This is only a problem because businesses are trying to prop up competitive scenes for arbitrary games from nothing, which is a silly way to go about this.
They're games, people play them for fun. Let the competitive scene develop organically and then go in with investor money for better broadcast equipment and sponsors and shit and draft a team to compete in the existing competitive scene.
Trying to just create a competitive scene for random games out of thin air when players haven't even shown they're going to stick around for it is insane.
The default approach for any unproven competitive game should at most be "hey we're hosting an official tournament with a modest prize pool in the hope to drive adoption of our game, if it works we might do it again next year" not "we're investing millions into regional teams and stadiums out of thin air like we're bootstrapping the fucking NFL, and don't you dare host your own tournaments.".
This comment would've made sense 10 years ago, but it doesn't today. The modern gaming landscape is generally incompatible with organic competitive scene development, and really anything else that might be considered "organic". The developers want to have full control over the game, how it's played, when it's played, and who plays it. They don't want anything to develop "organically" without them having a hand in it so they can extract as much profit from it.
> They're games, people play them for fun.
There's another big problem right there: this isn't really true anymore for most multiplayer games. Most that released in the past few years (and some games that were older but were updated) come with dozens of "features" designed to force people to play them even when they don't want to: battle passes, limited time events, endless grinds, etc, this is done to maximize engagement and profit and effectively turns the games into chores rather than something you do for fun. Doesn't help that most of these games weren't really fun in the first place.
>There's another big problem right there: this isn't really true anymore for most multiplayer games.
I was recently introduced to the game Rust. In chat within a server a player asked "How do I keep my base from being destroyed when i'm offline?", the answer that the crowd provided him was "Set your mobile to alert you when your base detects people near it.".
It then dawned on me that there are probably quite a few players who will wake up out of a sound sleep, dash to their computers and rush to defend a virtual base from players in distant lands -- sacrificing their personal lives and sleep health not due to the enjoyment of the game, but simply because someone somewhere antagonized them in an environment they were disconnected from entirely.
I can understand pulling late/all hour sessions due to a personal obsession ; game/coding/hobbies/etc. I've done that way too many times throughout my life; but the marathon represents to me a stream of enjoyment and fascination.
It's tough for me to consider pulling late sessions and deriving myself from sleep as a constant response to antagonism in an always-on persistent world.
I guess what i'm trying to say is that I totally agree with you; games aren't only played for fun now -- they're played sometimes in an entirely reactionary form to either gain from the current limited time event, a fear of missing out, or a fear of loss of competitive advantage -- and all of these concepts are being orchestrated by the game developers and the industry at large.
I have absolutely no idea what to do about it, but I recognize the problem and absolutely agree. The move from pastimes being an entertainment value to a constant worry surely plants more asses in seats, but it feels entirely unhealthy and psychologically damaging.
Stuff like this is why people overestimate "market effects" and under estimate just group think in industries. Sure it is "more profitable" in some sense to do it this way, but you'd imagine someone somewhere will make a small fps that doesn't have this overly controlled crap and then win big, taking a share of the big guys' profits, and then the cycle churns into a new area of phase space.
The reason that hasn't happened yet is because a) gamers are just too dumb or lead by hype to try small non-triple A titles (which isn't quite true) or b) the groupthink in the industry is too thick for anyone to even try it. I feel like it's a combination of these two, probably more of b) but enough of a) justifies developer's collective illusions about what is proftable (that is, b))
Maybe the sports model doesn't apply at all, and it's arguably pretty unimaginative to try to force the proven sports model onto computer games.
Is there another way to play as a collective experience, and to monetize it (not that I care to monetize it, but obviously some do)? Or another way of approaching the issue, do we need more than what's already in multiplayer online games? Should we just add something to those that is more of a mass collective interaction?
The regional model definitely doesn't make sense for video games given their non physical nature. At a continent/country level it does (because people too far away wouldn't be playing together because of latency).
Fighting games are a bit of an exception because historically they've been in person only, again because of latency. Modern rollback netcode has made this less of an issue though.
My first thought is that online communities should have their own teams, what game would HN play competitively?
> try to force the proven sports model onto computer games.
Yeah, trying a bit too hard there - every single person in that industry that i've met goes out of their way to use sports jargon to desperately try to make that model work (ie "esports athletes" when referring to the players )
Yeah it's mighty annoying. It's even worse when they take some "pro" with "actual sport" experience and they start throwing jargon around, ye, good job talking about baseball or handegg to international viewership that don't have clue what those terms mean.
Pretty much. Just looking at biggest titles, they are all designed to appeal to any skill level of play and "just" be fun PvP game
Games "designed for esports" are trying to push horse before the cart. Game needs to get the playerbase first, be interesting and competitive in the long run second and then you can scoop people on top, put them in funny named teams and make them duke out to the public you get from having a big playerbase
While I'm inclined to agree, when it comes to developers with a strong reputation for making fun competitive games, I can understand how it could make sense to just jump in immediately with lots of money.
