E-Sports Largest Games? - Page 2

On November 20 2010 06:21 trancey wrote:
It was also the first game to catch the attention of Western Sponsors outside of Asia and help carve gaming teams into lucrative organizations whose sole purpose is to function as a coverage and competitive hub for gamers.

On November 20 2010 06:31 trancey wrote:


It's not a lie, I was referencing that CS was a game that created Esports for Western Countries. Korean teams did attract Western Sponsors for SC, but I said *outside* of Asia.

You have to understand that CS peaked around the same time that SC:BW did in Korea.

On November 20 2010 06:39 trancey wrote:
Ah I stand corrected... But I still don't think Quake laid the foundation for Esports as much as CS and SC did. It was there first, but people didn't throw money at it like they did for CS. Imagine how many 5 man teams were being flown around for events, the game itself was an expensive Esport to maintain but sponsors/organizations still paid out for it.

On November 20 2010 04:58 son1dow wrote:
Counter strike, Halo, Quake Live, Starcraft 2, perhaps CoD are probably the main ones with sc2 probably being the most promising for the future.
Some fighting games are really big right now, but the biggest one ( Super street fighter 4 ) isn't getting the required support from it's creators, capcom and so it does not hold a big future apart from a few (huge ATM tho) community-run tournaments in the west, IMO. Some other fighting games are popular in Japan, but it's a very elitist, hardcore community so it is not very likely to spread.

Europe has been the stronger continent in western esports as a whole (sc guys might not agree but sc1 is only a small part of the games played here), but also a little bit more hardcore with their game choices so you always have to consider that.
Halo is all MLG, which is an USA based company as you may know.
Counter-strike has LAN all over the world but Europe has the, generally, stronger scene. It will have to die eventually if valve doesn't do anything and the community projects do not work out, but that has been said many times before.
Quake's community stronger in EU, but funnily NA always has a few players able to contend for the top spots.
Stacraft 2... you tell me It's big all over apparently.
CoD, I have no idea.
Japan>>USA>>>>>>EU in SF4 in my outdated, but most likely still correct knowledge.


Some other games are at least as popular (quake live actually has a pretty small community but has still managed to survive and attract sponsors throughout the years, 'the last big tournament' is a very famous quote used throughout the years), but don't have the long-lasting communities and appeal, IMHO. These include TF2 (yeah, big community, look how many tournaments it has tho), Smash etc.

Personally, I'm pretty elitist in the way I view these games, in the way that I only actually support the ones I consider hardcore like Quake, starcraft and some fighting games, even hating some of the others that I consider dumbed down - like TF2, CoD, the worst one - Halo and even, flame on, CS 1.6, (and don't get me started on MMOs, guitar or music and mobile phone games LOL) so I might not be the person to ask how big some of these games are but I do know a lot about the ones I follow and would love to clear a few things up, if you'd like me to.

On November 20 2010 06:21 trancey wrote:
Being an industry professional thats followed Esports for 10 years, these are the top 5 in terms of longevity, prize pools, international exposure, and overall LAN scene development. I sorted them into series, If I were to pinpoint the exact title, it would be a lot harder to base assumptions since some are dwindling away and others are rising into the scene. It's just easier to lump all the titles of a specific series together, since most of the time, the scene just evolves to the next title.

Top 5 Esports Games:

1) StarCraft

From the conception of Esports, StarCraft was the game that revolutionized competitive gaming. The TL community does not need to be told about the legend of "The Emperor" and evolution of the StarCraft scene in Korea. It is the first and greatest competitive gaming community to ever exist. I haven't even touched on SC2 and I feel like I don't need to.



2) Counter-Strike

If one game drew attention away from the growing RTS scene of StarCraft in the early 2000s, it was definitely Counter-Strike. CS was the first to create a complex mIRC community existing to grow the competitive community at large. It was also the first game to attract Western Gaming teams sponsors and help carve teams into lucrative organizations (such as SK, Fnatic, etc.) whose sole purpose is to function as a coverage and competitive hub for gamers. Although the game is aging and the scene is virtually non-existent in NA, it's still surviving in EU and parts of Asia. Further more, even though CS's expansion was a catastrophic failure in the scene's eyes, the CoD franchise is looking to pick up with CS left off. I would say CS was a the perfect Esports of all-time for the FPS community, it was simple and very easy to pick up. The strategy and depth of skill between players existed at so many levels. Ron "Rambo" Kim works at MLG and I listened to him talk about CS mechanics, I never realized there was the depth in which different hand positions create for your game (he holds the mouse a different way depending on which gun/position he was in).



