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Does Professional Gaming Have a Future?
mr_sifter writes "Three years ago, celebrity gamers such as Fatal1ty were bagging millions in prizes, and TV channels were queuing up to broadcast games on TV. Professional gaming looked set for the big time. It never happened, and in the current economic crisis, sponsors and media organizations are cutting costs, resulting in the closure of many pro gaming competitions (as we recently discussed) and a down-scaling in prize money. This feature looks at whether pro gaming can bounce back, and whether it will always be a PC sport, or if pro gaming on consoles is the future."
It's just a marketing tool by PR companies. As soon as they find a better way to sell games, they'll drop it like a hot brick.
... pro gaming. While you have places like Korea and starcraft, it's not the norm anywhere else.
I remember many startups like "Online athletes" years ago (defunct now) trying to create a "pro gaming" site and pay gamers for winning games, the y failed horribly.
Also there is a problem with pro gaming - the games keep changing and you can't do real "pro gaming" online because of cheaters and hackers, so you can't be sure the people you're playing against are "clean".
Gaming is also not like other sports where you stick to one game and then build an audience around that game around those rules. In the video game world everything is constantly changing.
One of my best friends plays at the WCG every year and would always be in the top 10 players but he never made any real money on it, he won prizes like computer hardware, etc. But I think it will take a leap forward in culture and technology before eSports takes off (a generation or so) when gaming is seen as something normal that most everybody does, and technology has advanced to allow more activity... in which Nintendo's Wii will be seen as just one of the first attempts.
Many competitive sports games can be really fun to watch but only if the camera work is done intelligently. Things like Orange Smoothie/other mods for Quake 3, etc, allowed people to stream live matches to the web so people could watch the match, truth be told... not all video games are exciting to watch, and this has to do with the lack designing the game and the games systems to do what traditional camera's do for televised sports.
No.
Long answer:
No, not really, outside of Korea anyway. But they eat dogs.
The economy is pretty bad and will take a long time to get fixed. When it is fixed, it's not going to be anything like the free ride a lot of people were used to in the past decade.
Pro gaming isn't going to be the only area. I expect actors and pro athletes to take a hit too.
Does it make sense to pay someone millions of dollars to play a game or pretend to be someone else in front of a camera while millions are losing their homes and jobs?
Take pro sports. Where do they make their money? Well. One way is selling tickets to games. But ticket prices have been soaring. Here's a historical look at Yankee ticket prices. It's really insane to think a box seat goes for $250 after season ticket discounts. That's just not something a lot of people are going to be able to justify. Same goes for merchandise.
Another way that sports franchises make money is through advertising. Both in the venue, on tv and through endorsements. Many people are spending less. They either don't have the income they used to have or they need to save more to cover the losses in their savings and retirement plans. It doesn't matter who endorses that new toy/car/carpet/whatever. People will be buying less. That means less money is going to be spent on advertising and we already started seeing advertising budgets cut.
The economy grew too high, too fast with nothing to support it. The current administration and previous administration kept pumping money into the system to keep it from collapsing. That can't go on forever. We're not going to recover from it. The best we can hope is that all this money that is being printed is being used in a way that will go into new industries that can help fill the void all these scammers created.
Dual Opteron < $600
Piloting drones for the military, or one of those rovers on the moon or another planet, or submersibles used for underwater repairs or construction or treasure hunting, or robots that work with bombs or hazardous materials, and things like that. It's not professional gaming, but gaming will prepare you for those jobs at least as well as anything else will
It already has a future in Korea. Does it have one in the USA? Possibly. How big? Not very. Americans like their athletics real.
It's probably about the level of, say, American Gladiator: a viable niche at best.
I piss off bigots.
The issue is not enough people care and only the top few dozen could make a living out of it (assuming 14 hours a day and keeping your reflexes permanently as younger ppl come through). With a professional sport like football you don't need that, you can be the 2000th best player in the world and still make a lot of money somewhere... if you're the 2 thousandth best player in quake/sc you'll end up on welfare. 99% of pro gamers would make more money now and in the next 10 years at least just playing as hobby and getting a mcjob during the day.
As long as someone is willing to sit and watch someone play a game, why wouldn't there be basis for a pro-gaming? Would you like to advertise directly to 1.000.000 16-25 year old males that play a lot of games, and buy a lot of hardware? Well then pro-gaming is where it is at, and you can get some really cheap well targeted advertising. When the advertising dollars are there, the rest is easy.
Just imagine... professional porn watching, and you can tune in and watch your favorite porn watchers watch porn. And, the professional stamp collector watching channel - exciting action, watching those philatelists lick hinges. Why, soon EVERY leisure activity can be a spectator sport. Watch people read the latest exciting novels, watch them watch movies. Watch people watching people watching people watch TV!
