I'm not sure where to put this, so I'll just leave it in Sports and Games. Mods can move it if they want.
Edit: I said fail more for effect than anything else; I don't think the current incarnation of esports is a failure. I do, however, believe that many people will be disappointed if they believe e-sports will become anything more than a very marginalized past time.
As our fledgling esports community grows larger and larger, we begin to dream. Can we indeed move into the mainstream? Will we have an esports television channel? Someday, will people go to a Starcraft match over a football game? Many factors point in the right direction. Day[9] daily 100 has over a million views on Youtube. Over 10,000 users are active on TL at any moment. Dozens of tournaments with huge sponsors for thousands of dollars are popping up everywhere.
Can Starcraft one day compete with mainstream sports?
While it is true that the esport community is bigger than ever before, there are inherent problems in e-sports that will forever limit its growth and prevent it from becoming accepted in society. Starcraft 1 in Korea will be the closest we will ever get to real credibility.
The main problem is lack of stability. Every time a sequel or a new popular video game is published, the community is asked to "switch over," with parent companies quickly ensuring the previous game's demise. Now imagine that you are a die-hard football (soccer in the US) fan. One day, the league suddenly makes a statement. "We have just created this awesome game called basketball. We will no longer show or support football." Two years later, the same league once again declares "We no longer support basketball, we will now be a rugby league." No tradition would be built, no lasting, growing fanbase would rise. Asking hardcore BW fans to switch over to SC2 is basically the same thing. Now imagine that there are sudden, unexpected large rule changes to traditional sports. "Football players will no longer kick balls into a net, they will kick stones into buckets. We call this football patch 1.1. Also, every other month, basketball hoop heights will be changed." Sounds ridiculous, right? Game patches are basically the same thing. While it is understandable for Blizzard to want to help balance the game, patches that come out every month that completely reset the metagame are stupid.
Secondly, the very nature of the video game business makes it difficult to harbor competition. It is always in the company's interest to cater to casual gamers. Far more of them exist over hardcore gamers, so video game companies have learned to decrease the skillcap of games as much as possible. Just look at today's games versus games in the 1990's and early 2000's. Games like Quake, Starcraft, Super Smash Brothers Melee; hell, even single player games like BattleToads or Silver Surfer were impossible to master. Now look at today's games. Super Smash Brothers Brawl. Halo Reach. The CoD series. Basically every console game made since 2004. What's worse is that its not just that companies just "happen" to make easy games. Many of these games are anti-competitive by nature, such as Brawl.
Compare
With
Tripping? Wtf?
Obviously, you can make the claim that there still exists a sizeable skillgap and it still remains impossible to play games to a perfect level. But the difference between skilled players and nonames is smaller than ever before. Some people argue that this promotes "competition." But do we really want players who practice for 14 hours a day to lose any random monkey who can pick up a controller? The beauty of sports lies in the ability of the best athletes to do what most of us cannot. If we could all run 9.8 100 meter dashes and with a little practice beat Olympic sprinters, would Usain Bolt still seem so special?
I could beat him on a good day.
I hope I am wrong. I hope that our community and our players will transcend these obstacles, and some day I will be able to turn on my TV and watch a match between Idra and Thorzain over some beers. But I'm not holding my breath.
Is that the right brawl video? It doesn't really match up with what your next paragraph says. maybe it's changed in brawl but in ssbm m2k was legendary for the sheer amount of practice he put in, and he's the one that won the match.
On May 28 2011 02:36 Antoine wrote: Is that the right brawl video? It doesn't really match up with what your next paragraph says. maybe it's changed in brawl but in ssbm m2k was legendary for the sheer amount of practice he put in, and he's the one that won the match.
Maybe it's because Metaknight is massively OP (I thought he was banned from tournaments)? Dunno.
On May 28 2011 02:36 Antoine wrote: Is that the right brawl video? It doesn't really match up with what your next paragraph says. maybe it's changed in brawl but in ssbm m2k was legendary for the sheer amount of practice he put in, and he's the one that won the match.
Maybe it's because Metaknight is massively OP (I thought he was banned from tournaments)? Dunno.
That's kind of what I was trying to get at, but I posted another video.
Yes it is quite the dream. The dream however lives with Brood War in Korea. Most sports were never mainstream right off the bat, it took a lot of time for a huge following to converge on the sports they love.
A certain game will have to stand the tests of time and always be played no matter how far into the future it is. Brood War has the best chance to achieve this feat. It has a structured league where their pro's play for the fans on a set schedule with other tournaments mixed in and broadcasted.
