything with non-reality physics, since people have
| to learn a new intuition.
| rspeele wrote:
| 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.
| switz wrote:
| 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.
| avisser wrote:
| 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.
| scythe wrote:
| >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.
| rspeele wrote:
| > 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.
| Klonoar wrote:
| 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.
| Narew wrote:
| 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.
| starky wrote:
| 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.
| markandrewj wrote:
| The thing is these player communities are huge, more people
| have watched worlds in the past then the Super Bowl.
|
| 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.
| oreally wrote:
| 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.
| symlinkk wrote:
| 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.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| 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).
| sheepybloke wrote:
| 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.
| Ekaros wrote:
| 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.
| jedberg wrote:
| > Dead simple concept, intuitive mechanics even to laypeople,
| and the meta game can be explained in 10 minutes.
|
| 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.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| 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.
| specialp wrote:
| 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.
| rchaud wrote:
| 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.
| abfan1127 wrote:
| 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.
| jerf wrote:
| "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.
| jedberg wrote:
| 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.
| jerf wrote:
| "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.
| tyree731 wrote:
| 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.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| > 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.
| lapetitejort wrote:
| 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.
| philodelta wrote:
| 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.
| chomp wrote:
| 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.
| syntheweave wrote:
| 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.
| tokai wrote:
| 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.
| listenallyall wrote:
| 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.
| spillguard wrote:
| 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.
| tarentel wrote:
| 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.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| 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.
| cruano wrote:
| 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"
| 8note wrote:
| Cricket would be an alternative example that most Americans
| don't already understand
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| 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.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| 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.
| com2kid wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >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.
| WHYLEE1991 wrote:
| 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?
| cruano wrote:
| Well, yes ?
|
| 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.
| jedberg wrote:
| 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.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Which is why OP said CS is the game most likely to become
| popular. It's the simplest/most realistic esport.
| musicale wrote:
| > The object is to diffuse the bomb
|
| 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.
| rg111 wrote:
| American Football watchers _grow up_ watching American
| Football.
|
| Compared to that number, nobody grows up watching Dota.
| Ekaros wrote:
| 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?
| simmerup wrote:
| Both teams work within the same constraints with the goal
| of beating the other. Same as any other sport.
|
| They stop after a play because that's part of the rules of
| the game.
| vlunkr wrote:
| 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.
| banannaise wrote:
| 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.
| pattrn wrote:
| 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.
| winkeltripel wrote:
| 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.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Counter-strike was massively popular even a decade before it
| had skins.
| banannaise wrote:
| 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?
| Double_a_92 wrote:
| 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.
| johnny22 wrote:
| i don't personally care about DOTA, but isn't "The
| International" that for DOTA?
|
| I do watch SC2, and blizzcon (and now IEM) is the world
| championship for that.
| barbariangrunge wrote:
| 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.
|
| Is that true for you as well?
| fsdjkflsjfsoij wrote:
| > 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.
| bobobob420 wrote:
| 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
| mjr00 wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_Crisis_(video_game)
|
| [1] https://www.polygon.com/2019/2/25/18239845/overwatch-
| goats-m...
| nluken wrote:
| 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.
| mjr00 wrote:
| > 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.
| Macha wrote:
| 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.
| dagw wrote:
| 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.
| nluken wrote:
| 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.
| mb22 wrote:
| 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.
| nordsieck wrote:
| > Teams are not geographical
|
| 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.
| trynewideas wrote:
| > 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?
| nerdponx wrote:
| > 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.
| sophrocyne wrote:
| 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.
| Ekaros wrote:
| > Some teams are geographical. For example: Overwatch league.
|
| Haven't checked the latest status, but I understood before
| that didn't really work out.
| Bilal_io wrote:
| 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.
| Ekaros wrote:
| 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.
| jameshart wrote:
| Soccer clubs aren't regional?
| smcl wrote:
| I think they mean that if you are, say, Real Madrid you can
| sign a player who was born in Sevilla, Brazil or Turkey or
| wherever.
| jameshart wrote:
| Okay, makes sense.
|
| Doesn't seem to restrict the ability of soccer clubs to
| build fanatical fanbases though
| smcl wrote:
| 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
| Ninjinka wrote:
| There are some geographical teams, my brother-in-law loves the
| Dallas Fuel, but yeah they aren't all.
| efsavage wrote:
| 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.
| fernandopj wrote:
| > Racing has teams, but nobody really cares about them
|
| Italians and Ferrari would strongly disagree with you
| Semaphor wrote:
| On the one hand, yeah. On the other, I know many Germans
| became Ferrari fans while they had Michael Schumacher.
| Godel_unicode wrote:
| Yeah, people not caring about the teams is really just
| applicable to NASCAR in my experience.
| jameshart wrote:
| I'm assuming by 'racing' you mean motor racing.
|
| 'Nobody' cares about racing teams?
