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The hype around esports is fading as investors and sponsors dry up

218 points by tmlee 4y ago

jgalt212 4y ago
That's because the smart money has moved on to Pickle Ball. /s
mamonster 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
    - ketzo 4y ago
      No need for the weird shot at women. Streaming makes more money than esports, period.
      - spinach 4y ago
        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.
      - runnerup 4y ago
        Indeed. The top woman streaming on twitch ranks #64 and the second most popular woman does not break the top 100.
    - IntelMiner 4y ago
      misogyny isn't cool
  - tashoecraft 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      Isn't the very definition of 'pro' that they get paid to do it? Prize money, sure, but also sponsors.
      - michaelt 4y ago
        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 https://liquipedia.net/pubg/BBL_Esports
        wingerlang 4y ago
        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 4y ago
        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.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  And on other side popular players can possibly make same money as streamers or influencers with less risk and effort.
  - deelowe 4y ago
    To me, this is what's changing and it's not just changing esports.
    - makestuff 4y ago
      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 4y ago
    So the classic sports model? Step 1. Be good at a sport and become famous Step 2. Convert Fame into money by endorsing products.
    - Godel_unicode 4y ago
      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.
    - HDThoreaun 4y ago
      This is true for soccer, but almost all American athletes make the vast majority of their income off team salary.
    - 4y ago
- rwnspace 4y ago
  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.
- Macha 4y ago
  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.
mb22 4y ago
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.
- Bilal_io 4y ago
  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.
  - jameshart 4y ago
    Soccer clubs aren’t regional?
    - smcl 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        Okay, makes sense. Doesn’t seem to restrict the ability of soccer clubs to build fanatical fanbases though
        smcl 4y ago
        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
humanlion87 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    MarineLord and BeastyQT might agree!
Verdex 4y ago
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.
- HDThoreaun 4y ago
  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.
  - midiguy 4y ago
    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.
- 4y ago
zlqart 4y ago
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.
- Raidion 4y ago
  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.
- s1artibartfast 4y ago
  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.
Decabytes 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
  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.
- leetcrew 4y ago
  > 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 4y ago
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.
- deleted 4y ago
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- Narew 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
- kentonv 4y ago
  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".
banannaise 4y ago
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 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
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 4y ago
  > 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.
IceHegel 4y ago
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.
- endominus 4y ago
  Who considers Starcraft II, of all games, the first esport? Was it ever even considered as competitive as the original Starcraft?
  - htag 4y ago
    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=PLoBxKk9n0UWc8-5eHtZXvg4Y5wRwFavnm https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WbXgaLr_eA&list=PLoBxKk9n0U...
  - rollcat 4y ago
    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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarCraft_in_esports
mlinsey 4y ago
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.
- TheAceOfHearts 4y ago
  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!
rvba 4y ago
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.
themodelplumber 4y ago
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 4y ago
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TheAceOfHearts 4y ago
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.
- Raidion 4y ago
  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.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  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.
tacticaldev 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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.
  - rvba 4y ago
    If you read about history of football/soccer in USA you can see how many leagues failed. Those other sport leagues kept failing too and "franchises" keep switching cities.
mjr00 4y ago
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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_Crisis_(video_game) [1] https://www.polygon.com/2019/2/25/18239845/overwatch-goats-meta-triple-tank-explainer https://www.polygon.com/2019/2/25/18239845/overwatch-goats-m...
jerf 4y ago
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.
yesimahuman 4y ago
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.
sylens 4y ago
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.
- ilyt 4y ago
  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.
- themanmaran 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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.
dogleash 4y ago
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?
s_dev 4y ago
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.
- intrasight 4y ago
  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.
  - aflag 4y ago
    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.
    - CyanBird 4y ago
      Soccer's history is very interesting, there used to be several competing international or local bodies fighting each other for control over soccer rules and therefore how people "ought" play soccer and therefore power Blizzard vs Kespa is very much that situation happening again. Now days in soccer the field is the way it is exactly because of fifa's ever present hand
    - KptMarchewa 4y ago
      It's not a big problem given that SC2 is free right now. Unless you mean that ToS (not toss) is somehow a big barrier that keeps StarCraft from getting bigger.
- Reubachi 4y ago
  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