3) Street Fighter

This is probably the franchise I know the least about but I'm absolutely certain that this is one of the biggest scenes out there (especially in Japan and the West Coast). It's fair to say that Japanese and Korean culture are the most technologically advanced in all of Asia. The huge difference between the two their social norms in parenting. The Japanese fringe upon a child that stays at home all day and plays video games, every Japanese parent pushes their children to go outside and get off the computer. Where do the nerdy gamer kids end up? At the ARCADE, of course! Bound with the stereo-type that maybe the Japanese just like fighting and fighting games in general, Street Fighter is the closest game to an Esport that the Japanese have. Names like Daigo and Justin Wong are synomous with the SF scene, players like to trash talk in this scene but all have a level of respect for one another.



I know very little about Street Fighter (probably comparable to a Bronze League player), but what happens in this video is absolutely incredible. Daigo (considered the BoxeR of SF) vs. Justin Wong, the greatest rivalry in Fighting Games, was about to be defeated at 1% hp. Jwong unleashes a ultimate combo and if Daigo just blocked 1 hit, it would have killed him. The only way to have survived the 20 hit combo was to parry each one (a technique that requires you to point the joystick at each move in the combo at lightning speed), which is absolutely incredible in the fashion he did it.

4) Halo

Honestly, the Halo scene is pretty unknown outside of NA but is starting to get bigger. It's absolutely crazy what's happened at MLG with the talent and monopoly they have over the game. The prize pool and contracts offered to the pros are the only ones that can rival those made by Koreans.

Halo has ways of creating absolutely amazing plays by either sheer luck, crazy skill, or a combination of both. Seeing a pro player throw a sticky grenade onto another while being launched off into the sky seems quite normal among the top tier. The level of skill that the current pros have achieved is something that takes years of practice and building muscle memory to get to.



There is also a dynasty built into the pro scene that trumps every team that's ever emerged in competitions. The ORGE twins of Final Boss have dominated each Halo title tremendously, there's only one player that comes close to matching their achievements and he was actually their former teammate (Walshy, a SC2 fanatic by the way). There was an interesting article about ORGE2 on MLGpro today, it's quite interesting if you want to have an idea about how much this guy dominated the Halo scene. Here's some statistics on him:

Ogre 2 By the Numbers
Exited every Halo title in the franchise as National Champion.
Won four out of seven National Championships (the only player to ever do so).
Has 24 tournaments wins (three more than Walshy, the closest contender)
Final Boss is the only team to threepeat in Halo 3.
One of two players (with Walshy) to win a title in four games (Halo 1, 2, 3 and Shadowrun)
From 2003-2008, placed in the Top 2 in 38 straight tournaments.
Won 30 titles during the 38 tournament streak
From 2004-2005, won 10 straight tournaments
From 2005-2006, won nine straight tournaments

http://www.mlgpro.com/content/page/319667/Ogre-2-The-Greatest-Player-of-All-Time 5

5) Quake Series

It was honestly a toss up between WC3 and Quake for me, but given the longevity of the Quake scene and it's popularity in EU and NA, I had to give it to Quake... Besides, the Quake Live is FREE to play now (what other Esport game can you play for free online?).

Quake is considered the highest form of FPS in which it's a solo player's game, most other competitive FPS are team-based games, but Quake is the reigning Solo FPS game that trumps all others. The community and game have forged some of the greatest personalities and characters in the Esports scene. We're truly lucky to have attracted these characters into Esports, as they've evolved into helping SC2 and others scenes now.

The three people that can put it into perspective of how important Quake was into bringing them into Esports: Fatal1ty, Slasher, and 2GD. These three figures have helped grow Esports and multiple gaming scenes after beginning their careers in Quake. Fatal1ty just being an all-around badass and creating the first commercially marketed brand name based off an Esports figure, Slasher being the ultimate social networking champion of the internet, and 2GD serving as a commenting personality for Quake, WoW, and now BLC (this guy is honestly one of the best shoutcasters of all-time, esp for a Brit. I highly recommend listening to some of his old Quake or WoW commentaries, I'm not even sure how he got away with saying the things he said in-front of hundreds of thousands of people.)



In this match, Fatal1ty starts at 0-8 and comes back to rape... This video basically shows the competitive aspects at the top tier, which is basically memorizing spawn timers for players, weapons, and armor.

Honorable Mentions: Warcraft III, WoW: Arena, DotA, HoN, LoL, SSMB, FIFA

How much bigger does a game need to be?