Hey here's an idea for a new show - Guitar Hero Hero Hero! Watch someone pretend to watch someone pretend to play guitar!
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Two words: pro wrestling.
Read my blog.
Hi, it will depend on the gaming market in general: Complex, PC based games favour professional gaming. Casual games on the Console are hardly done in a professional way. CU, Martin
The Spike Channel is trying to capitalize on this with the show "Ultimate Gamer". I saw one episode and the show seems more like MTV's Real World than any real gaming competition. While that kind of show doesn't appeal to me, I think I can see what they are trying to do. How do you create a delivery system around a game that makes it interesting to watch? With sports you can go to the field or watch it on TV and in either circumstance you are watching something that is dynamic that engages your attention. However, with video games, all the action is on a screen whose images are usually suited for only viewing one side of what's going on (Blue Team only, or Red Team only). There are way to switch back and forth between the players, but that hardly is smooth. Also I don't know about you but watching my friends play Halo 3 is nowhere near as fun as watching a ball game.
While you MIGHT want to link pro-gaming with pro-sports, the simple fact is that very few sports can be done on a pro-level. Especially the kind of pro-level that hands out small fortunes in prize money.
I read a story just recently about a dutch soccer player who played for one of the smaller but still big enough to matter teams, who in between matches worked as a constructor and now does once again. Okay, so his team wasn't in the top, but still, soccer is HUGE and he could NOT earn enough with the sport to make it his full time occupation.
The top darter in holland drives a tram. I am sure there are many other examples of sports that are at times aired on tv, where an individual might even be famous and they still need an ordinary day job to pay the bills.
You also have to consider the audience. Yachting attracts big sponsers because the people who watch it spend big money. Is gaming like that? Would you slap down several thousand bucks for a seat at a programing event? Did you buy the new X-fi soundcards? Gamers are two markets anyway, the geeks and the new MTV crowd. Cater to one and you loose the other. Doesn't happen with soccer. The geek gaming crowd isn't going to spend a fortune on a branded item. They know the deal and will get something cheaper instead. The MTV crowd? They got lots more to spend it on, you are competing with all other entertainment and mobile phones and clothes for their money.
So no, I don't think pro-gaming has a future, it will always be like one of those small sports where sometimes someone gets their 15 minutes of fame and if they are smart make enough to live comfortably for the rest of their lives but equal to say Soccer or baseball or whatever is your countries big sport. No.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Whenever you get set-up well in a game you save. Let's just hope these guys used that good practise when it came to their prize money
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Are there any taped matches with English commentary? I remember watching a starcraft 2 game(demo) a few months ago and the commentator's energetic way of reporting on the game made me curious about it.
Links would be most welcome.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
Wcg ultimate gamer sucks in many ways some of the big ones are
> Why is this on SCI-FI and not G4 or spike tv?
> Some of games they picked so far and joke of some of the Real Life Challenges.
> reality show type setup / rules that takes away from being about who is really the best at the game and may even keep some real good players but really bad looking ones out of the show.
> XBOX 360 only come on fps games are not the best on that system and most of good people with mouse + keyboard and not the xbox controller.
> Where are the RTS games let see they suck on the XBOX mainly with the xbox controller ( mouse + keyboard is the way to go with RTS games) so they can't have them even know they ARE BIG WITH PRO GAMING.
> Contestant talking about throwing games is a NON joking way.
> why paintball and not laser tag?
> This so bad that you have to keep watching it to see what they will do next.
> and many more smaller ones.
A little background about myself: I spent the better part of my teens and early 20's playing at a high competitive level in games like Quake and Counter-Strike. I've won semi-major events; I was even on a few teams with notable CPL/WCG winners. You could say that I was right on the cusp of becoming a pro gamer.
There are a few reasons that I didn't go "pro" like a budding career and the fact that only the very cream of the crop players actually made enough money at the time to consider pro gaming a worthwhile endeavor. I knew I wasn't the best player around, and carting myself around to places like the CPL to finish in the bottom half of the top 10 or top 5 didn't make any sense to me. Working a steady job and earning a living from 9-5, 5 days a week, did.
Back then, I watched a lot of demos of other players and teams. You know what? I hated it. It felt like homework to me. When I attended lans, I rarely watched or was interested in spectating matches.
Why? Because gaming, especially at the highest levels, is way more fun when you are actually playing. Gaming, to me, is all about the adrenaline rush that you get when you're storming a base, or grabbing quad damage, or fighting back to win a round when it's 1v3. Spectating, to me, is for losers. Spectating is what I did back in high school when I lost a round of Street Fighter II and had to sit and wait for my turn in a rotation of friends.
