Shady Numbers and Bad Business: Inside the Esports Bubble
kotaku.com
kotaku.com
Part of what helped propel traditional sports into ubiquity was the ability to have a ball and play anywhere with anyone you choose which allowed schools to build teams with practice fields and community leagues etc...
Modern games, at least as far as I can tell require you to connect to the IP holders company’s servers and often don’t allow you to pick and choose specifically who you play against which in turn makes it nearly impossible to build leagues and do team scrimmages, team practices, local community leagues, etc...
And the other major issue I see is the lack of quality spectator features in games.
My friends had a LAN party a few months ago and we played some older game, quake3osp(?) Its definitely old, but it seemed to have the kind of setup I imagine it would take for a modern game to really become as prolific as traditional sports. It had amazing spectator functions where you could jump from player to player at will, it had the ability to host the server yourself, you could trade players from the sideline onto your team at anytime, you could pause the match, you could practice on any map you wanted, you could pick a map and run around for an unlimited amount of time practicing, etc.. etc...
Modern games require too much interaction directly with the companies who control the IP for them to ever really take off.
Could you imagine if neighborhood kids playing football didn’t have the freedom to just run around the same field for hours and play against the same other team for hours? And were required to only play when everything is controlled by the Professional league who controls the nfl or mls branding? It never would have flourished.
Other than subbing in players, most source games have all of these features. Not sure about Dota 2, but certainly CS:GO and TF2 have all those features with a community that uses them.
I haven't looked at the config/set one up since HL1 days so here is a relevant article to how you would set that up https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=1990-UAV... and I am sure there is an equivalent one for source/hl2 games. It lets you set things like delay and so on and I remember it being relatively straightforward.
Basic guide here: https://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensive/comments/2arae2/how..., might be slightly outdated.
However, the swapping players from spectators would require them to directly connect into the game server, and simply spectate from there. I believe you can set them as coaches to prevent ghosting, as spectating directly from the server doesn't allow setting any sort of delay.
So the thing holding esports back is not enough barriers to entry?
Then why have none of the most successful esports had this characteristic? A characteristic they have all shared however, is a simple, out-of-the-box online multiplayer experience.
Archiving old games is an entirely seperate concern.
While esports has gained a little bit more traction since then, my suspicions are aligned with the article, it’s mostly due to dumping massive venture capital into hyping it. And it seems to have hit a wall.
I bet, if they want to move beyond the wall it has hit, one of the key moves will be to start implementing those features discussed above, which will foster the communities which will allow those organic communities to form.
The issue, in my opinion, is that getting good at something is _hard_. When you're a kid playing pickup basketball with your neighbors, that doesn't matter; you're all in the same pond and sure, while you can watch pro ball on TV and see what the pro players are like, you're never going to play against them. You're only playing against your local friends, and the skill level is probably going to be a bunch of people in the same order of magnitude. Maybe on occasion you'll get to a live tournament and run into somebody who's way better than you, but they're not local; after the tournament, they'll disappear back into their own pond and you don't have to worry about them.
With esports, there's no such thing as a pond; everybody's in the same ocean, and while the game will try to matchmake you with somebody around your skill level, that won't always happen. So when you beat your friends and think "huh, I'm pretty good at street fighter, aren't I?", you can immediately hop online and get double perfected by somebody using the worst character, and you realize that no, you're actually not good at all. And if you're not good, you can either put in the work to get better (which is hard) or you can play some other game where you don't have to confront the fact that you're not good at it (like basketball).
Most amateur leagues that do form around a game do use these kinds of features it may need to actually phone the home servers but online leagues generally just use default game functionality. I don't know any game that's worth playing competitively that doesn't have a feature for a 'custom game' or invite-only game. If it's worth playing competitively usually a group will spring up- it can be a hundred people or hundreds of thousands of people but those communities do exist from everything from soldat to Dota 2. You just have to go find them. Generally you don't start with a full team either, you play pugs (pick up games) and start to learn the competitive ropes just like you would in a more traditional game.
