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eSports Starting To Go Mainstream
An anonymous reader writes: eSports have never been more popular, and many large companies are starting to view them in the same light as traditional sports. The amount of money being thrown around is beginning to rival the money exchanged over sports teams. A recent Dota 2 tournament handed out over $10 million in prizes, and Google's $1 billion purchase of game-streaming site Twitch.tv has now been confirmed. But it doesn't end there — companies like Coca-cola, Intel, Nissan, and major movie studios are looking at the audiences being drawn by eSports and realizing the advertising potential. "Last fall, Riot Games sold out the Staples Center for its League of Legends Championship Series Finals. While 12,000 people watched live in the home of the Lakers and Kings, over 32 million tuned in to the livestream." George Woo, head of a global eSports tournament, said, "Attendance to Intel Extreme Masters events has grown 10X with us filling up sport stadiums, where we have visitors lining up to get a seat to watch the competition. Online it has grown 100X, where we now get more viewers watching livestreams for a single event than we'd have tune in for an entire season in the past."
People have been saying this for years. While it'd be interesting to see it actually happen, I'm not holding my breath.
...and many large companies are starting to view them in the same light as traditional sports...
Just another consumer product, of course "large companies" are looking the fleece money off of Americans with disposable income...
We are a "consumer society", as other societies seek to better their lot through education and economic advancement, we Americans consume.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I got really into watching DOTA 2. I first started watching games to learn how to play it better. The game has a pretty big learning curve, so being able to watch how people played helped me learn the basics. Once that was over, I found that there are actually a lot of interesting casters who do daily live plays which are *shocked* actually entertaining in themselves. I don't necessarily spend every moment glued to the screen like I would during major tourney's, but a nice semi-background activity to spend time on.
Bye!
If people classify chess as a sport, so should these things, no? But then again, When will we see simultaneous exhibitions with esports where one guy fights against 30-50 people and win?
eSports have been my long-time favorite way to spectate gaming (or demonstrate skill to an audience). I've never been much of a fan of watching real-life sports -- some have been pretty interesting, especially if they don't have downtime (like soccer, rugby, etc) -- but at the end of the day, the fact that I don't participate in these sports has left me with less interest.
Competitive Gaming on the other hand, has been a staple in my life since Doom II. I will never forget how Quake 1 had great multiplayer mods with capture the flag, etc, and that you could go into a spectator mode. At that point, I was very excited to see how other players would react and strategize in situations I myself would encounter.
Fast forward over a decade and we've got competitive counter strike, battlefield 2, etc, rolling along and the shoutcasts started. These were always very niche, but they were far more frequent than the extremely rare CPL video streams and the poor attempts by big media companies to create an eSport event on television. Back then (about 10 years ago), those big media events usually had too many shots of the crowds and of the gamers themselves, and not enough attention to the gameplay. For me, the best shoutcasts were direct video streams from observer mode and first person mode, with announcers discussing the game as it unfolds.
Anyway... In the last several years, there have been Twitch streams and much larger scaled video game streams or recordings on youtube that are really starting to please my tastes. It's good to see that gaming, a very popular medium for competition and pleasure, is gaining mainstream attention. This is also a great sign that our generation is finally starting to matter.
Why? Newborns have brand-awareness. What a waste of cash.
Requiem for the American Dream
Video games are better to spectate than sports. Broadcasters have known this for decades, doing what they could to compensate. Gimmicks won't stall change forever though, sooner than later they'll have to face this fact. The real interesting stuff will be the cultural shift when video games start to challenge the popularity of athletic sports.
sorry, old school here. But a sport involves the combo of physical exertion, and skill. Skill for gaming ? no doubt gaming requires a huge amount of skill. But physical exertion? come ON. and no question that gaming is going mainstream, when espn starts covering it ...
expecting the mod downs ... waiting for em actually ...
There is so much more with physical sports than with eSports, video games or whatever you want to call them.
With a physical sport not only are you building hand eye coordination in real life*, but you are developing physical abilities and social skills/social interaction. IM'ing with someone isn't the same.
*I've seen some of those videos of someone throwing a knife that bounces off a building, ricochets off a bird or something and then lands in some guy's eye. What physics are these games using?
I grew up on video games - no pretentious label of "eSports". What I missed out is "ball sense". Intuitive sense of how a ball moves and interacts with other objects.