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tifosi
| IceHegel wrote:
| 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.
| Kranar wrote:
| 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.
| fourseventy wrote:
| 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.
| htag wrote:
| 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?
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evo_Moment_37
| endominus wrote:
| Who considers Starcraft _II_ , of all games, the first esport?
| Was it ever even considered as competitive as the original
| Starcraft?
| rollcat wrote:
| 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 ;)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarCraft_in_esports
| Macha wrote:
| 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.
| htag wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WbXgaLr_eA&list=PLoBxKk9
| n0U...
| nemo44x wrote:
| 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.
| Ekaros wrote:
| 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.
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| The first Starcraft was already huge at least in Korea, and
| Doom / Quake were pretty big online in the 90s including some
| professional events:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esports#Growth_and_online_vide...
| pier25 wrote:
| The problem is that there's not enough audience. It's a niche
| thing compared to big sporting events like F1, La Liga, Premier
| League, NFL, NBA, etc.
| helen___keller wrote:
| 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.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| 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.
| helen___keller wrote:
| 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.
| cnntth wrote:
| 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.
| rchaud wrote:
| 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?
| jerf wrote:
| 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.
| mlinsey wrote:
| 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.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| 3) Esports gambling companies
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| 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!
| somehnacct3757 wrote:
| eSport viewership numbers are untrustworthy because the games
| incentivize players to tune in with special in game rewards.
|
| Also for reference the last Superbowl was watched by 100M
| viewers.
| axus wrote:
| Aren't the rewards cheap for the company? Advertising costs
| plus the artists salary?
| jcranmer wrote:
| > 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.
| stryan wrote:
| 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.
| rchaud wrote:
| 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.
| ptudan wrote:
| There's definitely derivative media in eSports too.
| Replace SportsCenter with youtube and twitch channels,
| and the rest is the same
| darkwizard42 wrote:
| Yes, I don't see anything wrong with that or why that might
| discount the viewership numbers. It is the equivalent of a
| giveaway during a presentation.
|
| The cost of in-game rewards is in most cases marginally
| zero in software.
| Semaphor wrote:
| > 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.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Sticky social networks.
|
| 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.
| Kranar wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://escharts.com/tournaments/sc2/dh-
| sc2-masters-2022-atl...
| nosianu wrote:
| 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.
| Kranar wrote:
| 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.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| 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.
| mocha_nate wrote:
| 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.
|
| If I could invest as an average joe, I would.
| Pwntastic wrote:
| https://archive.vn/LhQEa
| ninth_ant wrote:
| 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.
| tareqak wrote:
| 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.
| humanlion87 wrote:
| 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.
| avisser wrote:
| Man, the AoE folks and the Starcraft folks really need to team
| up to keep things going. 20-year old games for the win.
| runnerup wrote:
| MarineLord and BeastyQT might agree!
| rvba wrote:
| 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.
| yesimahuman wrote:
| 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.
| themodelplumber wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| sylens wrote:
| 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.
| themanmaran wrote:
| 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.
| Kranar wrote:
| 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.
| SgtBastard wrote:
| 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.
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| 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.
| Ekaros wrote:
| 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.
| Raidion wrote:
| 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.
| Doorstep2077 wrote:
| There are several risks to consider when investing in esports
| gaming. Some of the key risks include:
| Investment in esports teams and organizations is largely
| unregulated, so there is a higher level of risk compared to
| traditional sports. The esports industry is still
| relatively new and rapidly evolving, so there is a higher level
| of uncertainty and potential for volatility in the market.
| Esports players have shorter careers than traditional athletes,
| so there is a higher level of risk associated with investing in
| individual players. The esports market is highly
| competitive, with many teams and organizations vying for a share
| of the market. This can make it difficult for investors to
| generate a return on their investment. Esports is
| still a niche market, so there is a limited pool of potential
| investors and a smaller market for teams and organizations to
| generate revenue.