I have probably said it here before, but it bears repeating. Pro gaming relies on sponsorship which, in turn, relies on spectators. And gaming is a is a poor spectator 'sport', or at the best, a niche market.
Playing game is an entertainment, just like watching TV. Do you know someone called "pro TV watcher" that "bagged millions?" I never.
I'm a professional poker player and I make a reasonable income. Many other regulars I know were former Starcraft players. It's just a natural cycle of things. A few years ago people used to play Chess, but I know a few of them moved to Poker. As an example: Bertrand Russell or 'Elky' used to be a world champion at Starcraft, now he's a champion poker player.
What the Dream Team of professional gaming might look like
Professional gaming looked set for the big time. It never happened...
I will tell you why it never happened: the same reason other dot com creations like Webvan and Pets.com "looked set for the big time" and then promptly disappeared. The difference between professional gaming and Webvan is that professional gaming refused to die. A friend of mine was active in that stuff for years and despite being pretty good at what he did, all he ever won was an $800 check that had to be split 4 ways with his teammates. That was after multiple trips to all four corners of this country and at least a couple outside of the country. Not enough people give enough of a shit for sponsors to care enough about professional gaming, therefore there is no money in it for the participants unless you win the whole thing. Even low-rent sports leagues like the AFL pay their bottom-rung players something.
The day an organized league with a valid, sustainable salary structure comes into town is the day professional gaming makes it. Otherwise all it'll ever be is a smattering of competitions for people who can afford to take long weekends to go sit in some hotel conference room and jam themselves full of Red Bull and play video games in tournament brackets.
I certainly hope there's no future for it.
Already here, bro. Did you not see the news of the sequel to WoW?
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/warcraft_sequel_lets_gamers_play
Two words: pro wrestling.
Even pro wrestling is "real" in that the moves they're performing are real. When a guy jumps off a ring corner 20 feet into the air and does a backflip down on top of another guy, that's real. And without a lot of training and a lot of practice, you're looking at serious injury or worse without proper training.
You can debate the difference between a "game" and a "sport" but for me, it really comes down to the risk of physical injury. A big reason (though not the only reason) people like sports is because they like to see athletes perform physical feats that they themselves cannot. It's all about pushing the body to its limit. "Games" don't have that. They can still be interesting to watch, but for other reasons. You don't watch a chess match hoping to see a 99 yard touchdown pass or a slam dunk. On the other hand, the audience for watching "games" is inherently much smaller than the audience for sports, because there's less raw excitement.
Professional gaming is what it says - a game, not a sport. It will never be more popular than, say, watching two people play chess. People are just inherently more interested in watching other people perform physical tasks - video gaming is in the second person, you're watching someone manipulate some other character that doesn't really exist, and it's that virtual character that appears to be doing all the work and taking all the risks. It's not a sport and it'll never be popular for that reason.
Having spent a large amount of my youth playing games like real-time strats and shooters ... and having gone to competitions and doing really well, I can give you the simple answer as to why the "games" would not do well.
Real time strategies ... are too slow. I've played games with people of equal caliber that latest 5 minutes, and others that lasted well over 3-5+ hours. It's not consistent and most people don't understand what is happening. It's like watching chess, sure it's intriguing, but it's boring after a bit, let alone watching it over and over. Playing it yourself is much more fun.
Shooters. I'm by no means the best, but I'm usually very high ranked on many of the GAMING servers (not competitions). The reason why is because i'm constantly moving and I react quickly. This has been shown on many shows that that's how the GOOD gamers do it too. The problem with this is that I've been told countless times by my friends watching me play that I make them motion sick from moving to much and so fast. I can't imagine what it would be like to actually watch "professionals" do that for a half hour straight. The only way it would work is if they showed small 3-5 second clips, or just random frags... and then focused on the PLAYERS. The problem with that of course is that PLAYERS are just sitting in front of screens clicking a mouse and keyboard... so that gets old after a few seconds.
I can see there being gamer competitions, and i'm sure that the TOP players will do well $$ wise, but I don't think that the "professional gaming" will ever really become "mainstream". There is too little happening, too few things that changes in the game, and it's too difficult to understand for people who don't already play.
In the end, the people who would watch it the most, would be the people PLAYING the games. Except, that after watching it for a few minutes, they'd probably turn off the tv, and start playing the games themselves.
A lot of them seem to be turning to online poker, which is obviously more profitable but requires similar skills.
If there was a way to play Counter-Strike for 1$ a kill, then you'd have professional gamers.
Maybe I'm ignorant of what pro gaming is like these days, but I can't see it becoming mainstream (that's not what we're talking about, really) until the games themselves are: (1)Nuanced enough that individual styles of top-flight players can be discerned by laypeople and (2)that the technology to render a sufficiently immersive experience in a particular model of is a achieved and plateaus.