What that means, after seeing someone hit a ball and then land in front of me, I don't know what it's going to do until I see it. Folks who grew up playing ball can anticipate where it will go.
Because I missed out on that - and it's something that has to be hard wired as a child - I am doomed to suckage as an adult ball player. Bottom of the 'C' league for me - and that's even paying mega bucks for coaches and playing every single night for years.
Looking back now, my years playing "eSports" were wasted. I should have been out there playing ball or something, making friends, learning how to deal with people.
There's a reason why the ex-ballplayers end up in upper management - and it's not all "jocks like hiring other jocks".
As an adult I have learned the wisdom of the Greeks who valued developing the mind, spirit AND the body.
The (current, at any rate) lack of geographic identification probably hurts emotional engagement a bit. The more successful team sports have a nearly magical ability to grab the audience in some primitive part of their little hominid brain that used to handle inter-tribal combat and allow them to experience, by proxy, the emotional indulgence of victory or defeat against the away tribe. It's really pretty weird. Especially weird is how easily the affect of the game bleeds over into other things, like the traditional rioting and setting cars on fire, or the stock market...
Until they come up with a way of inspiring the same large-scale insanity in their audience, 'e-sports' are going to have a difficult time competing.
About how they get harassed from gamers
http://games.slashdot.org/stor...
Can you imagine any of these people dealing with what an Umpire a Tennis Linesman, or a god forbid a Soccer Ref has to go through ?
Money talks and no matter how much you huff and puff about useless semantics, the world will move on and accept e-sports into the cultural fabric like so many new forms of expression and entertainment before them.
Bye!
Sports fandom feeds off of the non-deterministic nature of the games that are played, sure there are winners and losers, but there is very little room in eSports to blame Referees, because in the game world it would be called "Exploits" and would be considered verifiable cheating.
Pro gamers use exploits all the time, and these are usually allowed it they don't break the game too much and use only standard manipulations. Some of these exploits became a core mechanic in these games. A classic example is the strafe-jump in Quake, a bug which allowed the player to exceed the maximum running speed by making a series of diagonal jumps. This bug was voluntarily reproduced in the next Quake games because it made gameplay more interesting.
And sure, you have no referees but bugs and hardware malfunctions can happen. It's also common for players to take gambles, make blunders or in general do something unexpected that turns the tides. Believe me, there is a lot to talk about with eSports, some of my friends are into 2D fighting games and they comment the matches the same way as sports fans do (blah blah, should have done this, blah blah, was at a disadvantage, blah blah, just lucky, blah, should have won, blah).
Esports, as a moniker, has about as much success at winning people over as Formula-E
Good-bye
I agree, playing video games is not a sport, since it doesn't involve physical prowess.
How is that relevant though? eSports is just a name, but the fact remains that people watch these things, will pay money to watch "live", and advertisers can monetize these eyeballs. That's why it's viewed like "traditional sports". Now you may think people are stupid and are paying money to watch a bunch of dudes clicking on a mouse with fingers on WASD, but hey, people watch a bunch of dudes trying to get an oblong ball from point A to point B. Different activity, same concept, and same result for corporations.
Regular sports are already a pretty obnoxious part of our society. Fandom brings out an ugly semi-repressed tribal side of people. Most sports themselves are lame and boring to watch on TV,especially when the wanker of an announcer just can't shut up and has to drone on with endless repeats of some anecdote.
Sports, like electronic games, can be a lot of fun to play, mostly awful to watch.
Stay off my lawn too.
sorry, old school here. But a sport involves the combo of physical exertion, and skill.
Exactly. Professional Sports athletes put in countless hours of blood, sweat, and tears to become the best at what they do. They need to practice and better themselves physically in order to become the best at what they do. They risk their bodies (from injuries) when playing sports. Sitting in a chair with a controller behind a TV/Computer screen is nothing compared to what "old school" sports athletes go through. 2 a day practices, 6am practices, etc. You just won't find that kind of sacrifice in esports -- at least not right now.
Sorry. But they're not sports.
They're not.
All this is, is an attempt to fleece money out of a bunch of stooges who're too stupid to understand that watching a bunch of guys clicking away on a computer or console system is NOT a sport.
Sorry, but email is not the same as mail. It just isn't. People are too stupid to understand that pressing buttons on a keyboard is NOT the same as sending a letter through the post office.