On November 20 2010 07:13 trancey wrote:


I respectfully disagree about your topic on Halo... Even though I work for MLG (I've been working on PC staff for 3 years), I started playing Halo because of my association with it. Learning to point, shoot, and have a mastery of the joystick/controller is A LOT harder than learning how to use ASDF and a mouse.

Being a CAL-M CS player back in the day, it was pretty nice being able to adjust your sensitivity for AWP and switching back for Pistols/M4/AK. I'm not being a hater here, but use of the controller needed to be honed to play this game at a high level is quite impressive. I jumped into Halo 3 after not playing any of the others and it took me like 2 months to be able to hang with the online studs in 2s (the easy bracket by the way). The MLG Pros at Halo are on a whole different level and it takes years of practice to be able to hang with these guys (most of the top pros have played every Halo title).

Also, the Halo pros use the same tactics Quake players utilize. At the top level, every team has their spawn timers for weapons and opponents down to a science. I wish you could hear the lingo that the "Coaches" and players use during matches, it's like "Spawn on 4A, cover my flank on B2..." I have no idea what they're saying but it's all code for spawn points and places on each map.

Besides Halo being on Xbox, an "American" console, there are tons of International teams that attend MLG events... MLG just has a monopoly on the community and they pay out greatly for it. Like the top 25 Halo teams are under contract and cannot attend WCG's Halo Championships (so it's always some random B-Team that wins it). But, MLG pays their teams tons of money. Final Boss, Tsquared, and a bunch of others receieved $250,000 contracts. Tsquared was on 1.75 million Dr. Pepper bottles, Gilbert Arenas gave Final Boss a $1 Million Dollar Contract (Red Bull gave them a similar offer), ESPN sponsors MLG nights, and MLG Halo Gear will start appearing at JCPenny stores on the East Coast.

How much bigger does a game need to be?

On November 20 2010 07:23 Zechs wrote:


Your information about the number of international teams seems pretty misleading to me. Halo is fairly popular here in the UK but in the rest of Europe it's seen as a casual game like pretty much anything else on consoles. The above poster was talking about Halo being big in America and nowhere else and you haven't really said anything to refute that. About 2-5 European teams show-up to MLG (and that's an increase from 1-2 in the past) and they generally do quite poorly because they have noone to practice against over here - much like American CS teams at CPL in the past.

I'll give you an example from my own experience. When SK had a Halo team for a while the biggest event they got sent to was i36. Now, i-series is a pretty big deal in the UK - even bigger now with SC2 - but compared to 'The Majors' it's like a local LAN cafe's allnighter, just with a few more people. The squad ended up leaving because SK didn't take them seriously enough and wouldn't send them to something like MLG. I realise that's just a one-off example, but it's indicative of the major European teams' attitude towards console gaming in general.

On November 20 2010 06:55 ZlaSHeR wrote:

I'm sorry, but did you just write those names off the top of your head?

Halo and CoD are NOT big esports whatsoever, just because MLG hosts them doesn't mean they're big worldwide, because nobody plays the game at a pro-gaming level outside of MLG.

The list will include

Counterstrike 1.6
Starcraft 2/BW
Fighting games, at the moment the largest is SSF4

Those 3 by far dominant their genre's by a mile, after that you can find QL, Fifa series, and HoN right at their heels. LoL is big but its more of a semi-pro type of game, not professional quite yet, the amount of prize money for HoN tournaments is larger in general.

Halo is a slow game, the amount of control you need to play that game competitively is significantly lower than any other game you've listed so far. The game is much more simplistic, but when it comes down to it, its flashy, and its on an xbox which is the premier platform to play on in the US. All that said, once again it is NOT a major worldwide esport, there are no tournaments outside of MLG, the prize money exists only 4x a year at a level that we regularly see SSF4 tournaments hit every 2-3 weeks at a major.

On November 20 2010 07:43 lazyfeet wrote:
Funny that everyone seem to forget about dota which is big in china and southeast asia. They also have mmo esports like kart rider or those free to play fps games.

On November 20 2010 04:57 Ogna wrote:
Xaeiu thanks for a real answer and not some troll crap or search bla bla, every opinion is helpful

I see youre from austria, I will most likely move to vienna soon and start a business and I will try to incorperate it with esports

On November 20 2010 07:45 Risen wrote:


Trackmania!!! :D

And I can see where you're coming from with DotA... I just don't see it as top 5. (Don't get me wrong, I follow DotA, but that doesn't mean other people do)