The goal is obviously that if you make a big investment into a competitive scene, that may attract top tier talent from other games, and that talent will itself bring in more regular players and viewers.
Gaming is the reddest of the red oceans. People only have so many hours in a day so if they are playing X they are not playing Y. Huge first mover and network effects to be the popular game.
Yeah this is a fair take too. Riot seems to have been largely successful in this approach with Valorant. Blizzard tried with Overwatch but imo they tried to push an overly structured approach with too much top down control way too far.
I agree. It seems like if companies are pulling out its probably best for the scene. I think people still want to have fun and compete against each other, and it will be more interesting to see organic competitions instead of the large corporate sponsored ones.
Its a chicken-egg situation. You need talent to attract attention, and you need attention to attract talent. You have to bootstrap prize pools etc IMO to hit critical mass until it becomes a "self fulfilling prophecy" and keeps the players invested. Otherwise, the next thing that offers a more legit prize pools and sponsorships is the "correct" choice if they are trying to make this their living.
I don't think it really is a chicken and egg problem though - hardly any of the competitive scenes for the biggest games historically got bootrapped like this:
Counterstrike: Organic community, Valve only started putting effort/money into it after it had already proved itself.
Starcraft: ditto
DoTA: ditto
AoE2: ditto
Smash: Nintendo is practically actively hostile to the competitive community, it persists regardless.
DoTA 2 and LoL arguably weren't bootstrapped either - they relied on players jumping ship from the already existing and proven OG DoTA scene.
If you let it develop organically before investing, there’ll be more money chasing from more people who recognize the potential by the time you invest, so you’ll get smaller upside, having to pay more for a similar share.
The few scenes I've followed (so two) have died because funding disappeared and the games stopped getting updates, with one ladder being taken off the internet entirely.
I am hesitant to bother getting into any new esport.
As far as I can tell, two groups are making plenty of money off of esports:
1 - The companies that make the game. Whether it's Riot and Blizzard selling slots in their leagues for eight figures, Valve using their annual tournament to sell in-game cosmetics, or all the companies ultimately owning broadcast rights to their game, this is the biggest difference between esports and traditional sports.
The New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers make money because they sell their own tickets and broadcast rights to their games; even though MLB does control the streaming revenue, they share it out to teams and ultimately have to bow to the wishes of a majority of team owners. What you don't see is a single company MLB inc that owns the copyright to the game of baseball, sells broadcast rights to all teams themselves, charges teams to play in the league, and can kick teams out of the league at a whim. That's the situation in esports.
2 - Individual players, with streaming. Players can first make a name for themselves in competitions, then stream on their own Twitch channel for revenue. This is not that different from athletes acting as social media influencers and signing endorsement deals, but the biggest difference is that by streaming on Twitch, they appear side-by-side with tournament broadcasts. It's as if LeBron's instagram account where he streamed his workouts and pickup games were just one change-of-the-channel away from ESPN, and people would consider it normal to flip between the game and individual player streams.
Lots of esports orgs, as part of signing players, get a big cut of the player's streaming revenue. But the revenue for an individual player's twitch stream, while great for an individual, usually isn't going to be significant enough to maintain a whole organization, and when a player brand does get big enough that their stream could sustain an org - that's when the player will be heavily incentivized to go independent, and make more money from streams than they do from competing.
Ultimately, I think esports has a bright future - overall total viewership continues to rise, even though some games like League of Legends - which is more than a decade old now - are starting to fade. It's just the business models of the offline sports world don't carry over, and that's especially apparent with these organized teams.
Point two reminds me of how some university professors make most of their money doing consulting and serving as expert witnesses. While their university salary pales in comparison to what they get from their other activities, it is their status as professors at reputable universities that makes the other income possible.
Twitch recently lowered their payouts (again) [1], making streamers and creators furious. More blood from the stone.
Twitch is bad for discovery, and they're continually losing creators to YouTube(Gaming).
Amazon doesn't report all of the key financials from Twitch, but it's expensive to support infra for everybody who wants to be a streamer. Only the top 1% draw an appreciable audience, and the ads cater to a demographic that doesn't have substantial disposable income.
If Amazon didn't have other interests in gaming (Luna, their own MMOs and game studios, etc.) that synergize well with Twitch, they would probably cut the losses.
As a comparison, Reddit recently cut their own streaming product [2].
This is a good reminder of Google's advertising economies of scale.
It doesn't surprise me that Twitch is struggling. TikTok could suffer the same fate as Twitch: their payouts aren't as good as YouTube (Shorts) on a per view basis. The only thing that's keeping TikTok in the game is their reach. Once reach hits parity, I wouldn't be surprised if TikTok succumbs to YouTube.
