US Companies Sponsor Pro Gamers

Baddox writes "Professional gaming, which has for some time now been a popular venture in Asia, is finally starting to get some attention from big US companies. Teams for competitive shooters like Counter Strike are getting sponsored by large corporations like Johnson and Johnson. The article poses the question, "Is 'frags per round' going to be the batting average of the 21st century?" "

Comments

Not Really

[mfh]

Is 'frags per round' going to be the batting average of the 21st century?

No. Our generation might be geeks but I think, for myself at least, the beauty of online gaming is not quantity but quality. That is pretty much the same for football for me too... it's the big plays that matter and make a game worth watching. It's awesome to watch a game where some professional gamer goes on a crazy rampage, doing all kinds of freaky/impossible moves and stuff, and that is the main draw to those events (as well as the celebrity factor), not the stats. With baseball, stats have to be the draw because the game is very slow.

Re:Not Really

[Saxerman]

It's awesome to watch a game where some professional gamer goes on a crazy rampage, doing all kinds of freaky/impossible moves and stuff, and that is the main draw to those events (as well as the celebrity factor), not the stats.

I agree, yet this is also the main limitation of 'e-sports' vs. the more conventional kind. In the really real world we don't have artificially coded limits to how fast we can run or how high we can jump. The software and hardware plays too large a part of the game for people to really admire the skill and prowess of computer gamers. Compare the finesse of a FPS player using a top-notch mouse and game pad on a high-end machine vs. Johnny Six pack with his mommy's email machine.

This is not to say there is not skill involved in gaming or that real tournaments don't level the playing field by giving everyone the same machine to play on. My point is merely we haven't reached the level yet where gaming skill is a significant enough factor in our games yet. We're going to need to improve our game inputs to the point where people will say, "Wow, I couldn't't do that." instead of "OMG! Hax0rs! BAN THEM!"

Two different worlds

[sexyrexy]

The world of Slashdot readers is populated with a high percentage of people who are actually interested in a professional gamer's KTD. The rest of the world is not.

And it's not just because the rest of the world is still populated primarily by the sort of middle aged and old folks who still don't understand computers. Go to any high school, any college campus in the modern world and most of the students care about rugby, or football, or what have you. They will grow old continuing to care about such things, and it will not be a generational change. This will always be fringe.

Well, let's get something straight

[user43]

The word sponsorship itself can mean an array of different things.

Right now, pro gamers only get sponsored for things like travel, clothes, computer parts, food, etc. They may even get a salary, but this salary more often than not is not enough to live on.

This of course is much better that nothing, but still, computer gaming has a ways to go before it catches up to "real" sports in terms of sponsorship money and recognition.

Johnson and Johnson *are* gaming related.

[reality-bytes]

There's nothing computer related about Johnson and Johnson's baby rash powder

I'll have you know that Johnson and Johnson's baby rash powder is required equipment when you're sitting on your backside for an 10 hour gaming tournament.

Gaming will never take over

[Metaldsa]

Simply from the fact that our society praises the biggest, strongest, and most beautiful. Just because bowling is popular doesn't mean we recognise the best. I think gaming will be the same where it will have a following but never such fame as football, baseball, basketball, or hockey. I highly doubt computer gaming will ever have a Brett Favre, Michael Jordon, and Barry Bonds that commentators talk about 24/7.

Re:More money for corps, less for consumers

[nhstar]

Of course the money of advertizing comes from the money earned by selling the products being advertized... It just kind of makes sense. Each and every product out there, no matter how good they are in and of themselves, won't sell if no one knows they exist. Marketing is all about getting your product in mind of people you think will buy it, which is the whole purpose of making a product.

Hell, research and development drive up the prices too, and rarely do I hear slashdot complain when nVidia or ATI find some new way to tweak your eye-balls.

Oh, wait! Employees! They make the price of products go up too! Sorry, son, but we need to keep all of our costs down... here's your pink-slip...

*sigh*

"Pro Gaming"

[dannyitc]

Here's my theory as to why the idea of "pro gamers" will never catch on. In today's society, sports stars are pretty much celebrities. Technical skill helps, sure, but nowadays the average joe watches sports usually because of either team/city loyalty (sports have a leg up of about a century in this respect) or they enjoy watching a certain athlete perform. One of the biggest reasons that people are drawn to elite athletes are their ability to perform at a level that is pretty much untouchable. No one sitting at home ever seriously thinks they could have gotten a couple more yards than Vick did on a scramble, for instance. This is really not the case with "pro-gaming." Being a semi-competitive CS player for a couple of years, you really get the sense that if you were still in high school or did not have a fruitful real life job (as is the case with the vast majority of "pro gamers") and could afford to spend 8+ hours in front of a monitor playing games you could do just as well as the "elite" players. Having seen players rise to the absolute cream of the crop of gaming in a matter of months justifies this. Another thing is the personality, maturity, and charisma these "pro gamers" exhibit, which is pretty much none. Real sports are a great way to build social skills at an early age, and most elite athletes have a personality (for better or worse) that is at least interesting, can make conversation and feed the media, are athletically fit, and in general project an image that is marketable, above all else. The environment of the pro-gamer seems to work against all of these qualities. All in all, sports succeed because they are marketable, and they are marketable because people can either relate to or are impressed by them. I think any sort of professional gaming has severe defecits in these areas and will not be seeing any sort of mainstream penetrance anytime soon.

Nintendogs will clean FPS clock

[WillAffleckUW]

Look, I've probably fired more rounds than many people, having qual'd as a sharpshooter on three weapons in the Army, but I think IMHO that frags-per-round is just a temporary thing, in that gaming is already showing signs of getting bored with the preponderance of FPS.

My guess is pets per hour, or here-boys-per-hour, in Nintendogs is likely to be a more useful stat over the next few years, as gaming - again, as it always does - moves on to the next best thing.

Spectator sports = physical action

[Andrew Lenahan]

Simply put, for a competitive activity to catch on as a spectator sport, it must be physical and have a good deal of action. There are orgainsed competitions for all sorts of things, from chess to tiddlywinks to rock-paper-scissors, but people won't tune in unless there's action. Even golf and bowling have more action than watching someone peck at a keyboard or twiddle a joystick.

There's also the issue of charisma and looks. Athletes are successful only partly because of a certain celebrity appeal caused by physical good looks. Most of the "pro" gamers I've seen photos of have ranged from totally disgusting-looking to drab and average... I've yet to see one who could give, say, Anna Kournikova a run for her money. It could be because the practice involved with being a pro gamer prevents them from paying attention to their looks, or it could be that hardcore gaming just attracts a certain "type". I won't speculate because I genuinely don't know, but let's just say that I won't expect a "Girls of Pro Gaming Swimsuit Edition" at the newsstand anytime soon.

Finally, (and please note that I'm a moderate-to-hardcore gamer myself), competitive/pro gaming just isn't something that most gamers care about. I get most of the mainstream gaming mags (EGM, Game Informer, PSM, etc.) and gaming tournaments and such aren't given much coverage. Most gamers would rather read about hot new games coming out than some dude in Peoria getting such a high score in Pac-Man that the motherboard melted. Pro gaming attracts a certain crowd, and probably won't go away anytime soon, but will never find an audience as a mainstream spectator sport.