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<font size=1>Graphics by DivinO.</font>
Once upon a time, in a land of cream and honey, a pair of brothers bought a video game that birthed an obsession. The boys were named Nick and Sean and for their one-time purchase they were blessed with 13 years of entertainment, passion and purpose. Such a return on investment is unheard of in this day of throw-away apps, subscription services and microtransactions, but the video game they'd bought was Starcraft: Broodwar and it was not an ordinary gaming experience even in its day. It effected their lives so completely that it has shaped the course of their adult careers.
If the careers of the Plott brothers could be considered the mantlepiece for western eSports, it becomes essential to note that in the hearth below them burns the flames of a hundred-thousand obsessed fans fueling western eSports, lifting that mantlepiece to its place. Indeed, with the release of Starcraft 2, that flame has exploded into a mighty blaze, The mantlepiece is accomodating, rising and growing wider as though it were powered by the heat of the flame.
There are organizations that have noticed the flame and are looking for places along the mantlepiece to set up shop. And for now, There's plenty of room. MLG, IPL, NASL, Dreamhack and dozens of others have arrived, all vying for the opportunity to warm themselves by the fire. Unlike the Plott brothers, however, they don't appear to remember the return on investment Broodwar gave to its commited fans. They speak with what seems to be one voice: "If You Support eSports, Pay Us." This worries me because I'm old and nerdy enough to remember the bubble of another fan-based economy that had a very similar rallying cry: Comic Books.
If we take the way-back machine to 1964 we can witness the birth of a PR campaign begun by Marvel Comics and Stan Lee. It was called the Merry Marvel Marching Society (MMMS), and it was a fanclub for kids that liked reading Marvel Comics. The goal was clearly to help grassroots word-of-mouth advertising along, but it came with a membership kit for a modest price and kids back then joined clubs for all sorts of things, so it seemed harmless. Despite some success, the company was losing money on the project and Marvel's publisher, Martin Goodman, wanted to cancel the program. Stan Lee disagreed with the publisher's decision and took it upon himself to keep MMMS going by finding an investor for a new project called Marvelmania International. In 1969, Marvelmania absorbed MMMS and served the same role as the old club. It turned out that Goodman was right, however, and Marvelmania International stopped selling membership kits and magazines in 1971. "Marvel Maniacs" lived on as the term for die-hard Marvel fans, but Stan Lee and Marvel stopped investing money in the group.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pB_v5w9NwUU
<font size=1>MMMS' rallying song from the late 60s. Adorable, ain't it?</font>
<font size=1>MMMS' rallying song from the late 60s. Adorable, ain't it?</font>
As kids are want to do, Marvel Maniacs grew and matured. They began to feed into the underground and independant publishers of the 70s and 80s. These publishers ignored the Comics Code (google Fredric Wertham "Seduction of the Innocent" for a history lesson on the CC) and therefore could not sell to supermarkets and other large carriers of comics. Fortunately, the fan base for comics was sufficiently fanatical that they found other ways to move these comics. Those that skillfully rode this wave of maturing readership enjoyed incredible success for a time.
Underground comics started out in head-shops for stoner-hippies and eventually blossomed into organizations like Fantagraphics Books. Independant publishers created the demand for Comic Novelty shops and direct distribution of the sort we see today. There were long-running successes, such as Harvey Pekar's American Splendor and Dave Sim's Cerebus. There were flash-in-the-pan successes, such as Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. It was starting to seem like comics could be a career for anyone with enough time and dedication to attempt to self-publish. Certainly, the success stories were encouraging.
All along this time-period the spirit of Marvelmania lived on and its principles informed the fanbase at large, fueling projects that may not have otherwise withstood the realities of capitalism. In the early 90s, with then-recent national news of comics auctions fresh in the public's mind (a near mint Amazing Fantasy #15 sold for some ungawdly sum), comics publishing giants such as Marvel, DC and Image decided to finally cash in on the mania. There was an explosion of product as all three companies "killed" main characters (anyone remember the death of Superman?), issued variant covers, issued hologram covers, and started new series after new series of utterly forgettable trash so that speculators and fans alike would buy multiple copies of "#1". For a short time, sales were fantastic.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/5L2MN.jpg)
<font size=1>Spiderman #1, the best-selling comic in history at the time of its publication. Marvel had the balls to call it a "collector's item" on each of its 3 variant covers. And folks bought them in such numbers that comics stores had to put an upper limit on the number of copies each customer could purchase. Are there analogues to this creeping into eSports? Think multiple streams and HD with commercial breaks.</font>
By the mid-90s, the comics industry had begun to faulter. Speculators realized that buying multiple issues of trash was fucking dumb and suddenly the jig was up. True comics fans and kids were still around, but their dedication was simply not enough anymore, particularly for the independent publishers who did less to court the under-14 market. Strangely, the undercurrent of the Marvelmania mindset only grew stronger. It eventually became so prevalent that it earned a new nickname: Team Comics.
Coined by then-Comics Journal Editor, Tom Spurgeon, he described the phenomenon thus:
Team Comics was "an implied social contract whereby it is asserted that everyone from comics professionals to readers is obligated to help raise the profile and sales levels of the comic-book industry. Team Comics members in good standing might buy an extra copy of a comic they believe in, shop only at their local comic-book store rather than seek out the best bargain, give comics for presents, loan them to friends and provide a good personal example through attention to personal hygiene and use of pro-comics rhetoric. Negative reviews or even pointed commentary aimed at a specific portion of the comics industry are a total no-no, and the person who insists on them must selfishly wish to keep the industry small and inconsequential. Team Comics believes that the American comic-book industry can be willed out of any sales decline no matter how extended, and perhaps even return to some hazily asserted utopia of mass-medium status it enjoyed in the 1940s."
