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Why E-sports hasn’t worked – A study in Starcraft
WARNING: the following contains large amounts of wild and totally unbacked conjecture, massively exaggerated for effect and large amounts of incoherent ramblings but it’s a blog so =)
Starcraft in Korea is probably the only example of a truly successful esport. While there has been some competition around the world in others in leagues like CPL, etc, it has never reached the notoriety or success of the Starleague in Korea. To ask why, I will examine by comparison esports worldwide (with some wild generalisations) to Starcraft in Korea.
Firstly Starcraft has that which so few esports has – watchability. FPS by its very nature is difficult to spectate, and FPS is the generally preferred esport (I’m ignoring DOTA, since I know nothing about it) in the majority of the foreign community (ie CSS, Quake etc). I watch esports to be shown something that I could NEVER even dream of pulling off, for instance BoxerS’ immortal marines, or the insane shots that the Quake pros pull off. I also love watching the mentality behind it, the insane build orders and mind games (JulyZerg anyone) or the incredible prediction of player movements (Quake again). Where FPS, especially team based, falls far below RTS in watchability is getting an overall perspective. From a first person view you have no direct knowledge of the enemy (or enemies) movements, nor even that of your team other than that directly visible. A third or fixed camera fixes this, but that removes the most enjoyable part, watching the players themselves. With RTS on the other hand, an observer is still seeing what the players see. Even though you might not see the mouse movements and hotkeys used to make Savior’s mutalisks rape, you can see the result just as much as he can (sometimes more, since the FPVods are so quick its hard to know what is going on). This observer view doesn’t compromise on being able to spectate the vast majority of the game at the same time.
Secondly Starcraft is ever evolving. Each season the “meta-game” (to borrow a tasteless phrase) is changed, sometimes subtly, sometimes considerably, but the introduction of new maps. Quake 3 by contrast was still playing the same maps as in the original Quakeworld (aerowalk, ztn), CSS (though I haven’t really followed the pro-circuit a lot) still plays dust a whole lot. This leads to stagnation in the playstyle (something some argue we are seeing with the macro focused maps in Starleague, but that’s beside the point). This stagnation ultimately decreases the watchability of the esport. Ironically the lack of decent maps released with starcraft probably helped its longevity since it forced an active map making community to evolve, whereas a game with good standard maps creates no need and thus a less active community.
The effect of sponsorship can’t be denied. Starleague has been well sponsored by companies with no affiliation to any particular game, which has meant there has been no influence to run the publisher’s latest game (FEAR on CPL anyone) or ensure that the game is one that shows of the sponsor’s hardware’s full graphical features.
Finally, the mechanics. I’m not going to stick on this issue, because lord knows its been slightly covered in the SC2 forum. Even though I can’t play like toxjk, I can occasionally fluke an awesome rail twitch. On the other hand I can NEVER pull off JaeDong’s muta dance. Though both require huge skill in order to perform consistently, muta dancing requires a fairly complex set of actions just to pull off once, whereas the other can be achieved once with pure luck (or at least, to a greater extent).
The question of balance has not even been considered and nor will I, because its too complex an issue to answer other than to say starcraft is balanced, all games aim for this, few necessarily achieve it.
Clearly starcraft presents some interesting comparisons with other esports as to its success where others have failed. Many might argue that Korean culture itself has something to do with it. Again, this is a question I can’t answer as this sort of conjecture is even beyond my bullshitting capability, other than to say, in Korea starcraft has eclipsed all others.
Thanks for reading my first attempt at a completely incoherent blog =D
  
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Good writing, everything is true. 
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thatswhy i say, 'the highest goal any game can ever reach is being equal to brood war'
sc2 included
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Please allow me to rephrase your whole essay in one equation:
watchability + balanced and tough competition + evolving metagame due to maps = lots of interested viewers -> lots of sponsors -> success
^^
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Actually, quake takes alot of skill, more so than just muta micro/multi task, it took a looooong time for me just to perfect a 400+ ups strafe jumping more so than muta micro. Learning movement is hard in quake, its not only shooting.
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South Africa4316 Posts
I like it, you make some good points about the ease of watching FPS games, which I've always thought is fairly easy to do, but I've never really enjoyed, especially team based games. I would have preferred if you had gone into more depth on the last few points though. Nice writing though.
