History and future of eSports

First and foremost, I want to bring some light to the dark of my own experience, so that I can give you some context in what I might have gone through, or what I might know.
On a beautiful summer day in June 99, a evergreen of gaming, the well-known Halflife modification Counter-Strike was released and hit the surface, and this is, where my personal story basically starts aswell.
I was 14 years back then, and I played PC games for 2 years. I started with Starcraft from release on, but I only played the campaign or against AI, so I wouldnt count that. I had no machine that ran Half-Life, so I could only play it at a friends, so I wasnt at the beginning of Half-Life either. But on some ironic correlation, the first LAN party I attended to (together with a friend, so we shared PCs), was a week after the release of CS, and somebody brought it up. So I started with Counterstrike, first on LAN. We played it on small garage LANs, but we also attended to a "bigger" LAN at the next bigger town with about 100 players, so about 5 or 6 teams competed against each other, and I fell in love with the idea of playing games competitive.



I played Counterstrike until 2003, which a short sidestep to Quake3 duelling, on a good competetive level, been in teams in which players played, that later made their way into the upcoming EPS, to give an idea.
2003 I switched to Battlefield 1942 and was in one of the Top5 teams in Germany and Top20 in Europe.
After that, shame on me, I wasted 2 years on WoW, before getting back into a team of a guy I played CS classic back in 2000, only this time for Counterstrike:Source, again with decent, but not outstanding success.
Then I finally got the curve to RTS, beginning with War3, coming back to beloved Broodwar, and now finally playing in a clan in Starcraft 2.
I have organised and played in teams for 12 years, to an amount where you could regard it as a half-time job. I have won some Tournaments or LANs in different games, and placed in others, and haven't earned a single cent with esports. And I'm fine with that.

So lets go back to the beginning: this is where my story of esports developement starts.
When I finally got regular access to the Internet (some people might remember on those good old modem days), I soaked in any information about competition, ladders and cups, but only for the purpose of knowing: who are the best. I didn't care about any money the people won in the first place, and most of them didnt either. I can remember Clanbase Eurocup Finals (the biggest and most prestigious tournaments back then) held online, and once they managed to pull off offline events, there was no price pool, some events couldnt even cover your travel expenses.



It was like how the foreigner Broodwar community worked before Starcraft 2 was released, maybe even more poor.
The CPL Organisation started with tournaments with huge prize money, and I think that the history hasnt given that organisation enough credit for what it did for esports, although its recent history.
The World Cyber Games concept started aswell and had huge impact on the scene.
ESL started to establish a unique and in its form untouched format of professionalising esports in Germany with the EPS series for which we are envied.
The price pools went bigger and bigger, and the most important thing is: what many, if not all of us were not able to imagine, finally got true: some players out of the West didnt just get travel costs paid. They didn't just get some equipment for free. They didn't just get a homepage or a game server paid. They didn't just make some prize money on top of that to buy some neat stuff, and they didn't just make enough money to cover their education to some point. No, some distinct people in the west could make their living out of gaming. Some.

So far, this is a great story. But some people have forgot, where this all came from. I have the feeling that many people take for granted that has costed millions of man-hours to accomplish, that players can earn money from what is fun.
A necessary comparison: this might struck Americans really hard, but outside of the US, football (soccer) is the biggest sport in the world. The most popular, with a huge volume of cash flow in the industry lying behind it.
Thousands and thousands of people stream into the stadiums every weekend to watch a modern mix of gladatior, athlete and entertainment. But this is not what the idea of football was or is, the idea is just the game itself.
On every weekend, in Germany more people play in the amateur leagues some meaningless matches without getting money for it, most of the time even without having spectators, than watching the games in the stadiums.
The power and the mass phenomenon of football has not come from the idea of making money out of it, and is not carried by the idea of making money out of it. It is carried by millions and millions of people giving their heartblood voluntarily to making football happen, let it be players, functioneers, referees, spectators. As a side product, a very disclosed group of people can make money out of it.
And this is, where esports might be heading to. Might be, I say. Why? Because some people don't seem to get what this is all about.



This very one most fantastic sport of all time, our sport, esports, is only possible, because of many hundreds and thousands of people investing all the time they have and getting nothing but zero money out of it to make it happen.
And it has only reached the point it is now, because some guys 10, 15 years ago had this idea and fought for it.
I have the impression that too many people, especially players, go into esports with the fix idea of money somewhere in the back of their heads.
But what they don't think about, is that all this money is not possible without all the people that don't make it.
All the admins, news posters, amateur players, fans, spectators, given all that time, if not even investing money into esports.
These are the people that make this all happen, and these are the people you all should be so thankful of.
Players are substitutable. If a take a random bunch of people and determine who is the best, I have a champion. But I can't let a random bunch of people build up the infrastructure.

Don't get me wrong, I love when people can make money out of what they love to do. But I don't like when it becomes the driving force.
My dream of esports, when I was 14 years old, was, that esports survives. I wanted to be able to follow it while I grow up. I wanted to have new championships, I wanted to see people play computer games for their countries, to have them be famous, if only inside the very small community of the game.
I didn't give a shit about if it grows to infinity and if we can fill stadiums and make money. I didn't expect webstreams to watch games live, I was pleased with reading news about it and seeing occasional screenshots of the end score when replays werent around yet.

I just didn't want it to die at some day, and I feared that it might happen.
The reason was, I really tried to bring people into it. I tried it with my family, my parents, all my friends. My parents at least now respect that I love this sport although they can't understand why. My brother is the only person that has really cought fire on it. Many of my friends play computer games, some even played with me in leagues, but they all dropped off and didn't get interested in global competition at all. Some of them try to convince me that professional poker might be somewhat interesting, which I will never understand in my life, but refuse to understand how one can play computer games on a competitive level, or follow it.

I learned some people in the western communities envy Germany for our professional leagues and players salaries, but I tell you, we have quite an amount of rednecks around here that would ban esports from the surface yesterday if they could, and the teams around here that pay oh so much money can't sustain the salaries the started to pay once the EPS established anymore.

Two years ago, I visited the World Cyber Games finals in Cologne, which is almost a thousand kilometres from my home, I slept over at a friends place, to see this. And I shed tears for what I saw, tears of joy.
The whole event, seeing the players play there, meeting with the Counterstrike team that represented my beloved second home country Australia, talking to some players at this huge event, seeing Grubby beat Moon on the main stage and cheering afterwards, this really touched me.
This made me look back at my own history, at what I feared that might happen, and I count this to the best experiences in my life.
And I was thankful. Thankful for all this.

This is where it all comes back to, and this is what I would love to see more in the conscience of our community.
If this grows to the biggest sport ever, great. Then it shall be, and will happen.
But don't think about money, don't think about bringing cash everywhere.
Don't think you deserve money because you play the game you love.
Think about the passion that makes this so awesome.
Everyone that has ideas, dig into them, and make it happen.
Be thankful for the admins banning the shit out of idiots and running tournaments on their free time without any return.
Be thankful for having the opportunity to play against other players all over the world on competition.
Be thankful for that there are institutions out there that make this happen, and that this thing we all love hasn't died...