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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 amazes me that people are willing to pay to sit and watch some stranger play any sport. Spectator sports simply bore me, and the handful of times I've found myself stuck standing around with nothing to do but watch someone play a video game, were a special kid of purgatory.
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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.
In a word, bullshit. Quake still works. So does Doom, for that matter.
It would not be at all difficult to stick to one game and get hardcore at it. Nor would changing games present that huge of a challenge, I suspect.
Many competitive sports games can be really fun to watch but only if the camera work is done intelligently.
I don't know. I might like watching highlights -- things like Quake Done Quick, for instance -- but quite a lot of these games just wouldn't be fun to watch. Either it'd be all action, with Quake, or a lot of camping, with Counter-Strike.
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
"Spectator mode" was probably the best way, since unlike other sports, the entire match can be recorder in full 3D, in every detail. If you're right, and it has to do with camera work, those could always be done after the fact, though I suspect many users would greatly enjoy finding their own...
But in all honesty, I've never been one for spectator sports. Maybe it will gain an audience, but it continues to amaze me that other sports have an audience. Are geeks really the right people to ask about this?
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