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AMD Sponsors Pro Gaming Team
Dillon Hamilton writes "AMD has chosen to sponsor Team NoA, a 6-member professional Counter-Strike team, with their latest hardware along with other unspecified support. NoA (Norwegians of America) is composed of three Norwegian players, two Americans, and one Canadian. All but one of the players (the newest addition and a Norwegian) currently live together in California to practice for the upcoming Cyberathlete Professional League championship tournament in Grapevine, TX, as well as the E-Sports World Cup in Toulouse, France. AMD will presumably be flying Ola Moum, the new member, from his home in Horten, Norway to the States as part of the deal. This is definitely a huge step forward for the concept of professional gaming, not only in the United States but worldwide. With teams like Team 3D and Schroet Kommando getting sponsored by bigger companies, (Subway, NVIDIA, and Shuttle in 3D's case) who knows where this might be in the next few years?"
but if you want to get people more hyped over gaming contests, it'd be cool to see a playback option in FPS's where you can replay the entire battle. It'd increase the competative analysis, plus it would be fun for spectators.
And during live events, it'd be nice if there was a seperate spectator server where people can login see the activity from the match in real-time without directly affecting the match.
Bye!
most modern fps games have demos you can record and play back the entire battle. actually most events post these games on their websites. counterstrike demos have been out for years, and also unreal tournament, quake 3, and even rts games like warcraft 3, starcraft, and the age of empires series have recorded games where you can watch from one or both players viewpoints in its entirety.
Well, that's a reality show waiting to happen. Although I suspect all those Blue Crush meets Big Brother shows last year had more attractive cast members to work with, but who knows?
(Does anyone else remember when Red Hat promoted the 6.0 release by having a bunch of Linux users live in a house and have adventures? And the poor marketing person in charge had to deal with constant "I can't go water skiing -- there's a new kernel release, and I get sunburned and I'm allergic to jellyfish!"?)
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
A. Large numbers of tickets are sold to the events.
B. Average Joe buys team-related merchandise.
C. Non-computer companies sponsor the teams.
What could counter-strike possibly showcase in hardware? A 400mhz PII can run that game perfectly smoothly!
Photos.
Actually Pro gaming has already taken off in Korea. This story isn't really news, as AMD, Nvidia and Intel have been supporting Counter-Strike (and various other games) clans for years now. These events are huge in Korea. On the other hand it is slowly gaining momentum here in the US and in Europe which I think is a great thing. I'd much rather watch a game of Warcraft 3, than a game of Football. Personally I think it makes a much better spectator sport. I can't wait for pro gaming to make it to ESPN, maybe then it'll be worth getting all those 100s of sports channels.
I've played and beat probably close to 50 people in various WI game tournaments for Mario Kart: Double Dash!! I always see prizes and big contests for FPS, but I've won little more than I've put in if you added up the value of the prizes. Professional gaming will come of age as soon as its more than just PC deathmatch games getting big prizes.
In a football game, there's really only one thing that you absolutely must concentrate on at any given time to follow the action, and that's the ball. Sure, there's plenty going on otherwise on the field, but seeing the receiver leap up and snag a long pass is more exciting to watch than the left tackle blocking a rusher.
But what do you focus on in a FPS? You can follow a single player, but you miss a lot of the action. You can focus on a spot, but again, you miss a lot of the action. Even as a free-floating spectator, there's too much going on to take it all in. Even if the game has objectives like places to plant explosives, you can't just focus on that one spot, since most of the action is away from there, anyway.
And in a RTS? Well, the early game buildup isn't terribly exciting. At least you can focus on a spot when two armies clash, so RTSes have that going for them. Still, it's a long way from football.
I think the essence of the problem is this: most FPSes and RTSes have a large element of deception, or at least concealment to them. You try to avoid revealing your location to your opponent. The problem is that this makes it more difficult for a spectator to watch because he doesn't know what to expect. In sports, there's much less concealment. Oh, sure, they try to keep their opponents from knowing their gameplan, but you at least know where the players are. If you want to make a FPS watchable, you need to stick all the players in a space where a spectator can see the whole area at once without much obstruction, while still being able to tell what's going on. Naturally, this might ruin the game itself, but that's hardly the point, is it?
This is the NFL, which stands for "Not For Long" if you keep making those bulls*** calls.
a 6-member professional Counter-Strike team
So, they're really good at playing a video game. Okay...
You know, I'm really good at cluttering up my apartment, and procrastinating - maybe I can pick up a sponsor!
--- We are not in the 8th dimension. We are over New Jersey.
Before the Dotcom burst, there were a number of 'esports' teams getting sponsorships. After the economy tanked, the whole process slowed down a bit, but it's been an interesting barometer to notice that a lot more teams are getting sponsorships lately, some with old companies, some with new.
