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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."
... 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.