This is what's happening when you watch a competitive game of Counter Strike (Valve) or Starcraft (Blizzard).
Sure there are institutions like FIFA and Wimbledon but nobody owns football/soccer.
My proposal would be for a game to be competitive it must be open source by default -- a generous license like MIT.
Blizzard basically treated the game as "done" and the competitive scene turned into a major esport organically.
Running esports like actual sports is not really how esports came to be, which is why I very much believe this to be the wrong way to go about it. These days tournament organizers care more of storylines of players battling each other than the actual sport, because that's what's relatable to viewers, humans are hardwired to like stories so now they try to leverage that more than it was done back on 2016 or so
Blizzard tried to force the leagues and players to play both games at the same time.
I remember very well how SC2 fans on websites like teamliquid wanted to "kill" Brood War too, so SC2 would somehow get more viewers.
Blizzard didnt really know what to do with Brood War's popularity.
But you make a good point about open source. It would have the added advantage of being open to code review to find flaws that allow cheating.
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
But in US, MLB owns baseball. NFL owns American football. What I mean is, they literally own the mechanism of play for these two sports and allow the individual teams to compete in the leagues, which they must make many concessions to be a part of. aA "copy" of MLB can't pop up and play the same exact game, MLB owns every part of it.
IE; your "problem" with competitive gaming infrastructure is exactly how competitive sport is and has succeded. Apples to oranges of course tho
How many kids play baseball in the US and don't pay royalties to MLB? How many kids play football and don't pay royalties to NFL?
All these same kids -- when playing Starcraft have already in someway paid Blizzard money. You cannot play Starcraft legally without paying them money. You can play football in your backyard whenever you want.
You also typically will pay some manufacturer for basketball equipment before you play.
You don't have to pay the NBA. Hell, you don't even have to pay Wilson, the official basketball manufacturer of basketballs for the NBA. You could buy a Spalding, or any random brand.
Strictly speaking, you can: both StarCraft 1 and StarCraft 2 have free versions.
You do need to pay for the HD graphics for SC1 though, and for SC2 you'd have to pay for some campaigns or co-op commanders. And it's quite common for eSports to be free to play, with mostly just charging for cosmetics.
I get what you mean, though: even if there are free versions, it's still explicitly under the game developer's control.
That's a very different relationship from NFL or MLB.
* SC2 works as you say, but from what I remember SC1's Korean leagues were run without Blizzard's consent/management. Obviously with SC2 they then 'fixed the glitch'. Probably the same for SC Remastered as well.
* There's an interesting case where the old C&C games are being slowly reimplemented in full by open source coders, in which case I imagine EA can't do anything even if they wanted to: https://www.openra.net/
The MLB doesn't "own" baseball nor does the NFL "own" football. Both of them are gestalt entities comprised of the member clubs.
The NFL are the 32 member clubs. MLB are the 30 member clubs. You can't start a football team and compete in the NFL because the 32 member teams don't want to play against you.
Any concessions a team makes "to the league" is really a concession made to the other teams. For the NFL, every year, the 32 owners get together and vote on various rule changes. Same with the MLB.
MLB is a little weird in that it does have a government allowed monopoly on professional baseball, but no other league does. Like, you could start a rival baseball league, but MLB could take whatever action it wanted to squash your league (assuming all those actions were legal otherwise). But nothing except very anti-competitive practices are stopping you from starting your own baseball league. Just, good luck airing your games, or finding fields that can seat more than 500 people, or being able to sell tickets online, or advertising. MLB can make agreements to exclude rival leagues from everything.
The NFL can't do that. Which is why you get the USFL, the XFL, the Spring League, the AAFL, the XFL again, Arena football, etc. It's just that no one is capable of putting up the money to compete with the NFL. You're either overpaying what any NFL club would pay for a player or fielding players no NFL club would take. And that's not to dismiss any of those guys in terms of athletic ability. Being in the top 1% of athletic ability is still pretty fucking good. But the NFL would be more like the top 0.1%.
But no one is doing that. Average salaries for all of these leagues were under the average salary for the NFL of the time. There just isn't the money because there's no base. And it's because the NFL has built its brand(s) over decades. The NFL makes money hand over fist because they've gotten there over the years. And they essentially got in when the competition was on their level. New competitors on the scene have a much harder path.
The biggest difference is that professional sports leagues are essentially team owned and team run. Collectively, but still.
A better analogy would be Wilson, Rawlings, Nike, Spalding, etc. Wilson make a football called "The Duke". It is made to the specifications set forth by the NFL. They also make the NBAs basketballs. Rawlings makes the baseballs for the MLB. Wilson/Rawlings gets exactly zero input into how the game is played. The people who agreed to play each other do that.
Whereas in eSports, the maker of the equipment (essentially) is the one dictating how to play the game. It would be like if the US Playing Card Company decided to start dictating how the World Series of Poker was run.
So what you have is that eSports is seen as advertising for the game rather than the product itself. That's what separates other leagues from eSports. Every other professional sports league treats the competition as the product. Mainly because they have to. Riot, Epic, Blizzard, Valve, WotC, etc. all see their "professional" leagues as advertising avenues for their "actual" product.
And big part of SC staying power was because of community made maps and stuff.
CS (which gave birth to Valorant in turn) and TF2 (which Overwatch traces lineage to) also came from mods.
So it's not really the license just sheer fact community can take it and start modifying if it doesn't work, or evolve if it gets stale.
> The FIA is the governing body for world motor sport and the federation of the world’s leading motoring organisations. Founded in 1904, with headquarters in Paris, the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA) is a non-profit making association. It brings together 244 international motoring and sporting organisations from 146 countries on five continents. Its member clubs represent millions of motorists and their families.
But anyway my point was that F1 is not "open source" and it's quite successful.
The FIA. But not because the sport is owned by the FIA. Formula 1 has selected the FIA as its governing body, not the other way around.
There is no “amateur” F1. You can go to track days in different cars. You can go karting. The gulf between that and F1 is huge.
Unlike football, or basketball, or cricket, or rugby, or volleyball, or…
My point is simply that the popularity of sports is really a cultural phenomenon.
Honestly I dont see a problem with it.
E.g. MMA. It's going pretty well.
That's one aspect, the other aspect is that the opensource base can end up becoming the reference implementation of a genre. It can become a more sustainable environment, where people are trying to improve the game (and get paid through the organisations that run tournaments and such) rather than create a competitor.
Mentioned elsewhere is the case of Kespa vs Blizzard. Kespa would run starcraft Broodwar like a reality TV show where the entertainment of thhe viewer would come first to demerit of the competition (think added randomness into the game state), whereas Blizzard would strip the reality tv angle and randomness and focus near soly on the actual sport/competition angle rather than optimize viewer entertainment
"You need to pay us for a copy but can modify it however you want" type of license from game company would work entirely fine
Actually very cool on it's own, but difficult not to categorize as cheating if it's not intended to be a programming competition.
The meta of malware clients and rare clients with the best bots will be interesting.