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The Logistics of an eSports Tournament
An anonymous reader writes: Wargaming's hugely popular World of Tanks game sees its biggest tournament of the year, The Grand Finals, taking place this weekend. In an interview published today, the developer's eSports director, Mohamed Fadl, reveals just what goes into preparing a tournament for both thousands of spectators at the venue, and millions more streaming online.
"The infrastructure behind such an event is the most challenging task," he reveals. "Ten highly qualified IT managers, 28 on-air casters and around 50 additional TV staff will be doing their best...A TV level production setup, 170 computers, a total of 1.3GB/s bandwidth and 16 cameras plus 14 player cameras." And all for just 12 teams playing one strategy game.
"The infrastructure behind such an event is the most challenging task," he reveals. "Ten highly qualified IT managers, 28 on-air casters and around 50 additional TV staff will be doing their best...A TV level production setup, 170 computers, a total of 1.3GB/s bandwidth and 16 cameras plus 14 player cameras." And all for just 12 teams playing one strategy game.
It's a real-time third-and-first-person shooter with a modest attempt at realistic physics simulation for projectile ballistics, impact damage modeling, friction coefficients for different environments and even the individual tanks' mechanical differences (transmission efficiency, ground pressure, etc.).
From the League of Legends World Championship (season 3)
"Over 32 million fans watched SK Telecom T1 earn the Summoner's Cup in front of a sold-out Staples Center. At peak, more than 8.5 million fans were watching at the same time."
and season 4:
"During the final showdown between Samsung White and Royal Club, the peak concurrent viewers (the highest number of fans watching at once) was 11.2 million - a climb from 8.7 million in 2013. Overall total unique viewer count for the finals came in at 27 million, from 32 million in 2013."
So apparently international E-Sports competition is larger than the NBA world cup, and the crowd is definitely big enough to sustain something like this...unless you are saying that live sports markets aren't big enough to be sustainable either?