helen___keller 4y ago
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.
- cnntth 4y ago
  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.
- HDThoreaun 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
rchaud 4y ago
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?
Pwntastic 4y ago
https://archive.vn/LhQEa https://archive.vn/LhQEa
ninth_ant 4y ago
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 4y ago
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.
bobobob420 4y ago
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
epolanski 4y ago
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.
- jmcgough 4y ago
  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.
  - nightpool 4y ago
    TFA: > Making matters worse, viewership for League of Legends’ Championship Series, one of the most mainstream leagues in esports, is at a five-year low, according to data aggregated by Esports Charts. As viewership declined, broadcast and streaming deals became less lucrative or less common for US and European esports leagues.
    - uhuruity 4y ago
      I don't know what the viewership numbers are, but as someone who watches a lot of LoL across all the major leagues (LCS in North America, LEC in Europe, LCK in Korea, LPL in China), I wouldn't be surprised if LCS viewership falls even while others do well. The standard of play in LCS is far worse than the other three regions, and there are no redeeming features either (LEC is worse than LCK/LPL but they do a lot of fun things with their production that makes it entertaining to watch overall).
- pastacacioepepe 4y ago
  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.
nitwit005 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
  Loot boxes. Gaming is all about putting people in a Skinner box and emptying their wallet now.
pier25 4y ago
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.
khiqxj 4y ago
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
Doorstep2077 4y ago
[flagged]
- j-bos 4y ago
  Unrelated note: Are you generating comments with gpt?
  - FooHentai 4y ago
    Yes, that is GPT output.
deleted 4y ago
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QuadDamaged 4y ago
I was involved with the London esports scene from 2010 to 2014, running events that would gather up to 500 people for blizzard and valve games. I left the scene because I could not morally justify the exploitation of the majority of the talent. I hoped that the younger guys would be finding a way to make it work for the majority but it still irks me how many years have been wasted by young adults on a wild goose chase. Some very few were able to make a living out of it and deserve 100% what they pulled, but man, what a churn in that industry. Devastated that TB / Odee didn't get to manifest a vision for player's union. That would have made a difference.
p1necone 4y ago
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.".
- lbhdc 4y ago
  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.
- smeagull 4y ago
  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.
- wolverine876 4y ago
  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?
  - 4y ago
smm11 4y ago
At the rate we're going it's going to be 1988 again before you know it.
dannyeei 4y ago
Some smaller companies are doing cool things with esports https://youtu.be/RkrWz7G-blY?t=841 https://youtu.be/RkrWz7G-blY?t=841
ok_dad 4y ago
I feel like simracing as an esport will be very successful sometime after we stop using gasoline even for racecars. Why even race around a track once the sims are as accurate as real life? Just put drivers in fancy g-force feedback cockpits and have them race in the virtual world!
Rotdhizon 4y ago
This is a minor take from someone who used to play CoD at a very high level (cash tournaments, wager matches, GB/CMG/UMG front page teams). At least from the perspective of games like Call of Duty and Overwatch, I think at least some chunk of it is that the quality of games is rapidly decreasing and it's killing off the fanbase. I remember back when it seemed like everyone I knew was following the CoD pro scene, watching the streams, tournaments, championships, etc. Nowadays I don't know a single person who still engages with that content and the responses I get from them are that they don't enjoy watching the games anymore. The current CoD (MW2 remastered), there are pro players making commentary and tweeting about how much they hate the games design. The person who is probably the single best known pro CoD player Scump is retiring now and he's said in side comments that it definitely has to do with how bad the game is designed. People seem to be losing confidence in these companies that make the games with the biggest esports scenes. Overwatch 2 now has also received quite a bit of negative press. There's probably a good chunk of anecdotal experiences inside my view but this is my take on things.
- MivLives 4y ago
  I think people are just split up over more games now. Every few years you get a LoL, a PUBG or a Minecraft where it seems like the whole world is playing at once. Then a good chunk of people move on, and there's not always a big thing to move onto. But some people remain. And I think people generally prefer the eSports of the games they know how to play. Right now off the top of my head there's eSports for Overwatch, CSGO, dota 2, lol, apex, Fortnite, hearthstone, rocket league, pubg, valorant, rocket league, sim racing and countless fighting games. And those are all still active and updated with new content coming out (except overwatch rip). Sure the market got bigger but it feels like back in 00s and early 10s a games life was shorter and more people tended to play the same thing.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  If that was true, you’d see people playing old games. And sometimes you do. Age of Empires 2 is more popular than Age of Empires 4. Considering the majority of people are still playing new games, that would suggest the newer games are better. You maybe getting old with your friends and no longer have interest in watching esports anymore.
unixhero 4y ago
Well is starcraft2 really that fun to watch?
ck2 4y ago
Imagine putting esports into the Olympics, lol IOC is well known to be super-dooper corrupt and that was icing on the cake.
lowbloodsugar 4y ago
Free money no longer available. People stop throwing free money at anything and anyone. More at 11.
farseer 4y ago
For a moment I read that as escorts and it still made sense.
sureglymop 4y ago
I think one of the problems is that eSports games can change rapidly. For me it's easy to not watch soccer for 5 years and then watch a match and still know what's going on. But i don't have the mental capacity or even time to do the same for a valorant match. It's great for the niche, not simple enough for the masses (viewers).

