Declining eSports Journalism

Oh how excited Readmore.de and the like used to be about the numerous yearly highlights. On average, once a month there were big, high-profile events. 1Today the motto is “quantity over quality”. Especially in StarCraft 2, you see the world’s elite collide practically every day. In other games though, events are much further apart. That aggravates event coverage a lot and makes for a cave-in in clicks. A real highlight event easily triples the amount of clicks in comparison to normal days due to the amount of high-quality content that got collected around these events. 2Nowadays, you rarely see that. After all, very few editorial teams have the necessary routine to properly benefit of the remaining events – the writers are simply out of practice.

Roughly 5 years ago, several clan websites could easily keep up with independent scene websites, and in some cases were even better. Just think of mymTw’s days of glory in Germany or Carmac’s time at SK-Gaming.1Nowadays, team websites hardly matter. Despite having some good editors, no organization manages to succeed in the balancing act between clan-focused coverage and independent articles. Innovative editorial concepts are seen less than ever. There may be some highlight articles now and then, but you rarely notice them as2there’s barely any reason to visit clan websites regularly any more.

No national or international esports website has managed to successfully represent more than 2 to 3 game titles. Readmore is now clearly a CS 1.6 website with a little SC2, while temporarily experimenting with other games. On an international base, there’s an even clearer focus: Teamliquid focuses on StarCraft 2; Cadred and SourceJunkies on CS:Source; HLTV.org on Counter-Strike 1.6. If you meddle in other games, you are quickly and consequently punished by the readers. Only fragster keeps up the effort in covering more than just a few select games – but with moderate results (see #6).

Barely any of the big German editorial sites still has a good team, like mymTw and readmore used to have in former times. 1The few constants in the leading squads are rarely actively writing, with the notable exception of “cyph” at readmore. Other than that, staff writers come and go all the time. Out of the hopeful, young and hungry fragster founders, there’s practically no one left. And at readmore, you don’t see any writer’s name producing content that you would have also seen a year ago – with the exception of cyph. 2The fluctuation does bring forth young, freshly motivated writers with short, highly active working phases. In the mid-term though, websites have to permanently fight for new writers who rarely have the necessary knowledge and the writing experience to produce high quality content.

It was truly a gold rush atmosphere in 2007: MLG and Computec Media AG invest significant amounts into esport websites and with fragster, yet another ambitious project with good financial support is announced. Four years later, the hopes they once had have vanished. 1Nearly no editor still earns significant money in eSports. Many of the best writers are volunteers. Why’s that? None of the websites has managed to establish a sustainable revenue model. Hopeful experiments have failed and many of the previous topics in this blog have not exactly helped relieve the situation. Web advertisement does mostly cover running costs, but hardly pays event travel expenses or wages. Real sponsorships are either completely out of reach or money-wise in barely measurable regions. Too large is the competition from leagues and clans. New methods of website monetization are out of sight currently. Readmore tried innovating with a Flattr connection, but it’s been to no avail so far. 2Herein lies the biggest crux in eSports journalism: Presently it leaves its protagonists mostly empty-handed. If that doesn’t change, the decline in eSports journalism will be hard to stop.

Across languages, we can see that international websites are in competition with each other nowadays. That can be very clearly seen in the area of Counter-Strike: Source coverage where Vakarm, Cadred and Sourcejunkies regularly try to one-up each other with the hottest stories. 1Such a situation causes a motivation to triumph over the other – and thus to research better...to write better. 2Additionally, when it comes to English language websites aiming at broader coverage, there seems to be an ambition to claim upcoming stories in a specific way and partly to even set one’s opinion clearly against those of other websites. A good example was the recent scandal over the supposedly bought Twitter followers by Major League Gaming CEO Sundance DiGiovanni and the different interpretations by Rakakaworld, Cadred and ESFI.

1Exercise: Name three editors of the biggest coverage website for SC2 (TeamLiquid). Impossible? Right.2Teamliquid realized what others dreamed of in the past: eSports coverage writing itself. Video interviews, live blogs from events, photo galleries and even the hottest stories from Korea freshly translated. All of that is done by the readers of Teamliquid themselves. That’s crowdsourcing perfection: an armada of reader/reporters who don’t miss anything. 3And the ban and edit-happy forum moderators even make for some selection and quality in writing. But there’s also a positive example in Germany: Readmore has managed to split off the management of the score ticker completely from the tasks of the regular editorial staff. The times when the editor-in-chief had to copy the scores from 6 HLTV servers at once at 4 A.M. are over. Now a whole host of helpers formed from the reader base takes care of that. This creates room for creativity and more time to focus on feature content.

The English-speaking German eSports addict never had this amount of informational sources at his disposal before. While the number of at least halfway professional German eSports websites keeps its high level, lots of interesting options came up internationally. 1Teamliquid managed to give up on their dry, Korea-focused StarCraft: Brood War obsession. After almost four years of announcements, ESFI went online, who offer well balanced US-centered coverage with a big diversity of opinions and stories originating from the US. And at long last the Swedish riot website Rakaka opened an English offset with a good field of editors. With Rakakaworld, now you don’t only have access to English versions of the legendary Rakaka.se scandal articles but also to numerous articles of their own which you won’t find on any other eSports website in that format. [The original version of this article was published early June prior to the untimely demise of Rakakaworld].