By "continually losing creators to YouTube" you mean YouTube paid a few top streamers million dollar contracts? I don't see anyone prefer streaming on YouTube over Twitch unless you already have a big channel on yt.
Discovery is still better on Twitch. There's raids and hosts, and simply picking a catogery/game you like and see everyone who streams it. How do I find a Dota livestreamer on Youtube? There's not any intuitive way, if I search it I just get videos.
And then there's twitch prime, the supreme chatting experience of twitch etc.
The latest League Worlds was gigantic and viewership peaked at 5.1 million. These big finals are the eSports equivalent to the Super Bowl, and a lot of people tune in even if they're not active players.
My favorite moba is Heroes of the Storm but I still check out League Worlds and DotA2's The International, despite not playing either game.
StarCraft 2 is a decade old and viewership is still pretty solid for big events. Brood Wars is two decades old and they still get thousands of viewers!
Can you cite figures for SC2 viewership? I sometimes watch it but from what I've heard from announcers on Twitch, SC2 viewership outside of Korea is basically dead. The last SC2 event was last month, Dreamhack Atlanta and it only managed to get a peak viewership of 26k for the finale. The average viewership for SC2 was 15k.
That's abysmal, it's not even on par with people who watch competitive hot dog eating.
> 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.
Based on your explanation it sounds like a good thing that investors and sponsors are pushed out as they are middle men and rent seekers. Allow those with skin in the game (womp womp) to profit.
100% agree. I started getting into Twitch during the beginning of the pandemic and got to know a lot of people who make money via online tournaments. The main channels I watch are Call of Duty and Super People. It's fascinating watching these streamers compete.
It might be interesting to note that during Starcraft Brood War's heyday as a major esport in Korea, it wasn't really touched by Blizzard. They weren't pushing out updates or expansions, or leveraging control of the IP e.g. involving themselves in managing the competitive scene.
Blizzard basically treated the game as "done" and the competitive scene turned into a major esport organically.
Anyone can play football (even if maybe they can't use the name?) using FIFA rules and even incorporate their own. However, you cannot legally play starcraft 2 without blizzard's permission.
Not sure the case for "older" sport like soccer/football,
But in US, MLB owns baseball. NFL owns American football. What I mean is, they literally own the mechanism of play for these two sports and allow the individual teams to compete in the leagues, which they must make many concessions to be a part of. aA "copy" of MLB can't pop up and play the same exact game, MLB owns every part of it.
IE; your "problem" with competitive gaming infrastructure is exactly how competitive sport is and has succeded. Apples to oranges of course tho
How many kids play baseball in the US and don't pay royalties to MLB? How many kids play football and don't pay royalties to NFL?
All these same kids -- when playing Starcraft have already in someway paid Blizzard money. You cannot play Starcraft legally without paying them money. You can play football in your backyard whenever you want.
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.
The USFL exists. It doesn’t really compete with the NFL but that’s more due to NFL teams having much more money with which to buy nearly all the top talent.
No. Formula 1 is owned by Liberty Media. FIA does not own any racing series. FIA is a governing body.
> The FIA is the governing body for world motor sport and the federation of the world’s leading motoring organisations. Founded in 1904, with headquarters in Paris, the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA) is a non-profit making association. It brings together 244 international motoring and sporting organisations from 146 countries on five continents. Its member clubs represent millions of motorists and their families.
I’m a huge F1 fan, but I’m also confident that the total annual viewer hours of F1 pales in comparison to any other major sport. F1 was a sport born by the rich for the rich. Unlike every? other mainstream sport, you cannot and will not “play F1” in schools.
There is no “amateur” F1. You can go to track days in different cars. You can go karting. The gulf between that and F1 is huge.
Unlike football, or basketball, or cricket, or rugby, or volleyball, or…
Are you saying that MMA is a counter example? I'm not an MMA fan but I've seen far more Bellator matches than UFC ones despite working with a UFC team while they were on The Ultimate Fighter. That doesn't track with UFC owning the sport.
I share the same feeling as OP. Open source games can essentially live forever and others can pick up where the previous entity left off. For instance, starcraft 2 still has big mass of players, even though it's on life support (servers die sometimes, bugs go unfixed for years/forever, maps are not updated as frequently anymore, etc).
That's one aspect, the other aspect is that the opensource base can end up becoming the reference implementation of a genre. It can become a more sustainable environment, where people are trying to improve the game (and get paid through the organisations that run tournaments and such) rather than create a competitor.
Long term, I think esports are going to be fine. However, I think it's too early for them to really take root and embed themselves into any sort of mainstream or stable culture.
Physical sports have been around since forever and even if we're talking about some of the biggest games around at the moment we're talking about things like football which was invented in 1863. Plenty of time to shake out all the details such that everyone understands the game and some stability evolves.
