NiP Wins Counter-Strike CPL

raskolnik writes: "Ninjas in Pyjamas beat out Xtreme3 in a *very* close series of matches to win the $50,000 purse at the CPL today. Coverage is on ShackES and Domain of Games. Congrats to both clans!" $50,000 isn't quite a NASCAR purse, but nothing to sneeze at. When will this be on ESPN?

Comments

Someone has tried it already.

[AltGrendel]

I forget who, but some cable channel tried televising this sort of thing. Turned out to be very boring. All they did was setup a couple of cameras to show the contestants. They should have tapped into the video out. THEN it COULD have been interesting.

But they won't think of that, will they.

Yea, right.

Re:Someone has tried it already.

[crisco]

Half-Life's engine does this now, they have assorted spectator modes that allow first person, third person following, free flying mode and a map overview mode with little icons for each player. Valve software has also set up spectator mode proxy software that allows lots of people to watch a feed.(But you might already know that and be talking about something else).

The real trick would be taking multiple streams of this and editing it in with some good commentary. Think NFL style, with the replays, different camera angles, etc. You could probably do it on a low budget, just taking the time to make it flow and make it slightly interesting to someone that might be a gamer but not real familiar with CS. But you can't oversimplify, you alienate your core audience of hardcore gamers.

ESPN

[MisterBlister]

It'll be on ESPN approximately...never.

There's a ton of issues with online gaming that will relegate it to niche status at best for the foreseeable future.

One of the biggest issues is that the game of choice changes too often due to progressing technology -- compare this to baseball (or even newer sports) where the rules and gameplay remain relatively the same..In the gaming world, the game of choice changes about once every year, or two years at the most. This causes a few problems, one is that it is very confusing to spectators who don't play these games themselves and two is that it limits the options for having 'star players' ala basketball, etc.. Today's top CS players aren't likely to be the top players of tomorrow's game-of-choice. Very few 'pro level' game players dominate in more than one game, as the short history of this activity has shown.

Secondly, gaming just doesn't have much potential as a mainstream spectator sport. Sure, people that play these games all the time might appreciate the skill involved in winning the top gaming tournaments, but to people who don't play these games, they have no basis for understanding this skill. In traditional sports they can still be impressed by the human factors involved -- eg. "wow that guy jumps real high", or "wow that guy runs real fast". When it comes to gaming, there's no context for them to make any relationship like that unless they game quite a lot themselves, thus the spectator potential is very limited.