The downfall is unlike older titles where individuals rented servers and communities grew around servers easily, the lazy matchmaking that you can do nowadays makes actually meeting people you want to play with much harder than it used to be. You can play 10 hours in a matchmaking competitive game and never play with the same people twice, whereas you usually were playing with/against the same people all for at least an hour or two at a time. It's not impossible to do just is less organic to find people you want to play with at their worst and at their best.
I’m not trying to be cheeky. It’s just a very curious argument.
They did. We already went through this bubble / bust cycle once about 10 years ago, albeit on a much smaller scale. Look up the Championship Gaming Series.
I loved it! I had so much fun and I was playing with the best of the best and not a single person in my 10,000 student University (I was co-oping at the time) could even come close to challenging me. We had LAN parties all the time. We'd take over a computer lab, install Quake on every PC, then compete all afternoon long. I'd travel to regional lan parties (the big one hosted by members of my clan in Detroit) all the time. All my clan mates were located within a couple hours of each other. We were a Midwestern team (mostly Ohio and Michigan).
There was even a minor league. I once dropped down into the minor league because I got fed up with the politics of the majors and I was always very very good, but not Michael Jordan good. I was one of the guys on the team who supported the big star. I just couldn't quite make that super star tier. Our clan was always in the top 10 but couldn't crack the top 3.
Anyway I dropped down to the minors for a couple months. It was a mistake. I was so much better than everyone else I literally single handedly won games for the clan. Only one or two other people on the other teams challenged me, and they were likely A Leaguers moonlighting in the minors or just hadn't moved up yet. It was eye opening and felt like a real second tier league prepping people for the shot at the big league. I eventually moved back to the majors because it was unfair for the others on my team and I simply needed the challenge. I brought some of the better players with me.
I really believed that this was the beggining of true esports. Unfortunately my career as a professional gamer came to an abrupt end. I began to suffer from severe motion sickness as the games became more realistic graphically and real life became more of a priority.
We did all this via GameSpy and IRC. I look at things now and it's so different. It feels less organic, but it might just be that I'm removed from it now.
I also wonder how good I could have gotten had I been able to keep playing at this level. I would have another 20 years of experience. Also cheating (wall hacks and aim bots) were rampant at the time. To this day I believe the reason our team never broke into the top 3 wasn't for to lack of talent, it was due to the cheating. We were a good crew and we played honorably. Some of the better players in the better teams were eventually outed as cheaters.
I miss those days. Some of the best experiences of my life and I learned more than just the game. I learned politics, managing people and personalities, scheduling and discipline. I learned how to practice something rigorously and made many good friends who I have unfortunately lost touch with.
I sure hope others can still experience this today.
eSports has already taken off. 10mm tournaments, player salaries in excess of 200k, and 1mm+ viewer events.
Are you saying people will unsubscribe from Twitch channels because it didn't post a video for a day? That sounds crazy. Why does it happen?
[0] http://www.espn.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/24710688/fortnit...
Amazon Prime subscribers are '5 seconds of fame' subscribers. His core audience has stabilized to pre-Drake numbers as of December, around 5-6k tier 1 subscribers. Note, subscriptions on Twitch are different from 'follows.' Subscriptions have direct monetary value and follows are indirectly valuable metrics (analogous to subscriptions on YouTube).
Also, missing a day of streaming might mean that people whose monthly subscription ran out (and would have been reminded that day) end up not renewing. It's much easier, psychologically, to extend a subscription than to renew one you let lapse.
Also esports competitors skew young because league participation means you are taking 3-6 months off work to earn below minimum wage. These young players are often delaying college educations to compete. You may mistake their hunger for competitive spirit, but they're actually just hungry. Watch their streams in the off-season and listen to them dread the return to the "gaming house" and its frequency of ramen meals.