218 points by tmlee 4y ago

That's because the smart money has moved on to Pickle Ball. /s

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 4y ago
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 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
  - ketzo 4y ago
    No need for the weird shot at women. Streaming makes more money than esports, period.
    - spinach 4y ago
      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.
    - runnerup 4y ago
      Indeed. The top woman streaming on twitch ranks #64 and the second most popular woman does not break the top 100.
  - IntelMiner 4y ago
    misogyny isn't cool
- tashoecraft 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    Isn't the very definition of 'pro' that they get paid to do it? Prize money, sure, but also sponsors.
    - michaelt 4y ago
      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 https://liquipedia.net/pubg/BBL_Esports
      - wingerlang 4y ago
        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 4y ago
        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.
Ekaros 4y ago
And on other side popular players can possibly make same money as streamers or influencers with less risk and effort.
- deelowe 4y ago
  To me, this is what's changing and it's not just changing esports.
  - makestuff 4y ago
    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 4y ago
  So the classic sports model? Step 1. Be good at a sport and become famous Step 2. Convert Fame into money by endorsing products.
  - Godel_unicode 4y ago
    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.
  - HDThoreaun 4y ago
    This is true for soccer, but almost all American athletes make the vast majority of their income off team salary.
  - 4y ago
rwnspace 4y ago
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.
Macha 4y ago
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.

mb22 4y ago

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.

Bilal_io 4y ago
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.
- jameshart 4y ago
  Soccer clubs aren’t regional?
  - smcl 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      Okay, makes sense. Doesn’t seem to restrict the ability of soccer clubs to build fanatical fanbases though
      - smcl 4y ago
        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

humanlion87 4y ago

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 4y ago
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 4y ago
  MarineLord and BeastyQT might agree!

Verdex 4y ago

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.

HDThoreaun 4y ago
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.
- midiguy 4y ago
  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.
4y ago

zlqart 4y ago

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.

Raidion 4y ago
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.
s1artibartfast 4y ago
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.

Decabytes 4y ago

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 4y ago
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 4y ago
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.
leetcrew 4y ago
> 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 4y ago

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.

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Narew 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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.
kentonv 4y ago
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".

banannaise 4y ago

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 4y ago

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 4y ago
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 4y ago

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 4y ago
> 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.

IceHegel 4y ago

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.

endominus 4y ago
Who considers Starcraft II, of all games, the first esport? Was it ever even considered as competitive as the original Starcraft?
- htag 4y ago
  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=PLoBxKk9n0UWc8-5eHtZXvg4Y5wRwFavnm https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WbXgaLr_eA&list=PLoBxKk9n0U...
- rollcat 4y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarCraft_in_esports

mlinsey 4y ago

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.

TheAceOfHearts 4y ago
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!

rvba 4y ago

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.

themodelplumber 4y ago

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.

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TheAceOfHearts 4y ago

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.

Raidion 4y ago
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.
Ekaros 4y ago
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.

tacticaldev 4y ago

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 4y ago
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.
- rvba 4y ago
  If you read about history of football/soccer in USA you can see how many leagues failed. Those other sport leagues kept failing too and "franchises" keep switching cities.

mjr00 4y ago

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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_Crisis_(video_game) [1] https://www.polygon.com/2019/2/25/18239845/overwatch-goats-meta-triple-tank-explainer https://www.polygon.com/2019/2/25/18239845/overwatch-goats-m...

jerf 4y ago

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.

yesimahuman 4y ago

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.

sylens 4y ago

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.

ilyt 4y ago
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.
themanmaran 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.

dogleash 4y ago

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?

s_dev 4y ago

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.

intrasight 4y ago
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.
- aflag 4y ago
  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.
  - CyanBird 4y ago
    Soccer's history is very interesting, there used to be several competing international or local bodies fighting each other for control over soccer rules and therefore how people "ought" play soccer and therefore power Blizzard vs Kespa is very much that situation happening again. Now days in soccer the field is the way it is exactly because of fifa's ever present hand
  - KptMarchewa 4y ago
    It's not a big problem given that SC2 is free right now. Unless you mean that ToS (not toss) is somehow a big barrier that keeps StarCraft from getting bigger.
Reubachi 4y ago
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

helen___keller 4y ago

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.

cnntth 4y ago
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.
HDThoreaun 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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.

rchaud 4y ago

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?