Not only are videogames much newer, but the medium is up to the whims of large corporations with a history of making crazy decisions just to squeeze another dime out of the consumer.
Give it a couple of generations and I'm sure it'll earn it's place and become a staple of lazy sunday afternoons.
I think you have provided an argument against eSports: a popular sport is "timeless" and is played for generations.
Games are ephemeral. It's very rare for a game to be popular for more than 10 years. There might be popular franchises like Counterstrike, but they are still different games that will eventually be replaced by something better.
That means you can't build up the same history, traditions and attachment.
League of Legends has been around for over a decade and is still in a really healthy state because it's continued to change and get better over time - every season brings pretty significant updates and new champions. The history, traditions and attachment are there - Faker, CLG vs TSM, etc.
Honestly think we'll still all be playing Minecraft, League of Legends and Fortnite in a decade or two.
This is the correct take I think. So much of sports is about tradition and routine. Esports needs the build up that base of "I watched this league every sunday with my dad growing up and he watched with his dad when he was growing up" etc. to be taken seriously. Will probably take another 40 or so years, and esports will continue to improve in the meantime too.
Importantly this requires long lasting games. Currently most people switch the game they watch every 5 or so years. Having a long lasting league that can create generational fandoms requires a game that can be enjoyed for a lifetime. MOBAs might satisfy that, remains to be seen, but that type of commitment is absolutely a pre-requisite.
On this note, I think people underestimate how intrinsically important things like our relationship to our physicality, and face-to-face contact are to us as human beings. Just in the last few decades have virtual worlds/networks/games been seriously present in our lives, and I feel like a wager has already been made that our lives will continue to become virtualized ad infinitum. I think we are starting to witness the human limits of this notion with corporations like Meta pushing virtual shit no one wants, and game companies trying to force competitive scenes unsuccessfully. Video games are rad, and watching them can be rad, but 'esports' feels like a forced experiment.
I was thinking along the same lines, but on the other hand, will specific video games be able to have as much staying power as physical sports?
The way I envision longevity playing into the sports industry is by having generational playing and viewership, with parents teaching their children about the game rules, playing with them, and explaining while watching a broadcast game. It's not the only way people get into (traditional) sports watching, but I believe it is the main underlying word-of-mouth mechanism.
However, with videogames being driven so much by graphical improvements, gameplay evolution, and other trends, will there ever be an eSport which stays in vogue for long enough?
Quick research on eSports:
Tetris is the oldest at 30 years (for the World Championship version), still a popular game with a competitive scene. Smash Bros Melee is 20 years old and very popular as an eSport, as well as StarCraft with a lesser but still decent viewership as I understand, though Quake and Street Fighter 2 from around that time are not drawing much viewership (nor casual popularity). 20 years ago was also the appearance of CounterStrike which is massively popular, but has had multiple titles, with only the latest version of 10 years ago still being played. All other major eSports are from that time period of 10 years ago or newer as far as I see.
Physical sports also have a purpose that esports cannot adequately address: the need to discharge physical energy and aggression. There is something primally satisfying in defeating someone in say basketball that cannot be matched in my experience by non-contact activities.
While that's true, there are also advantages to being non-physical:
* You can play way, way more of the game on a daily/weekly basis because you don't really have to worry about endurance/recovery in the same way.
* With a few clicks you can grab opponents and teammates of comparable skill near-instantly, at any time, whereas finding a game for a given sport is much more beholden to schedules and other logistical difficulties.
I suspect eSports works better for the long tail because of that second point: much harder to develop a critical mass when people have to be local. If you think about how many different sports vs competitive video games you could find a match for with modest effort in the coming week, video games would probably win by a least an order of magnitude, maybe two orders.
My main argument against esports is somewhat similar, though in a different direction. It's odd to me to watch something anyone can do, with minimal investment. Why watch when you could just play?
With baseball, football, or basketball, I'd have to not only find a field or court and a bunch of willing participants, but also be in good enough shape to run a bit.
Watching Esports is essentially watching someone sit at a computer - something anyone can easily do. I don't mean to discount whatever skill is involved in being a good player, only talking about barriers to entry.
Note to all financiers drunk off zero-interest capital: not every new thing has to be jammed into 'unicorn' clothing. Some things can just exist as cottage industries.
I first saw a televised StarCraft competition in South Korea in 2001. That still exists AFAIK. Maybe it can't expand too far beyond that, but at the same time, maybe it shouldn't?
Trying to manufacture celebrity gloss and betting markets around eSports like it's professional field sports is just sad. How many actual fans want to see the industry go that way?
As someone who played a lot of Starcraft back during SC1/SC2 Wings of Liberty days, Starcraft was a game I loved watching other people play - mostly due to fog of war knowledge asymmetry in the audience.