The Elder Scrolls Legends (TESL) had "drops", watching streamers play the game would give you in-game benefits. To the surprise of nobody, even small streamers (as long as they promised to host another TESL streamer afterward) had hundreds of viewers. Very, very quiet viewers who would not write in chat even once. Rebroadcasts became a thing with the biggest TESL streamer simply showing the same once recorded game-play over and over again. Because no one had to make any effort or pay to watch the stream.
Independent sites exist for esports betting. In Dota 2 there is also betting on pro games with the in-game shards that are earned only by playing (if the player is subscribed to this program with a fixed fee).
Precisely.
Just to give you a quick example - since time shifting came into play for TV consumption, the perceived value of TV advertising campaigns decreased (though I don't think it became cheaper, but I think that's for other reasons) - except for live sports events. That's a premium in a world where people can see content on their own terms, and where our attention is constantly shifting attention between screens.
Live sports events is the only time we're comfortable assuming that a huge audience has their attention retained in the TV screen.
It's a emotional thing, a social thing, and truth be told, it's the most spoiled type of content even few seconds after major in-game events. Everyone wants to see it in real time.
There's no need to give any incentive for this behavior. Hell there's a whole sales event surrounding it (beers, snacks, etc, thrive on such events).
Now, there are people who act the same way for esports... but like you said, if they need to inflate those numbers, something is not triggering it the right way, or maybe it simply doesn't have what it takes yet.
Constant meta changes, forced metas by developers, grinding, balance issues, boring (but effective) strategies, predictable outcomes, a lot of small things that off put their highest potential audience - the players. If they can't retain their attention, it will be difficult to do it for anyone else.
I'm not convinced. The NFL has all of these, and it's still huge. The one important thing e-sports lacks is tradition and culture. "Everyone" watches the superbowl. "My family grew up watching football/playing in high school"
This is all stuff that took 100 years to organically come together, though maybe it really only got big the past 40ish, I'm not sure.
My main reference is football (or soccer) since I'm European, but I think it's safe to say that all major sports evolved throughout the years.
Yet these changes aren't "every new season changes", neither are "current season" changes, and that's what's happening in these games. Simple patches throughout the seasons that are game changers.
They are done for the sake of balance or entertainment, but it impact of even minor changes sometimes it's enough to be exploited.
Tradition and culture takes a long time to build, and maybe we underestimate the stability it's required within the game itself.
I bet that if you played one of the most played MOBAS and if you came to play, or watch, the game 6 month or even 1 year later, you would find that the game changed are you have a hard time trying to grasp the "what" and the "whys" without reading patch-notes.
I can also bet you the core of football(soccer) hasn't changed since I was playing it during school breaks 20 years ago. I can grab a ball and play, or watch a game, and there's a common understanding of the game.
Maybe it's the simplicity of sports, maybe it's the limits of human condition, that make the games stable enough during long periods of time so that small communities start to play it and grow from there.
You will never hear anyone say "oh "the sport X" from the season of 1998 was when it was at it's best, fun to watch and play!" , yet that's a common theme on a lot of e sport games "oh the game was way funnier/balanced/etc on season X".
Maybe it's too hard to claim, that some soccer team from 1979 would beat a current team 2019, because the game indeed changed and that would weight a lot. But you can easily claim a team from 1999 would beat a team from 2019, because the game didn't change that much in that time window - training and conditioning changed with tech, but the game itself, didn't change that much.
https://www.theguardian.com/securedrop https://www.nytimes.com/tips
Population density/internet quality may have something to do with it as well. Europe and South Korea seem to have stronger esports scenes for just about every game. The players from those regions tend to be better, and they have more tournaments located there.