Pwntastic 4y ago

https://archive.vn/LhQEa https://archive.vn/LhQEa

ninth_ant 4y ago

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 4y ago

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.

bobobob420 4y ago

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

epolanski 4y ago

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.

jmcgough 4y ago
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.
- nightpool 4y ago
  TFA: > Making matters worse, viewership for League of Legends’ Championship Series, one of the most mainstream leagues in esports, is at a five-year low, according to data aggregated by Esports Charts. As viewership declined, broadcast and streaming deals became less lucrative or less common for US and European esports leagues.
  - uhuruity 4y ago
    I don't know what the viewership numbers are, but as someone who watches a lot of LoL across all the major leagues (LCS in North America, LEC in Europe, LCK in Korea, LPL in China), I wouldn't be surprised if LCS viewership falls even while others do well. The standard of play in LCS is far worse than the other three regions, and there are no redeeming features either (LEC is worse than LCK/LPL but they do a lot of fun things with their production that makes it entertaining to watch overall).
pastacacioepepe 4y ago
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.

nitwit005 4y ago

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 4y ago
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 4y ago
Loot boxes. Gaming is all about putting people in a Skinner box and emptying their wallet now.

pier25 4y ago

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.

khiqxj 4y ago

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

Doorstep2077 4y ago

[flagged]

j-bos 4y ago
Unrelated note: Are you generating comments with gpt?
- FooHentai 4y ago
  Yes, that is GPT output.

deleted 4y ago

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QuadDamaged 4y ago

I was involved with the London esports scene from 2010 to 2014, running events that would gather up to 500 people for blizzard and valve games. I left the scene because I could not morally justify the exploitation of the majority of the talent. I hoped that the younger guys would be finding a way to make it work for the majority but it still irks me how many years have been wasted by young adults on a wild goose chase. Some very few were able to make a living out of it and deserve 100% what they pulled, but man, what a churn in that industry. Devastated that TB / Odee didn't get to manifest a vision for player's union. That would have made a difference.

p1necone 4y ago

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.".

lbhdc 4y ago
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.
smeagull 4y ago
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.
wolverine876 4y ago
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?
- 4y ago

smm11 4y ago

At the rate we're going it's going to be 1988 again before you know it.

dannyeei 4y ago

Some smaller companies are doing cool things with esports https://youtu.be/RkrWz7G-blY?t=841 https://youtu.be/RkrWz7G-blY?t=841

ok_dad 4y ago

I feel like simracing as an esport will be very successful sometime after we stop using gasoline even for racecars. Why even race around a track once the sims are as accurate as real life? Just put drivers in fancy g-force feedback cockpits and have them race in the virtual world!

Rotdhizon 4y ago

This is a minor take from someone who used to play CoD at a very high level (cash tournaments, wager matches, GB/CMG/UMG front page teams). At least from the perspective of games like Call of Duty and Overwatch, I think at least some chunk of it is that the quality of games is rapidly decreasing and it's killing off the fanbase. I remember back when it seemed like everyone I knew was following the CoD pro scene, watching the streams, tournaments, championships, etc. Nowadays I don't know a single person who still engages with that content and the responses I get from them are that they don't enjoy watching the games anymore. The current CoD (MW2 remastered), there are pro players making commentary and tweeting about how much they hate the games design. The person who is probably the single best known pro CoD player Scump is retiring now and he's said in side comments that it definitely has to do with how bad the game is designed. People seem to be losing confidence in these companies that make the games with the biggest esports scenes. Overwatch 2 now has also received quite a bit of negative press. There's probably a good chunk of anecdotal experiences inside my view but this is my take on things.

MivLives 4y ago
I think people are just split up over more games now. Every few years you get a LoL, a PUBG or a Minecraft where it seems like the whole world is playing at once. Then a good chunk of people move on, and there's not always a big thing to move onto. But some people remain. And I think people generally prefer the eSports of the games they know how to play. Right now off the top of my head there's eSports for Overwatch, CSGO, dota 2, lol, apex, Fortnite, hearthstone, rocket league, pubg, valorant, rocket league, sim racing and countless fighting games. And those are all still active and updated with new content coming out (except overwatch rip). Sure the market got bigger but it feels like back in 00s and early 10s a games life was shorter and more people tended to play the same thing.
Gigachad 4y ago
If that was true, you’d see people playing old games. And sometimes you do. Age of Empires 2 is more popular than Age of Empires 4. Considering the majority of people are still playing new games, that would suggest the newer games are better. You maybe getting old with your friends and no longer have interest in watching esports anymore.

unixhero 4y ago

Well is starcraft2 really that fun to watch?

ck2 4y ago

Imagine putting esports into the Olympics, lol IOC is well known to be super-dooper corrupt and that was icing on the cake.

lowbloodsugar 4y ago

Free money no longer available. People stop throwing free money at anything and anyone. More at 11.

farseer 4y ago

For a moment I read that as escorts and it still made sense.

sureglymop 4y ago

I think one of the problems is that eSports games can change rapidly. For me it's easy to not watch soccer for 5 years and then watch a match and still know what's going on. But i don't have the mental capacity or even time to do the same for a valorant match. It's great for the niche, not simple enough for the masses (viewers).