Esports are
so hot right now.
League of Legends, DOTA2, CS:GO, Hearthstone, StarCraft 2... with a few high-profile titles making esports look more legit every day, suddenly
everyone wants some of that sweet, sweet esports action:
Per a release from the Pac-12, the athletic conference will become the first to run and broadcast officially sanctioned esports competitions. They haven’t picked a game yet, but they say they will pick one soon and broadcast some gaming starting next year:
Intercollegiate competition in egaming is in its initial stages, but Pac-12 universities are increasingly involved through passionate student groups competing in competitions with popular games. Esports is also closely tied to academic departments at Pac-12 universities such as computer science, visual and cinematic arts, engineering and others.
And they're not the only ones. Activision Blizzard recently
"scaled back" their licensed properties division, even as they were
acquiring Major League Gaming; they've since
partnered with Facebook to deliver esport content worldwide.
They're not alone, either:
Turner Broadcasting and WME/IMG announced that they were forming an eSports league that would debut on TBS. Amazon-owned Twitch, one of the pioneers in this space, receives over 100 million monthly unique viewers, and 1.7 million monthly unique broadcasters. Users view approximately 422 minutes of programming on Twitch, which is more than YouTube’s 291 monthly minutes, according to TechCrunch.
Yes, it's the new videogame gold rush. In the same way that everyone wanted to be making MMOs (only to discover that there really only was room for one World of WarCraft), and then MOBAs (only to discover that there really is only room for one League of Legends), and then free-to-play games (only to discover that people are only willing to drop so much cash on microtransactions for ostensibly free games), now everyone wants to be in esports.
Is this realistic?
Maybe not:
While some publishers establish their own eSports divisions and appoint chief competition officers, Take-Two is approaching the competitive gaming trend with a bit more caution. Speaking with GamesIndustry.biz in advance of the company's financial earnings reporttoday, CEO and chairman Strauss Zelnick said the field was promising, but still unproven.
"eSports we find very interesting," Zelnick said. "It is, however, still more a promotional tool than anything else. And most people see eSports as an opportunity to increase consumer engagement in their titles, and depending on the title, to increase consumer spending within the title."
That more or less matches my thinking on the subject. Riot Games didn't design League of Legends to be an esport -- they were just making a game, that they were hoping players would enjoy enough to support with online purchases. It was always an online multiplayer game, and it always had its competitive elements, but there are a lot of competitive online multiplayer games, and almost none of them have become juggernauts of esports in the same way that LoL has.
The same applies to games like Hearthstone, the popularity of which was something of a surprise to Blizzard; players were organizing their own tournaments long before Blizzard got involved. Even Blizzard's StarCraft and WarCraft III, which basically established the current eSports template when it became a cultural phenomenon in South Korea, were not designed as esport titles. Just as with regular, athletic sporting events, the biggest esports grew organically, from games that people just loved to play.
The same applies to almost every big, athletic, sports league. Soccer (or Football, for readers outside NA) was a game long before FIFA became a sporting juggernaut. Football (or gridiron football, for readers outside NA), was organized into the massively profitable NFL long after its popularity as a game had helped it to spread. Baseball is big business, but that's because it was everywhere in the USA at the start of the 20th Century, and not because some corporation decided that their strategy called for a strong position in pastoral past-times.
Conversely, more recent attempts to manufacture new sports have largely flopped. Do you remember when Roller Derby was huge? Do you also remember watching moon landings on TV as a kid? Roller Derby is still around, and experiencing something of a renaissance in the last two years, but it's a long way from being the pop cultural touchstone that it briefly became, back in the 1970s.
Even attempts to popularize already-existing but lesser-known sports, like Lacrosse (yes, there's a
pro Lacrosse league) have met with only moderate success; and other contenders only meet with fleeting success before fading into obscurity, living on like zombies in the wasteland of daytime weekday ESPN. Meanwhile, Professional Darts has gone from daytime ESPN broadcasts out of croweded pubs to
packing good-sized arenas, much like esports... again, I think, because it was already a popular
game.
I have a feeling that esports are here to stay, but even absolutely dominant titles like LoL can only remain on top for so long; it's the nature of the medium, for new games to eventually supplant older ones at the top of gaming's zeitgeist. But companies that are revamping their entire business models around chasing esports gold? I have a feeling that even the even the AAA prospectors might end up with more fools' gold, than real stuff.