Starcraft 1 players on pro teams lived together and their average day was full of training between meals, gym session, and theorycrafting with their coach. Isn't polishing the matchups and builds for 12hrs a day not enough of a sacrifice?
Try practising so much that you are able to sustain 300 actions per minute with 99% accuracy for half an hour and then we'll talk.
" But a sport involves the combo of physical exertion,"
Back in my day, lugging that goddamned 21" Trinitron CRT around with my almost as heavy loaded Antec P4 Server WAS the physical exertion aspect. Not easy for someone that's 6' and 145.
Off my lawn.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
soooo funny. I have mod points, but can't use em on this post.
The entire purse of The International 2014 was larger than the British Open - this is one step in eSports becoming relevant.
I prefer the more accurate term ePenis over eSport.
--
"Once money is involved, the art & activity is almost always corrupted. Politics, Sports, Movies, Games, etc."
you know, that's why it's called a eSport event. On another note, the word sport dosen't mean that it's only for physical competitions.
you stooge.
Why don't we just check a dictionary on that?
Sport (Noun)
An athletic activity requiring skill or physical prowess and often of a competitive nature, as racing, baseball, tennis, golf, bowling, wrestling, boxing, hunting, fishing, etc.
Hmm.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
So mutual masturbation via video chat is an eFuck right?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
a game where most of the participants act like that one asshole
Every single starcraft match I've watched has had every participant sit there like a robot with a slightly furrowed brow until the match is over. "dramatic flare" reduces your APM and lets the zerglings rush you.
Why would they show eSports on ESPN when they can reach a wider audience and offer a much better experience with streaming? Traditional TV is going the way of the Dodo, everything is moving to streaming. It is like saying Soccer won't be mainstream until it is on the radio.
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But how long will PCs continue to be able to run the Starcraft binaries usably? And how long will Actiblizzard continue to authorize streams of Starcraft play rather than just DMCAing them for infringement of the copyright in Starcraft?
Arguments for or against this being a sport are all missing the point. It's an activity performed by an elite few that a large population of people want to spectate. It's a spectacle and entertainment. Whether it's a eSports, baseball, food eating competitions, the Olympics, a boxing match, poker, etc. the common denominator for them all is that enough people want to view it that that the activity becomes economically sustainable in some manner.
If people classify chess as a sport, so should these things, no?
No. The difference is that Chess is more than 95 years old. Anyone can sell Chess equipment and stream Chess matches without permission from FIDE or any other governing body. With games like StarCraft, on the other hand, all leagues operate at the pleasure of Actiblizzard. If Actiblizzard doesn't like a league, then under current law, it can shut down the league's streams with a copyright claim.
The real interesting stuff will be the cultural shift when video games start to challenge the popularity of athletic sports.
I expect that to happen around the 2080s when the copyrights in popular multiplayer video games start expiring, provided that national legislatures don't extend the term of copyright again. Until then, a game's publisher is allowed to dictate who, when, where, and how broadcasts are allowed to happen.
I'm going to be competing in my first official Super Smash Bros Melee tournament (ie. paid entry, prizes) in a couple of days and have been soaking in many videos of professional tournament games over the past couple weeks. It's truly amazing to me to see the strategies and techniques that the pros employ. It takes a LOT of practice to be able to exploit a character's specific intricacies in order to optimize your offensive and defensive game. It practically gets down to the point of playing mind games with your opponent. Always being able to predict their next move (not always possible with a good opponent), or at least knowing what options they have available to them at each split second is essential. (Watch this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... - a good example of professional players pushing technique to the limits)
I don't think I've ever sat in front of the computer and sucked down video after video of historic baseball footage... ore ever will.
Actiblizzard [has the option of] DMCAing them for infringement of the copyright in Starcraft
I have no idea why they would do it.
For the same reason as the Let's Play takedowns. Sega DMCA'd videos containing footage of the Shining Force games (but later issued a non-apology). Some publishers, such as Nintendo, might instead choose to put a Content ID* claim on videos containing "images or audio of a certain length" (such as a game's title screen or cut scenes), diverting ad revenue away from partners.*
* YouTube terminology used. Feel free to substitute.
Yep. I'm going to fear some AC troll and a vauge, pointless threat of "mod points".
Probably about as much as belching during a belching contest.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!