Ultimately, Team Comics managed two things: first it softened the eventual collapse of the comics bubble; second, it bled the fanbase's bank accounts so a few moderately popular comics could last a few more months. Today, with some rare exceptions, the only publishing companies to survive are the ones that would've existed without the bubble. Marvel, DC, Image, Dark Horse, etc. Independent publishers with no reputation have moved on to digital publication and can be found on the internet, but you're unlikely to find them in comics shops any longer. Comics is a pale shadow of what they were in the 90s.
So what's this have to do with eSports? you may be asking. Well, I think eSports is growing, that it hasn't yet reached its peak, but I see signs of a bubble forming. Somehow we, as a community, are already showing signs of Team eSports, and that's trouble. Recently Sundance tweated: "I[f] we sell 100,000 memberships before the national championship I will raise the prize pool. A lot. Next season too." And iNcontroL responded with the mocking quip, "Uhhh if you give me a million dollars I will raise the prizepool??? Wow! That is amazing!" The community (and especially Reddit) immediately jumped down iNcontroL's throat for having the audacity to question Sundance's tweat.
iNcontroL is a hypocrit for questioning Sundance's motives, he's been as bad as anyone about profiting off the fans of eSports, I do not want to address that. What I want to say is that iNcontroL's point isn't wrong. Sundance is effectively bribing the community with a reward that does not benefit them. A larger prize pool is useless to a fan except in the most nebulous sense. It may generate interest from more progamers, but that's all it does. In my opinion, the only way you can support Sundance's bribe is if you're already a member of Team eSports. And if that's true, I worry.
Comics was already becoming an old medium when their bubble popped and eSports is new in the world of entertainment, so you may not agree that our community can learn from the mistakes of Team Comics. But I think there are some lessons that can be drawn:
First: Don't spend money on products you don't enjoy. It won't grow eSports, it'll bubble it. Start-ups will crumble, larger organizations will get burned and investors, sponsors and advertisers will mistrust the opportunities in eSports even more. I've heard DJWheat brag that he'd bought subscriptions to tournaments he didn't have time to watch. He forgave his careless consumerism with some offhand comment about supporting eSports. For wheat it's not terribly important-- DJWheat is in eSports for the long haul, he'll likely always have wasteful purchasing habits, and so on-- but if that mindset is adopted by a large minority (or gawd forbid, the majority) of casual fans... casual fans that'll move on when the next big game hits. Well, there goes all our sustainability.
Second: If eSports organizations have to rely on advertising and sponsors to pay their salaries and fund their prize pools, so be it. That is a sustainable business model that is flexible to the size of the audience. Abusing Team eSports' generosity and community spirit to squeeze out a few extra dollars may be a savvy business move for a strip miner, but if you expect to rely on the land for more than a few years, you're going to want to nurture the soil. A personal plea to the new eSports organizations: be farmers; not strip miners. Day[9] has the right idea on this one.
Finally: We're not all in this together, sorry. If every SC2 league event on the planet is successful, that doesn't mean you will be, too. There are enough competing leagues out there that you can, and should, pick and choose between them. The cream will rise to the top, and you'll be rewarded for your discrimination. Teamliquid (and the SC2 community more generally) are fantastic, passionate and incredibly supportive fanbases, but sometimes to a fault. If you support a shitty professional league or tournament because you're "supporting eSports," please remind yourself that they're not going to share their profits with you. Not every eSports company has to survive to keep you entertained.
There's a reason that Nick and Sean Plott were able to follow Broodwar eSports, eventually translating that passion into careers, and it wasn't because they were spoiled rich kids that could afford to purchase faux-ancillary events and products attached to Broodwar. They were able to do it because it was as close to free to audience and participants as the event organizers could make them. When local events were held, they had a cover charge for attendance and most of the rest of the costs were covered by advertising. When there were Korean restreams, watching those streams was free. Occasionally, restreamers would suggest users make donations, but that's only because they were losing money on the situation and didn't have the viewership numbers to generate interest from advertisers. It had nothing to do with greed. Today we have the infrastructure in place (through Justin.tv, Livestream, Own3d.tv and other options) to attract advertising dollars no matter how small the production. It's an exciting time to grow eSports, but now we also have greed creeping in, with eSports organizers ready to exploit the passions of the fanbase for their own financial gains. In terms of content, they're not offering any more than what we've always had, they're putting a shiny gloss on the production and charging for the privilege to see it in high quality. What's the return on investment in that?
This thread should be about ways eSports organizations can provide value to their customers to justify the prices they're demanding. Alternatively, discuss advertising and sponsorship options that're available to these organizations. Paying someone to "support eSports" is a poor motivation to part with your money, and you should demand more than some empty pride in the scene's profit margins.
+ Show Spoiler +
Sorry for being so long winded, but the whole "support us because ESPORTS!!" has been bugging me for almost a year now, and it really smacked me in the face when I started reading about the sundance/incontrol controversy the other day. Seeing people call sundance a genius businessman and incontrol a fat moron really grated on my last nerve about this topic. Neither are heroes with regards to how they've tried to abuse the goodwill of the community for an extra buck. And incontrol, like day9, at least comes from our community. Buy NASL or MLG, etc HD passes if you like their tourney and the passes seem like a smart buy to you. Don't do it cuz someone's bribing you with ESPORTS.