If I was someone who didn't play video games, I think Rocket League would be the title I would be interested in watching others play.
I just can't fathom any non-gamer ever finding Call of Duty, League of Legends, DOTA, Overwatch, Valorant, etc. interesting enough to watch. I played many of those same games at some point and even I don't find them interesting to watch. First person shooters in particular seem so confining in terms of spectating.
So I stopped gaming soon after the original Xbox came out. Rocket League is about the only game I understand now. I have the new Xbox now and started playing it and find it extremely difficult. I improved a lot with some practice and even studied some other players. Until then, the whole concept of Twitch didn’t really make sense to me. Anyways the point I wanted to make is Rocket League has some mass appeal as a game to watch tournaments. However, it kind of falls a part because of how the pros play. It just looks like the game is glitching out. A layperson is just watching some weird physics without the context of how difficult some of those moves are to perform.
I think for esports to be as huge as a traditional athletic sport, you need mass appeal. Most sport fans don’t play those sports they watch. But they can appreciate the difficulty and it’s not easy to appreciate the difficulty of a video game you’ve never played.
Agreed. Starcraft in particular is fun to watch because you can see some longer term strategies at work.
Compare to CSGO or COD. I have no idea what's going on, only that one side has better mechanics than the other. I know these games have strategies / formations as well. But they're a lot less apparent to me, and engagements are so quick I can't grok what's happening.
I play SC2 and watch from time to time. I don't see how you can claim there are longer term strategies at work when the average game lasts about 6 minutes, and the first minute or two of the game are basically "filler". I think one reason SC2 is kind of boring to watch is because you get maybe 1-2 minutes of actually interesting game play, and the rest of the 4-5 minutes is just repetitive.
Dota2 (really most PvP games) have same information asymmetry tho ?
It even has a bit of metagaming like SC2, there you pick the opening build and in Dota your team picks/bans heroes and decides where they go on a map in early game.
As someone has followed the industry for quite some time, I would say that the hype isn't really dying down, but rather that teams are finally having to address the elephant in the room: Pro player compensation is completely out of whack with regards to where franchising revenue/merch sales are. Salaries need to come down maybe 50% in the West for the numbers to make sense.
The flip side is that compensation is not terribly attractive to the players.
I’ve heard that players are dropping out at young ages not because they can’t play anymore but because it is not a good living.
I had a LoL habit for a while. I was definitely a fan of Yiliang Peng but spent a lot more time playing LoL than I did watching the pros. I don’t think I generated much if any revenue for his team. There is not a big money train like there is for the NFL.
I only follow pubg esports, but I'm just not seeing how a pro player in an expensive country can afford to make a living. The competition is brutal, the hours to be at the top are very high, and unless you're a top streamer the income is very low.
Now this can all be hand waved away with "they're just playing a video game, they're lucky" but I think that misses the point. To be a pro at one game, you have to dedicate everything to that game. Revenue sharing has to go up for longevity of esports.
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
The flip side is that the earning potential of the top players are incredibly lopsided, whether that be the top competing players in terms of winnings, or those most able to be a personality in terms of streaming. It's not clear the teams themselves contribute much to either of those areas - training is most often self directed or with play groups that may not align with teams, and it's not like e.g. soccer where there's big physical infrastructure like stadiums that clearly the players need an organisation to provide. Instead the venues for in-person events are provided by the tournaments, not the teams, and pretty much everything else the players need to earn money is online.
I believe Faker was the first million dollar salary in eSports on 2017, IIRC LoL moved to a franchising system for it's leagues, which brought in a ton of 'naive' capital, the combination caused a gigantic inflation in NA player salaries and a significant one in EU.
This was recognised as a bubble by veterans in the industry and talked about on various talkshows at the time.
I completely agree with your point about salaries and really just want to add that this has been expected for years. ESports is still growing, it's just the rate will seem more sane to those in the know.
That’s essentially the thesis of the article, yes. Hype here refers not to the players or the fans but rather to the business side. Investors are looking for returns and not finding them.
Readit News
They're games, people play them for fun. Let the competitive scene develop organically and then go in with investor money for better broadcast equipment and sponsors and shit and draft a team to compete in the existing competitive scene.
Trying to just create a competitive scene for random games out of thin air when players haven't even shown they're going to stick around for it is insane.
The default approach for any unproven competitive game should at most be "hey we're hosting an official tournament with a modest prize pool in the hope to drive adoption of our game, if it works we might do it again next year" not "we're investing millions into regional teams and stadiums out of thin air like we're bootstrapping the fucking NFL, and don't you dare host your own tournaments.".
> They're games, people play them for fun.