The second condition has been fulfilled by games like Pac-man, off the top of my head. The first condition has has been achieved in some modern games, but inability to maintain the second condition doesn't allow any one "sport" to catch on.
Also, and I don't know if this exists, but some kind of commentated observation of a FPS game may hasten achievement of the first condition in some styles of game.
At least, not the kind that get "professional gamer" attention. Counter-Strike 1.6, Counter-Strike: Source (during TheCGS era), TF2, COD4 and Halo are highly popular online games that were (and are) still successful in the professional arena. The problem is your definition of "professional" is based on who gets on T.V. A professional is anyone who is an expert in his or her field.
And if you want a come-back to professional gaming, refer to ESEA.net.
"Want some fries with that?"
In a world where you can be (relatively) famous for the ability to eat more hot dogs in five minutes than anyone else in the world, I can't see how gaming is all that bad.
(Why not combine the two? Oh, wait. There's already a competitive eating video game. Holy crap, I think I might just explode.)
If firefighters fight fire, and crimefighters fight crime, what do freedom fighters fight? - George Carlin
I've found that there is no better way to ruin a perfectly good hobby then to make it a career.
I think by "real", he meant meatspace.
All gamers went to wow thats why the pro gamers vanished.
thrust me the marketing of those pro games have alot to do with what kind of games people play, for 5 years wow has been numero uno so much that it killed the interest in other games , when professional gaming was big there was starcraft and quake.. ( and you cant really have people watch wow raiding tbh , altough i would love to see ensidia,method guilds etc try to get a world first, but that only lasts for a week or two every year )
dont go to a too rash judgement here , but ill bet you $100 that the pro comp gaming will take up when starcraft 2 is released.
First, PC games are not long-term. Even Starcraft has only been around for about 10 years, and its replacement is coming up this year or next. FPS's typically remain popular for 2-3 years at the most. Compare that with any real pro sport. Some of them have been around longer than the US has been a country; almost all of them have been around before computers existed. So when this year's $BIG_POPULAR_FPS dies out next year, which one is going to replace it as the next "pro" FPS? No one really knows until they've been out for a while, and it's more or less selected by how popular it is. Of course by then, it's going to be popular for probably another 1-2 years, and then it's on to the next game.
The second problem is that watching someone play a PC game really just is not that fun.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
There is not enough money in gaming to support a large number of players. Hockey and Football support all of the players at the high end while in gaming only the top few can make a living and the pay drops off sharply after. I do not think that this can change right now.
Gambling may be an interesting avenue. Anyone can try playing poker. A loop of interest can exist between watching and playing. I think that getting people to try and win 50 bucks playing Quake or Street Fighter would generate interest in the pro gaming coverage.
[20:36] wwwdot/.dotorg
do professional gamers have a future?
No, you'll confuse and worry them. Do what you like and try to get paid for it.
did professional gaming ever have a present?
Let me see, have you completed and/or installed as many games as I have on WINE?
http://www.youtube.com/user/rofthorax
I think I should get some prizes too.. I doubt F4tality or whatever his name would not have the balls to get games running on WINE, nor to play them to the end.
Let's see you install COD4 on WINE F4t4lity or whatever your name is..
Just say no to license servers!!
Shitloads of people watch poker on television. The differentiating factor isn't physical activity. It's the sense of jeopardy.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yes. The potential to make gaming visually interesting is so much higher than in sports.
Play Command HQ online
To watch the game and enjoy it:
1: You must understand it
2: You must have played it
3: You must have spent money getting it
Games are marketed for single person's interest. Now, how can you make those game which are ANTI_SOCIAL into a pro gaming?
Football, soccer, basketball, etc, you need to GET TOGETHER WITH OTHER PEOPLE SOMEWHERE. The rules are pretty basic, and easy to follow.
In video games, you missed one second, and you missed the whole fucking game. That is why dumbtube is good, cause you can rewind, and see wtf just happened.
In korea, most spectators, are people who are skipping studying, in a HIGHLY DENSE population area. Game, cause of PCBANG, of Starcraft is EXTREMELY popular and been around for 10 YEARS! Everyone knows the rules.
In USA, we always go for the NEWEST,BRANDEST EYE CANDY, and 6 month later, we go to the new one. And "twitch, jerk FPS games" that we love so much, or fighting games that move at the blink of the eye to most untrained public, will leave most of us with WHAT THE FUCK JUST HAPPEN, and I have no idea what a fuck is going on anyway as it is off screen with schitzo strobe effects and music (MVC)
So, the answer is NO.
One more thing, in USA, some torneys are rigged now in video games as in Evolution sponsored tornements. Some throw in the fight among the friends to split the money. Add to the gang culture of disrespect and thug behavior, who wants to watch that?