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I know, I love bunny hopping, its a shame that so many of the new games and gamers view bunny hopping as an exploit where it is really an absolute art when its done right. I love the trick jump maps as well, though my strafe jumping is unfortunately not great so I struggle a bit. I was just simplifying to try and make my point =)
LOL VIB, yeah, thats pretty much the TLDR version
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Older FPSes are alot better e-sports.
The maps are less detailed, which means less curvy, which means tighter, which means skillfull-er. Also barrels on CSS piss me the fuck off.
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Agree entirely, not just for better, cleaner maps, but for harder gameplay. If you have ever played quakeworld, games have basically gone backwards since then (I prefer quake 3 myself, but qw is a more pure experience to be fair).
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what about beat em ups?
they have the ease of viewing and i'd expect the meta-game is close to as complex if you get into one.
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On September 11 2008 22:19 drift0ut wrote:
what about beat em ups?
they have the ease of viewing and i'd expect the meta-game is close to as complex if you get into one. It doesn't matter how complex it is. If it's fixed instead of flexible like in starcraft (because maps always change) at one point the game will be dessicated to a point where everybody know every single detail of the game by heart and it will just get older, older and older. Eventually dying.
SC lasts because it's always changing. Complexity isn't important. Starcraft is very simple in mechanics when you look at it. It's complexity is created by the always changing strategies, due to maps.
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you cant make a game perfect, like a book, every unit has its lore/concept/model and special abilities, the interface is retarded-friendly , the graphix are awesome and glitches are banned, and expect this game to grow...
competition relies on more so than art of war books, strategy definition, thats why quake and sc are so good, you got mechanics that allow the gamer to develop a completely new way to use the units and game elements
thats one of the things that make me think that
"idle workers buttons are Parkinson-friendly too"for example
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On September 11 2008 22:52 VIB wrote:Show nested quote +On September 11 2008 22:19 drift0ut wrote:
what about beat em ups?
they have the ease of viewing and i'd expect the meta-game is close to as complex if you get into one. It doesn't matter how complex it is. If it's fixed instead of flexible like in starcraft (because maps always change) at one point the game will be dessicated to a point where everybody know every single detail of the game by heart and it will just get older, older and older. Eventually dying. SC lasts because it's always changing. Complexity isn't important. Starcraft is very simple in mechanics when you look at it. It's complexity is created by the always changing strategies, due to maps.
i hope that the smash bros level editor cures this problem, if only brawl had been designed to be played competitively.
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true true cant beat good ol starcraft imo ^^
boxer immortal marines were pretty rapage huh? lol
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Even though I can’t play like toxjk, I can occasionally fluke an awesome rail twitch. On the other hand I can NEVER pull off JaeDong’s muta dance.
This might be a bit of a nitpick but I don't get the point of this sentence. I have no idea what game you are talking about but I get the idea that a rail twitch is a 1 time thing that takes less than a second to do, and if you do 1 (only 1) in a low level game it won't equal auto-win. This would be more equal sniping a marine/scv/turret w/o taking any meaningful damage rather than JaeDong's entire muta dance. Because if you perform a muta dance of pro-caliber against all but top players you auto-win the game, while sniping 1 worker/turret/marine won't auto-win you the game.
Your article had very good points epically the one about maps, we should probably ask blizzard if they intend to change ladder maps for SC2 to keep the game changing.
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its better ask bliizzard if sc2 will allow such interactivity and constant gameplay evolution
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Nice and interesting article.
I must add though that I think it's MUCH easier for FPS games to be semi-popular in an e-sports arena just because balance isn't such a huge factor like it is for RTS games. It doesn't really matter if rockets are the only weapon that's good (quake 1) since it's equal for everyone. In RTS, if the balance is flawed it literaly destroys the whole game from an e-sport perspective.
Bottom line: Mediocre FPS games don't look half as bad as a mediocre RTS games in e-sports, BUT when you manage to get out the perfect RTS (starcraft) we see that RTS owns FPS pretty hard from an e-sports perspective because of all the points you stated in your OP.
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shouldn't this be in a blog?
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On September 12 2008 05:17 Phoned wrote:
shouldn't this be in a blog?
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Do you know what section you're in, or... Hmm.
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EPT
. Not to mention you dont know who is winning (in a perspective of a person who never played the game) when a battle occurs.