There's another big problem right there: this isn't really true anymore for most multiplayer games. Most that released in the past few years (and some games that were older but were updated) come with dozens of "features" designed to force people to play them even when they don't want to: battle passes, limited time events, endless grinds, etc, this is done to maximize engagement and profit and effectively turns the games into chores rather than something you do for fun. Doesn't help that most of these games weren't really fun in the first place.
I was recently introduced to the game Rust. In chat within a server a player asked "How do I keep my base from being destroyed when i'm offline?", the answer that the crowd provided him was "Set your mobile to alert you when your base detects people near it.".
It then dawned on me that there are probably quite a few players who will wake up out of a sound sleep, dash to their computers and rush to defend a virtual base from players in distant lands -- sacrificing their personal lives and sleep health not due to the enjoyment of the game, but simply because someone somewhere antagonized them in an environment they were disconnected from entirely.
I can understand pulling late/all hour sessions due to a personal obsession ; game/coding/hobbies/etc. I've done that way too many times throughout my life; but the marathon represents to me a stream of enjoyment and fascination.
It's tough for me to consider pulling late sessions and deriving myself from sleep as a constant response to antagonism in an always-on persistent world.
I guess what i'm trying to say is that I totally agree with you; games aren't only played for fun now -- they're played sometimes in an entirely reactionary form to either gain from the current limited time event, a fear of missing out, or a fear of loss of competitive advantage -- and all of these concepts are being orchestrated by the game developers and the industry at large.
I have absolutely no idea what to do about it, but I recognize the problem and absolutely agree. The move from pastimes being an entertainment value to a constant worry surely plants more asses in seats, but it feels entirely unhealthy and psychologically damaging.
The reason that hasn't happened yet is because a) gamers are just too dumb or lead by hype to try small non-triple A titles (which isn't quite true) or b) the groupthink in the industry is too thick for anyone to even try it. I feel like it's a combination of these two, probably more of b) but enough of a) justifies developer's collective illusions about what is proftable (that is, b))
Is there another way to play as a collective experience, and to monetize it (not that I care to monetize it, but obviously some do)? Or another way of approaching the issue, do we need more than what's already in multiplayer online games? Should we just add something to those that is more of a mass collective interaction?
Fighting games are a bit of an exception because historically they've been in person only, again because of latency. Modern rollback netcode has made this less of an issue though.
My first thought is that online communities should have their own teams, what game would HN play competitively?
Yeah, trying a bit too hard there - every single person in that industry that i've met goes out of their way to use sports jargon to desperately try to make that model work (ie "esports athletes" when referring to the players )
Games "designed for esports" are trying to push horse before the cart. Game needs to get the playerbase first, be interesting and competitive in the long run second and then you can scoop people on top, put them in funny named teams and make them duke out to the public you get from having a big playerbase
Ain't nobody got time for dat. Push the new game out, organize two tournaments, recycle the game into the next iteration... Rinse and repeat.
The goal is obviously that if you make a big investment into a competitive scene, that may attract top tier talent from other games, and that talent will itself bring in more regular players and viewers.
Counterstrike: Organic community, Valve only started putting effort/money into it after it had already proved itself.
Starcraft: ditto
DoTA: ditto
AoE2: ditto
Smash: Nintendo is practically actively hostile to the competitive community, it persists regardless.
DoTA 2 and LoL arguably weren't bootstrapped either - they relied on players jumping ship from the already existing and proven OG DoTA scene.
I am hesitant to bother getting into any new esport.
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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.
Twitch recently lowered their payouts (again) [1], making streamers and creators furious. More blood from the stone.
Twitch is bad for discovery, and they're continually losing creators to YouTube(Gaming).
Amazon doesn't report all of the key financials from Twitch, but it's expensive to support infra for everybody who wants to be a streamer. Only the top 1% draw an appreciable audience, and the ads cater to a demographic that doesn't have substantial disposable income.
If Amazon didn't have other interests in gaming (Luna, their own MMOs and game studios, etc.) that synergize well with Twitch, they would probably cut the losses.
As a comparison, Reddit recently cut their own streaming product [2].
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/21/twitch-subcription-revenue...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/pan/comments/yl5zzd/update_on_the_f...
I use reddit daily and that's the first time I hear about it. How bad they can be at marketing their own stuff on their own platform...
It doesn't surprise me that Twitch is struggling. TikTok could suffer the same fate as Twitch: their payouts aren't as good as YouTube (Shorts) on a per view basis. The only thing that's keeping TikTok in the game is their reach. Once reach hits parity, I wouldn't be surprised if TikTok succumbs to YouTube.
Discovery is still better on Twitch. There's raids and hosts, and simply picking a catogery/game you like and see everyone who streams it. How do I find a Dota livestreamer on Youtube? There's not any intuitive way, if I search it I just get videos.
And then there's twitch prime, the supreme chatting experience of twitch etc.
My favorite moba is Heroes of the Storm but I still check out League Worlds and DotA2's The International, despite not playing either game.