| dogleash wrote:
| 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?
| khiqxj wrote:
| 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
| mamonster wrote:
| 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.
| Godel_unicode wrote:
| 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.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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.
| loganriebel wrote:
| 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
| bitwize wrote:
| ketzo wrote:
| No need for the weird shot at women. Streaming makes more
| money than esports, period.
| runnerup wrote:
| Indeed. The top woman streaming on twitch ranks #64 and
| the second most popular woman does not break the top 100.
| spinach wrote:
| 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.
| IntelMiner wrote:
| misogyny isn't cool
| tashoecraft wrote:
| 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.
| wingerlang wrote:
| Isn't the very definition of 'pro' that they get paid to do
| it? Prize money, sure, but also sponsors.
| michaelt wrote:
| You can get paid without getting paid _well_.
|
| 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?
|
| [1] https://liquipedia.net/pubg/BBL_Esports
| wingerlang wrote:
| 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.
| tashoecraft wrote:
| 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.
| tashoecraft wrote:
| 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.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| 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.
| nigerianbrince wrote:
| > 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]
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=rocket+lea
| gue&s...
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuV2SGAZaig
| kgwxd wrote:
| 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.
| Macha wrote:
| 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.
| rwnspace wrote:
| 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.
| Ekaros wrote:
| And on other side popular players can possibly make same money
| as streamers or influencers with less risk and effort.
| deelowe wrote:
| To me, this is what's changing and it's not just changing
| esports.
| makestuff wrote:
| 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.
| beckingz wrote:
| So the classic sports model?
|
| Step 1. Be good at a sport and become famous Step 2. Convert
| Fame into money by endorsing products.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| This is true for soccer, but almost all American athletes
| make the vast majority of their income off team salary.
| Godel_unicode wrote:
| 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.
| ptudan wrote:
| 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.
| epolanski wrote:
| There is one huge problem behind esports: their viewers are
| always going to be limited by the actual game's userbase.
|
| 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.
| pastacacioepepe wrote:
| 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.
| jmcgough wrote:
| > 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.
| nickff wrote:
| > _" 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).
| 8note wrote:
| Minecraft is the obvious eSports example
| jmcgough wrote:
| This is true for a lot of games, but less true in evergreen
| games that can continue to update in perpetuity forever.
|
| League of Legends has been around for over a DECADE and the
| esports scene for it is bigger than it's ever been.
| thinkmcfly wrote:
| 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
| s_dev wrote:
| The core problem of competitive games is that they're "owned" by
| someone. Imagine if "soccer" or "tennis" was owned by a
| corporation.
|
| 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.
| pier25 wrote:
| I don't know. There are many racing competitions but F1 is
| owned by the FIA.
| intrasight wrote:
| From a business practical standpoint, FIFA does own
| football/soccer.
|
| 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.
| Reubachi wrote:
| 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
| s_dev wrote:
| That's not a good example. Here's why:
|
| 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.
| Tenoke wrote:
| SC2 is f2p so you can.
|
| You also typically will pay some manufacturer for
| basketball equipment before you play.
| bena wrote:
| That money doesn't go to the leagues however.
|
| 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.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Yeah, instead of price it'd make more sense to talk about
| centralized control.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| > 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.
| bena wrote:
| You're right and wrong.
|
| 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.
| bbanyc wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| marcelluspye wrote:
| The closest thing to this at the moment, I think, is online
| Chess.
| helen___keller wrote:
| 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.
| Verdex wrote:
| 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.
| wasabi991011 wrote:
| 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.
| thefaux wrote:
| 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.
| silisili wrote:
| 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.
| lmm wrote:
| 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).
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| 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.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| 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.
| the_duke wrote:
| 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.
| lmm wrote:
| Starcraft is something close to timeless; I'd bet there are
| some second-generation players around by now.
| zlqart wrote:
| Online chess tournaments have been sponsored by FTX and obscure
| poker companies with Malta ties.
|
| It is pretty embarrassing how chess pros and streamers hyped
| bitcoin and online poker. The image will take a while to recover.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I have seen this criticism for some other video games, but it
| doesn't really resonate with me.
|
| 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.
| Raidion wrote:
| 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.
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