The reason why I suggest it's similar to boxing/wrestling is that really all you need to get into the market and trying to create an event is charisma, connections, and time to pull off a single event. It's not like there is an overarching master event planner for all events and leagues, it's a much more loose market and you may be able to throw a few big promotions a year. It's not too different than putting on an industry event like a home show, IT expo, or any other kind of weird infrequent event. Since the actual profits for those kind of events are slim at best people cut corners and be exploitative in all sorts of fun ways.
The question is always just going to be when are the subsidies/sponsorships are going to stop. A cynical part of me feels like there are a lot of people on the inside of corporations writing sponsorship checks are driven by people who are fans of esports as well- just the same as people who write checks for golfers or NASCAR.
Ouch. That's nothing.
Dota2's $25+ million prize pools are virtually entitely crowdfunded from the fans. Yesterday, a commonplace tournament wrapped up giving the winners $300K and a new Mercedes.
The article mentions Esports viewership is about to surpass pro sports, yet pro sports have massive government funding and support from elementary school up through stadium construction. They are further entrenched in monopolistic competition through cable TV and regulatory laws. So then is esports really the artificial bubble industry, and not pro sports?
Further, Esports has been linked with positive externalities such as cognitive benefits--high IQ development--while some of the pro sports are literally the opposite, being linked with CTE and other neurological destruction. Shouldn't public funding change, then?
If I had to choose a sport for my kid to have delusions of being able to go professional, I wouldn't pick esports, despite myself playing many of those games.
The intelligence argument is weak at best. Among other things linked with an increase in intelligence: a good night's rest and regular physical exercise. I will give you the hand eye coordination point though.
Ultimately, esports should be treated as exactly what pro (physical) sports are: entertainment, best in moderation.
If you blow out your knees before the age of 22 due to playing competitive team sports, you're probably not working on your feet for a living.
I'm not totally convinced it isn't. Franchise valuations and player salaries have been increasing at a very fast pace, all of which are propped up by television revenue. Should TV subscription numbers drop (as many predict they will), I'm not sure they can recapture that lost revenue.
It's not going to be a killer, likely, since they have other revenue streams such as merchandising, ticket sales, etc. But with many teams signing large, multi year deals just to stay competitive, I could see it causing a number of very painful years. It would not surprise me at all if at least one of the major professional leagues contracted sometime within the next decade.
I suspect this may be one of the reasons why Nate Nanzer is headed to Epic. If esports is in a bubble, then the best way to head it off is to boost Fortnite's ailing competitive scene to draw new audiences. All games should see a halo effect if Fortnite can start drawing the kinds of interest OWL has in the last year.
E-sports is a loss-leader for the video game industry. Duh.
This might sound too radical but League of Legends already does this with their ladder system: everyone who plays the game is ranked somewhere on the gigantic ladder and, if you're good enough, you can play against the pros if you get ranked up there. The NBA could do it too instead of attracting only 8 foot freaks of nature and guys who have been playing professionally since age 8. Fans would have a tangible reason to want to watch other than that the pros are pretty good.
I dunno. The NBA also makes oodles of money and they'd hate my system too so w/e.
Consider that rocket league has built in support for tournaments, and it's a ghost town because they're always won by Grand Champs, who are also usually twitch streamers, just destroying normal people.
Edit: it's also blatantly untrue that elite players are uninteresting, go watch any press conference with Von Miller or James Harden. This kind of uninformed pejorative just comes off sounding like sour grapes.
Also, I think your second paragraph contradicts the first one. "Everyone who plays the game is ranked somewhere on the gigantic ladder and, if you're good enough, you can play against the pros if you get ranked up there." How does one get good enough? By being one of "the select few who burn away 10s of hours a day no-lifing the stuff."
The reason why people want to watch "8 foot freaks of nature and guys who have been playing professionally since age 8" is exactly because they offer the best possible gameplay a human being can achieve. That's why they're professionals. If you want to make a living competing against average players, you could just stream on Twitch.
I'm not sure I follow how this fixes the problem identified in the first paragraph, namely that competitive systems draw people who spend all of their time practicing their skill.