StarCraft 2 is a decade old and viewership is still pretty solid for big events. Brood Wars is two decades old and they still get thousands of viewers!
That's abysmal, it's not even on par with people who watch competitive hot dog eating.
[1] https://escharts.com/tournaments/sc2/dh-sc2-masters-2022-atl...
Also for reference the last Superbowl was watched by 100M viewers.
Do they? I played (completely casually) till 2013, and stopped watching after the 2014 championship. I didn’t understand it anymore. Too many new champions, meta changes that I didn’t keep up with. Patches that changed the behavior. I have a hard time seeing how inactive players keep being interested.
If I could invest as an average joe, I would.
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.
Blizzard basically treated the game as "done" and the competitive scene turned into a major esport organically.
Blizzard tried to force the leagues and players to play both games at the same time.
I remember very well how SC2 fans on websites like teamliquid wanted to "kill" Brood War too, so SC2 would somehow get more viewers.
Blizzard didnt really know what to do with Brood War's popularity.
But you make a good point about open source. It would have the added advantage of being open to code review to find flaws that allow cheating.
But in US, MLB owns baseball. NFL owns American football. What I mean is, they literally own the mechanism of play for these two sports and allow the individual teams to compete in the leagues, which they must make many concessions to be a part of. aA "copy" of MLB can't pop up and play the same exact game, MLB owns every part of it.
IE; your "problem" with competitive gaming infrastructure is exactly how competitive sport is and has succeded. Apples to oranges of course tho
How many kids play baseball in the US and don't pay royalties to MLB? How many kids play football and don't pay royalties to NFL?
All these same kids -- when playing Starcraft have already in someway paid Blizzard money. You cannot play Starcraft legally without paying them money. You can play football in your backyard whenever you want.
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The MLB doesn't "own" baseball nor does the NFL "own" football. Both of them are gestalt entities comprised of the member clubs.
The NFL are the 32 member clubs. MLB are the 30 member clubs. You can't start a football team and compete in the NFL because the 32 member teams don't want to play against you.
Any concessions a team makes "to the league" is really a concession made to the other teams. For the NFL, every year, the 32 owners get together and vote on various rule changes. Same with the MLB.
MLB is a little weird in that it does have a government allowed monopoly on professional baseball, but no other league does. Like, you could start a rival baseball league, but MLB could take whatever action it wanted to squash your league (assuming all those actions were legal otherwise). But nothing except very anti-competitive practices are stopping you from starting your own baseball league. Just, good luck airing your games, or finding fields that can seat more than 500 people, or being able to sell tickets online, or advertising. MLB can make agreements to exclude rival leagues from everything.
The NFL can't do that. Which is why you get the USFL, the XFL, the Spring League, the AAFL, the XFL again, Arena football, etc. It's just that no one is capable of putting up the money to compete with the NFL. You're either overpaying what any NFL club would pay for a player or fielding players no NFL club would take. And that's not to dismiss any of those guys in terms of athletic ability. Being in the top 1% of athletic ability is still pretty fucking good. But the NFL would be more like the top 0.1%.
But no one is doing that. Average salaries for all of these leagues were under the average salary for the NFL of the time. There just isn't the money because there's no base. And it's because the NFL has built its brand(s) over decades. The NFL makes money hand over fist because they've gotten there over the years. And they essentially got in when the competition was on their level. New competitors on the scene have a much harder path.
The biggest difference is that professional sports leagues are essentially team owned and team run. Collectively, but still.
A better analogy would be Wilson, Rawlings, Nike, Spalding, etc. Wilson make a football called "The Duke". It is made to the specifications set forth by the NFL. They also make the NBAs basketballs. Rawlings makes the baseballs for the MLB. Wilson/Rawlings gets exactly zero input into how the game is played. The people who agreed to play each other do that.
Whereas in eSports, the maker of the equipment (essentially) is the one dictating how to play the game. It would be like if the US Playing Card Company decided to start dictating how the World Series of Poker was run.
So what you have is that eSports is seen as advertising for the game rather than the product itself. That's what separates other leagues from eSports. Every other professional sports league treats the competition as the product. Mainly because they have to. Riot, Epic, Blizzard, Valve, WotC, etc. all see their "professional" leagues as advertising avenues for their "actual" product.
And big part of SC staying power was because of community made maps and stuff.
CS (which gave birth to Valorant in turn) and TF2 (which Overwatch traces lineage to) also came from mods.
So it's not really the license just sheer fact community can take it and start modifying if it doesn't work, or evolve if it gets stale.
> The FIA is the governing body for world motor sport and the federation of the world’s leading motoring organisations. Founded in 1904, with headquarters in Paris, the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA) is a non-profit making association. It brings together 244 international motoring and sporting organisations from 146 countries on five continents. Its member clubs represent millions of motorists and their families.
https://www.fia.com/fia
There is no “amateur” F1. You can go to track days in different cars. You can go karting. The gulf between that and F1 is huge.