Also interesting is that most of the sponsorships I've seen go to teams in Europe, like the bevy of top-notch German and Swedish gaming clans. The reason for this is that gaming there is a far more common thing. Gamers view LAN tournaments as the ultimate competitive venue, because of the low latency, the presence of tournament computers that generally eliminate any framerate issues that one's own PC might have, and because there are often prizes for gatherings such as that. The close proximity and population density, combined with the greater popularity of competitive gaming in these regions leads to a lot more corporate attention.
The LAN tournament scene is only recently looking to pick up lately in the US. Before the only tournaments you could find were for Counterstrike, and generally run by either the CPL, or by the WCG (an Olympics style competition, with a limited number of entrants per country, making it very difficult to qualify). So far this year there've been 2 relatively large ones here on the West Coast, both featuring flavors of Unreal Tournament and the Battlefield series (BF:Vietnam and BF:1942), as well as Call of Duty. There are few more that I am aware of planned for the summer, as well as one in Colorado and a particularly large one in Kentucky.
All of these tournaments feature some notable prizes. The NVidia tournament featured $4000 prize machines (which I think are actually worth more like 2.5-3k, not that anyone's complaining) as well as $500 cash to the first place winners. On a more realistic level, Newegg.com held one with P4 3.2 GHz CPUs, motherboards, and a $100 gift certificate for first place.
So you can see the money flowing into these events, and the question a lot of people ask is 'Why?'. The reason companies are so interested in gaming and gamers is because video games are notorious for pushing computers to their limits. Because of this, hardcore gamers tend to seek out the highest-performance equipment they can get their hands on. This makes them perfect opinion leaders for the rest of the hardware market.
Of course there are some doubters and nay-sayers who question whether 'esports' is really a legitimate venue for competition because it doesn't involve a bunch of steroid-hyped testosterone-appealing dudes in uniforms. The simple fact, though, is that competitive venues will thrive wherever they can sustain themselves. Magic: The Gathering tournaments weren't big by accident. There were people who wanted to play it. Similarly, e-sports has been a competitive platform of its own for several years now. First with the PGL, and through various incarnations to the CPL, as well as other tournaments such as the annual World Cyber-Games (WCG) which have a HUGE following in Korea, and will be having their first event hosted outside of Korea this fall in San Francisco, and smaller tournaments such as the aforementioned NVidia tournament hosted alongside the GeForce 6800 unveiling, the Newegg tournament(s), Million-Man Lan in Kentucky, PDXLan in Portland, and so on.
If it were all a big joke, people would be laughing, but they're not. They're shelling out money to travel to these events and compete and hopefully come home with some pretty respectable prize purses.
Moo
I have actually heard people call chess a 'sport' before. On TV. On ESPN in fact. Still, I doubt you or anyone else would be satisfied by that justification - I wouldn't. So let's get deeper.
A preliminary look at dictionary.com reveals this as a definition for sport:
Physical activity that is governed by a set of rules or customs and often engaged in competitively.
This would seem to further your point, but upon a closer look, you'll see this, as well:
Of, relating to, or appropriate for sports: sport fishing; sports equipment.
The important part: sport fishing! Fishing is not a sport that requires intense conditioning. In fact, neither does bowling, or auto-racing. None of these require conditioning, and therein lies the point.
Conditioning is not requisite to whether or not an activity can be considered 'physical', only that the action in question implement some sort of physical faculties. Reaction and coordination are as fundamental as you can get when it comes to sports, and since reaction time and hand-eye coordination are two of the fundamental necessities for any 'cyberathlete' (I really hate that term, mind you, because I *DO* maintain that being an athlete requires some sense of conditioning), then I think you have, right there, a perfect case for why 'esports' is indeed a sport.
It's not a substitute for getting off your ass and going to the gym, however. In fact, several of the top 'esports' personalities do maintain some sense of physical shape. It's an undeniable fact that being in shape can only benefit you, physically as well as mentally. You're a lot less likely to be exhausted after a day-long tournament if you're in good shape.
Moo
You can do that in Quake too.
Record the demo on the server, and you'll have all the information. You don't want the clients to have this ability, because then it can be used for cheating (sending everyone's positions instead of just the people that are visible).
If you want to edit your demos and change perspective, use KeyGrip.
As for not having to buy the game.. the Quake engine is GPLed.. but you still have to buy the games to get the maps. Any demo playback engine will also have to have the maps, since the demo data doesn't contain rendering information.
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
I've seen some of these players go at it. I've played a few rounds of CS in my time, I'm not a bad gamer, better than most of my friends, but I'm certainly not a pro.
So I would say that I am in AWE of these players, because they are so much better at something I enjoy than I am. They deserve some respect for this.
Skeet shooting is an olympic sport. It's serious, standing still and shooting clay pigeons is one of the mainstays of the contemporary olympiad. Is it a sport? Yes. Does it require athleticism? Not really. Standing up and pointing a gun is not particularly athletic, but it does require tremendous amounts of skill. Only the best in the world, the absolute elite amongst humanity can win a gold medal. Would you then say that these people, much like video game players, don't deserve to compete in a recognised competition?
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.