It might come to pass but probably not in our lifetime to become as mainstream as soccer(football), hockey, baseball and many other sports. We are just being too impatient and trying to ram it down everyone's throats that it should be mainstream tommorow. I think this is the only reason it will fail is with our impatience.
Nobody watches professional track and field outside of the Olympics, and it has been around for thousands of years and will continue to be played.
SC2 and other games don't have to be "mainstream" to succeed, even now they are doing well and if the scene doesn't grow at all, as long as it stays at a consistent level all will be fine.
I don't really like the title of this thread. As far as I am concerned, as long as e-sports stays at least as big as it currently is, it has already succeeded. Television is a dying medium. I have no interest of having a Starcraft television channel. I don't even own a TV.
On May 28 2011 02:41 Mailing wrote: Nobody watches professional track and field outside of the Olympics, and it has been around for thousands of years and will continue to be played.
SC2 and other games don't have to be "mainstream" to succeed, even now they are doing well and if the scene doesn't grow at all, as long as it stays at a consistent level all will be fine.
But that's just the point. It won't stay consistent. The scene will boom, and with the next new flashy game everyone will leave and move on to the new shiny.
On May 28 2011 02:41 Mailing wrote: Nobody watches professional track and field outside of the Olympics, and it has been around for thousands of years and will continue to be played.
SC2 and other games don't have to be "mainstream" to succeed, even now they are doing well and if the scene doesn't grow at all, as long as it stays at a consistent level all will be fine.
But that's just the point. It won't stay consistent. The scene will boom, and with the next new flashy game everyone will leave and move on to the new shiny.
I feel like if the game is good enough (BW), people will stay with it instead of moving in. In regards to your sports analogy, sure, you could say that sports wouldn't work if people were playing soccer one day then moved on to basketball once it "came out". But that's not how things worked, right? Obviously, some of those sports were invented before others, yet they all manage to keep a large following. And with games, though new ones will come out, if an older one is good enough, it'll maintain its following. The only problem I can see is the painfully shitty attention span of the current "Xbox" generation. In light of that, I agree that it'll be rather troublesome for any game to have real competitive staying power.
On May 28 2011 02:41 DrainX wrote: I don't really like the title of this thread. As far as I am concerned, as long as e-sports stays at least as big as it currently is, it has already succeeded. Television is a dying medium. I have no interest of having a Starcraft television channel. I don't even own a TV.
Esport sponsors are fickle. They support a game for a couple years as long as everyone is still playing, then move on. E-sports may stay the same size, but the games sponsors support will be completely different after 5 years. Look at WCG in 2005 vs WCG today or MLG sponsorships in 2005 vs MLG sponsorships today.
E-Sports has seen a huge growth with SC2, and it will see a huge growth should SC3 arrive as well, which I remind you is at the very least a decade away.
On May 28 2011 02:41 Mailing wrote: Nobody watches professional track and field outside of the Olympics, and it has been around for thousands of years and will continue to be played.
SC2 and other games don't have to be "mainstream" to succeed, even now they are doing well and if the scene doesn't grow at all, as long as it stays at a consistent level all will be fine.
But that's just the point. It won't stay consistent. The scene will boom, and with the next new flashy game everyone will leave and move on to the new shiny.
BW didn't boom in Korea. It plateaued. I don't see why that wouldn't happen with SC2 in the rest of the world. Many games that are played competitively today are old. Like Quake Live (Basically Quake 3), CS 1.6 and Brood war. Many new games aren't suited for pro-gaming like you say but some are (Starcraft 2) and we don't need every game to be the perfect e-sports game and if there are no new games we will just play the old ones that the fans and the players enjoy. If there is a new RTS 5 or 10 years from now that is better or more interesting than Starcraft 2 then I have no problem with it becoming the new big hit and replacing SC2. E-sports doesn't have to be like sports. I enjoy it just the way it is.
It seems to me that the problem you describe only really applies to CoD and Halo and only at MLG.
I agree with most of what you wrote in the OP, especially the parts about how it makes no sense (from a player's standpoint) to move from better games to worse games, such as BW->SC2, the great FPS of the 90s->CoD clones, etc. However, I think that e-sports will continue to grow, just because as the games get more mainstream (even if they are worse), e-sports will get more popular, even if the level of play becomes lower due to poor game design. You can see this in a bad way because the quality of games and level of play will get worse, or you can see it in a good way because the popularity of competitive gaming will grow. I see it in a bad way.