Unlike football, or basketball, or cricket, or rugby, or volleyball, or…
Honestly I dont see a problem with it.
E.g. MMA. It's going pretty well.
That's one aspect, the other aspect is that the opensource base can end up becoming the reference implementation of a genre. It can become a more sustainable environment, where people are trying to improve the game (and get paid through the organisations that run tournaments and such) rather than create a competitor.
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.
Games are ephemeral. It's very rare for a game to be popular for more than 10 years. There might be popular franchises like Counterstrike, but they are still different games that will eventually be replaced by something better.
That means you can't build up the same history, traditions and attachment.
Honestly think we'll still all be playing Minecraft, League of Legends and Fortnite in a decade or two.
Importantly this requires long lasting games. Currently most people switch the game they watch every 5 or so years. Having a long lasting league that can create generational fandoms requires a game that can be enjoyed for a lifetime. MOBAs might satisfy that, remains to be seen, but that type of commitment is absolutely a pre-requisite.
The way I envision longevity playing into the sports industry is by having generational playing and viewership, with parents teaching their children about the game rules, playing with them, and explaining while watching a broadcast game. It's not the only way people get into (traditional) sports watching, but I believe it is the main underlying word-of-mouth mechanism.
However, with videogames being driven so much by graphical improvements, gameplay evolution, and other trends, will there ever be an eSport which stays in vogue for long enough?
Quick research on eSports:
Tetris is the oldest at 30 years (for the World Championship version), still a popular game with a competitive scene. Smash Bros Melee is 20 years old and very popular as an eSport, as well as StarCraft with a lesser but still decent viewership as I understand, though Quake and Street Fighter 2 from around that time are not drawing much viewership (nor casual popularity). 20 years ago was also the appearance of CounterStrike which is massively popular, but has had multiple titles, with only the latest version of 10 years ago still being played. All other major eSports are from that time period of 10 years ago or newer as far as I see.
* You can play way, way more of the game on a daily/weekly basis because you don't really have to worry about endurance/recovery in the same way.
* With a few clicks you can grab opponents and teammates of comparable skill near-instantly, at any time, whereas finding a game for a given sport is much more beholden to schedules and other logistical difficulties.
I suspect eSports works better for the long tail because of that second point: much harder to develop a critical mass when people have to be local. If you think about how many different sports vs competitive video games you could find a match for with modest effort in the coming week, video games would probably win by a least an order of magnitude, maybe two orders.
With baseball, football, or basketball, I'd have to not only find a field or court and a bunch of willing participants, but also be in good enough shape to run a bit.
Watching Esports is essentially watching someone sit at a computer - something anyone can easily do. I don't mean to discount whatever skill is involved in being a good player, only talking about barriers to entry.
I first saw a televised StarCraft competition in South Korea in 2001. That still exists AFAIK. Maybe it can't expand too far beyond that, but at the same time, maybe it shouldn't?
Trying to manufacture celebrity gloss and betting markets around eSports like it's professional field sports is just sad. How many actual fans want to see the industry go that way?
If I was someone who didn't play video games, I think Rocket League would be the title I would be interested in watching others play.
I just can't fathom any non-gamer ever finding Call of Duty, League of Legends, DOTA, Overwatch, Valorant, etc. interesting enough to watch. I played many of those same games at some point and even I don't find them interesting to watch. First person shooters in particular seem so confining in terms of spectating.
I think for esports to be as huge as a traditional athletic sport, you need mass appeal. Most sport fans don’t play those sports they watch. But they can appreciate the difficulty and it’s not easy to appreciate the difficulty of a video game you’ve never played.
Compare to CSGO or COD. I have no idea what's going on, only that one side has better mechanics than the other. I know these games have strategies / formations as well. But they're a lot less apparent to me, and engagements are so quick I can't grok what's happening.
It even has a bit of metagaming like SC2, there you pick the opening build and in Dota your team picks/bans heroes and decides where they go on a map in early game.
I’ve heard that players are dropping out at young ages not because they can’t play anymore but because it is not a good living.
I had a LoL habit for a while. I was definitely a fan of Yiliang Peng but spent a lot more time playing LoL than I did watching the pros. I don’t think I generated much if any revenue for his team. There is not a big money train like there is for the NFL.
Now this can all be hand waved away with "they're just playing a video game, they're lucky" but I think that misses the point. To be a pro at one game, you have to dedicate everything to that game. Revenue sharing has to go up for longevity of esports.
These inflated pro salaries are good for the lower tier players who don't have the entertainer personality
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Step 1. Be good at a sport and become famous Step 2. Convert Fame into money by endorsing products.
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.