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The ESports Athletes Who Tried To Switch Games
An anonymous reader writes "Michael Jordan's infamous attempt at baseball aside, athletes have sometimes switched sports successfully in the past — and perhaps a sure a sign as any that eSports are coming of age is pro gaming's top players are now trying to do the same. A new feature looks at the top players who've tried to make the jump from one first person shooter to another, or even between genre — from StarCraft 2 to League of Legends — and finds that while some have thrived, others has shown that each title can require a very particular, and sadly non-transferrable, skill set."
Another difference is that 50,000,000 people won't pay to watch eSports on any given weekend but they will for football and basketball etc.
While I find the moniker "ESports" somewhat humorous, calling gamers "athletes" borders on the ridiculous.
It's competitive gaming, and nothing more. Gaming is not a sport.
Buck Feta. You know what to do.
"Athletes".
Stop trying to pretend gamers are something that they're not. If gamers are athletes, then watching movies is like personal non-competitive physical exercise.
Keep counting...
A significant portion of my friends from my late teens are now employed not in *making* games, but in casting, organising, events management, marketing and more for eSports events... The growth is beyond phenomenal.
I believe a League of Legends event recently sold out the Staples Centre faster than any other event in history...
Please watch the great 30 For 30 episode Jordan Rides the Bus . Even I, as a Chicagoan that grew up in the Jordan era, was surprised at how good Jordan got at baseball. It seems at the end he had quite a few game winning hits. It seemed there was no guarantee he'd be called up to the majors in 95, but any question of that was nixed with the baseball strike that year. I don't think a lot of people knew how much he improved. Even his main man Spike Lee made jokes about Jordan - with a commercial about his struggles with "the wicked double-A curveball..."
Hell, watch most 30 For 30. The 16th Man is as good as most movies out now.
The current year major tourney viewer count is 32 million for League of Legends, 20 million for Dota 2. To put that in perspective, only 100 million watch the Superbowl. Yes, League of Legends is 1/3 as popular as the Superbowl. Strange but that is the way the future is heading. Should we include twitch then it may just be that 50 million people pay to watch other people play video games any given week.
Can you explain the "fundamental" changes that happen in these games?
In single-player Tetris since 2001, infinite spin and playing forever made score attack trivial, and Ryan Davis of GameSpot wrote of infinite spin that "it actually breaks Tetris". It ended up changing the most common single-player game format to time to complete 40 lines. In multiplayer, the rules on when a T-Spin sends extra garbage to the other player have fluctuated ever since the rotation rules were revised in Tetris Worlds .
To be fair, most of the games being played now are at most five years old, whereas many traditional sports have been around for the better part of half a century or more. In another 100 years, these games (or whatever comes after them) may have just as much of a viewer base.
Interestingly enough, in South Korea they're about as big as traditional sports. Back in the day they even had TV channels that would broadcast professional Starcraft matches. I expect that in time, the rest of the world will grow to be more like Korea in that respect and that eventually there will be an ESPN channel dedicated to e-sports.