On May 28 2011 02:41 Mailing wrote: Nobody watches professional track and field outside of the Olympics, and it has been around for thousands of years and will continue to be played.
SC2 and other games don't have to be "mainstream" to succeed, even now they are doing well and if the scene doesn't grow at all, as long as it stays at a consistent level all will be fine.
But that's just the point. It won't stay consistent. The scene will boom, and with the next new flashy game everyone will leave and move on to the new shiny.
I feel like if the game is good enough (BW), people will stay with it instead of moving in. In regards to your sports analogy, sure, you could say that sports wouldn't work if people were playing soccer one day then moved on to basketball once it "came out". But that's not how things worked, right? Obviously, some of those sports were invented before others, yet they all manage to keep a large following. And with games, though new ones will come out, if an older one is good enough, it'll maintain its following. The only problem I can see is the painfully shitty attention span of the current "Xbox" generation. In light of that, I agree that it'll be rather troublesome for any game to have real competitive staying power.
Sure some people will always stay with it. Look at the hardcore Warcraft II community. However, you can hardly call it an esport if your community is like 20 people with no corporate sponsors to provide legitimate tournaments. Even taking your example BW, ICCUP is a shadow of what it once was. I think its only a matter of time before the scene in Korea stops being profitable for Kespa and dies out.
With games like CS1.6, BW, DotA, SF2, and Q3/QL that have transcended time and sequels, I don't even understand how this statement that "e-sports will die" can be true. As long as there are tournaments and people practicing for them, there will be e-sports. E-Sports even exists for titles like AoE2 and WC2 (no, I was not trying to type 3, though I'm pretty sure it exists for 3 as well). Whether it will be big is entirely another issue, but the fact is e-sports was and is here to stay. Who cares if there won't always be the scene in its exact form 20 years from now? As long as there are people to play StarCraft with me, then I'm happy.
Sure some people will always stay with it. Look at the hardcore Warcraft II community. However, you can hardly call it an esport if your community is like 20 people with no corporate sponsors to provide legitimate tournaments. Even taking your example BW, ICCUP is a shadow of what it once was. I think its only a matter of time before the scene in Korea stops being profitable for Kespa and dies out.
Why are corporate sponsors required? If someone is giving $20, and everybody is practicing their best for that $20, then is not the spirit of e-sport present? And if the spirit is present, then who cares about how big the prize-pool is? Yes ICCup is a shadow of what it once was, but have you seen the Korean BW servers? And KeSPA might die out (I'm betting against it), but that doesn't mean e-sports ends in Korea once and for all.
what about poker? one could argue that poker should die out because it is not entirely comprised of skill.
in any case. this seems to be very weak reasoning as to why esports will not grow. the better games will rise above the newer games (like BW did for 10+ years, and continues to stay active today)
On May 28 2011 02:54 vindKtiv wrote: With games like CS1.6, BW, DotA, SF2, and Q3/QL that have transcended time and sequels, I don't even understand how this statement that "e-sports will die" can be true. As long as there are tournaments and people practicing for them, there will be e-sports. E-Sports even exists for titles like AoE2 and WC2 (no, I was not trying to type 3, though I'm pretty sure it exists for 3 as well). Whether it will be big is entirely another issue, but the fact is e-sports was and is here to stay. Who cares if there won't always be the scene in its exact form 20 years from now? As long as there are people to play StarCraft with me, then I'm happy.
The whole point is that there might not people to play Starcraft with you. Once the main ADHD community dies out, the remaining players slowly leave the scene. Wouldn't you be discouraged to go on Bnet or ICCUP, only to find a ghosttown?
Interesting. Very interesting. This is something I've been thinking about for a while but because it is essentially out of my hands I haven't devoted too much time to it. What I think may happen is that a community will latch onto particular games and their communities will develop and sustain themselves. Eventually they will fade away but by that time another game will have come along. We had Brood War for a while, and now we have SC2. The game may be different but 'ESports' is growing the whole community has expanded.
On May 28 2011 02:56 ishboh wrote: what about poker? one could argue that poker should die out because it is not entirely comprised of skill.
in any case. this seems to be very weak reasoning as to why esports will not grow. the better games will rise above the newer games (like BW did for 10+ years, and continues to stay active today)
We'll see how active the BW community is 5 years from now.
EPT![[image loading]](http://images.businessweek.com/ss/09/02/0217_richest_football_clubs/image/007_arsenal.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://cdn.newsone.com/files/2009/09/usain-bolt-olympics-200m.jpg)
