...who discovered the wheel and built the Eiffel Tower out of metal and brawn. That's what kind of man I am. You're just a woman with a small brain. With a brain a third the size of us. It's science.
I can remember tinkering with it back in the early days. Of course, it was just a vector-based web animation tool at that time. Building flash animations and seeing what people could accomplish with this amazing tool was fun and entertaining.
Now, I just want it to die a horrible, horrible death. Browser focus-stealing advertisements, poor support on consoles like the wii and ps3, complete lack of support on certain portable devices, an awful video interface that suffers from performance issues... what the hell happened?
Flash has gone from a purpose-built vector graphics program, to a plague upon the www. Please kill it.
-The Rendition Verite (V1000) was the first "true" 3d card that I can remember. It was capable of running accelerated Quake and the included Indy Car Racing II was breath-taking at the time with it's high framerate (30fps), high resolution (640x480), and bilinear filtering. I remember sitting in amazement as I watched the ICR2 demo play when I first bought this card. It was truly the first amazing 3d acceleration I had ever seen in my life. Probably the closest thing to it was the Race Drivin/Hard Drivin arcade game, with all of it's blocky polys and 10-15fps goodness.
-The article gives us a huge list of 3d cards, but little depth into the actual performance or market penetration of any of them. Most of these cards are barely worth mentioning. Even at the time, some of these cards sold in miniscule numbers or performed horribly. That's not to say that they shouldn't have been mentioned, but how about focusing on the major players a little more?
-How about 3dfx's "16-bit color is just fine!" rhetoric when Nvidia upped the ante with 32-bit color? I think the reason that 3dfx neglected to move to 32-bit color at the time was because they had tested it and performance on their cards was horrible. Hey, I bought 3dfx's bullshit at the time, mainly because I wanted to run Quake 2 as fast as possible.
I could go on, but the bottom line is this article isn't much of a "history" at all. It's nothing more than a list of cards with specs and brief summaries. How disappointing.
"They shot themselves in the foot with Windows ME too, luckily for them they had the reasonably stable Windows NT ready to go out the door."
Not exactly sure what you meant by this. Windows NT was around long before ME. I thought, maybe you meant Windows 2000. I was pretty sure that ME and 2000 were released around the same time. Nope. According to wikipedia, Win2000 came out in February 2000, while ME came a full 7 months later in September. So... what exactly did you mean?
Information wants to be free. Sure, you may think it's a silly cliche, but the message holds true.
So why would I pay for something that is readily available for free? The internet already provides me with an insurmountable amount of information on a daily basis... more information than I can ever recall reading in a week's worth of newspapers!
Digital readers will neither save or condemn the newspapers; it's up to the newspapers to save themselves. Learn a lesson from the RIAA. Your business model has changed. Adapt or die.
I get it. You're very proficient at wiring ethernet cables. For what it's worth, I agree with you in principle. I've run some lines in my home and it makes no sense to me to spend the extra money on pre-crimped wire.
In a corporate environment, however, it makes all the sense in the world. It's alleviates quality control issues and is easier. These conveniences come at a cost.
Oh, and that technician you're talking about hiring... the one with years of experience? That costs money, too.
I'd love to see you grab a spool of cable, measure and cut it, strip it and sort the wires, then crimp both ends in 15 seconds. I'm good, but not that good. When someone comes to me with a problem, it's much easier for me to reach over and grab a cable from a drawer.
To me, it makes a hell of a lot more sense to use 1 or 2 manufacturers' products than you know are of good quality, than having to worry about a site where 3 or 4 technicians (with varying degrees of skill) may have crimped different lines throughout that location.
Using manufacturers' cables isn't only easier, it's also a form of standardization. And again... if your company can't afford to stock its' sites with spare patch cables, I really don't know what to say.
Compared with... filling in an internal requisition, having to justify the expense, waiting a week for order delivery, followed by resuming doing what you were doing when you needed the cable. If you can even recall what it was.
I'm not sure where you work, but I have a plethora of patch cables sitting in a cabinet next to my desk. It's very rare that I don't have what I need (in terms of ethernet cabling, anyway). And in the ultra-rare instance that I don't have what I need? My district office can have it shipped to me next-day. I think you're being a touch dramatic... or maybe the company you work for has some seriously screwed up policies if you can't even have a few cat-5e/6 cables on hand.
Yes, you can use handmade cables that are as good as mass-produced factory cables. But that really isn't the issue.
It's just not worth the time spent to cut and crimp your own lines anymore. In my experience, it was a more common practice years ago in IT. That may have had something to do with the fact that there weren't nearly as many PC's or ethernet ports in buildings as there are today.
My advice: Find a good supplier (i.e. not one that charges $800 for a 6 ft. adamantium-coated cable) and do something else with the rest of your time.
Team Fortress 2 http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=9335 -wine appdb reports TF2 as a "gold" game. Great, I thought. Installed fine, but the framerates were absolutely horrible! Severe stuttering and fps lag on a system that rarely drops below 100fps with all eyecandy enabled (c2d 3+ghz, 8800gtx). Under wine, I would drop to 5-10fps frequently whenever more than a few players are on screen. Unplayable.
Ventrilo Client http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=2169 -Yet another app that is reported as "gold". Client installs after significant tinkering. Unfortunately, push to talk does not work unless ventrilo is active window (effectively making it useless if you are in game and attempt to chat in real-time). There are several scripts that supposedly fix this PTT focus issue; none of them worked for me on Jaunty x64. So, the primary VOIP client that I use for gaming was useless to me.
Xfire http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=2573 -Another supposed silver/gold app. Xfire installs fine, but the text on the main window is garbled. It is also unstable. Workaround = installing the gfire plugin for pidgin to chat to friends on xfire. It has no in-game functionality, but it works.
Wine is a great tool, but it leaves much to be desired. Is this really a 1.x program? Probably not. Are some of these games really worthy of a Gold or Platinum rating? Definitely not. Admins should be reviewing these submissions.
So I do appreciate the fact that you've had some success with wine. It appears, however, that we're just playing different games.
No way, huh? This is sarcasm, right? I can easily use that amount of bandwidth per month legally.
Example of usage: I stream internet radio pretty heavily. -streaming internet radio @ 128Kbps x 6 hours/day = 345MB/day = 10GB/month
Hulu hd content is between 480Kbps and 1000Kbps. Figuring for an avg. of 700Kbps: -hulu hd @ 700Kbps x 4 hours/day (figuring for my usage and my wife's... VERY generous estimate) = 6.3GB per 5 days/week = 25GB/4 weeks (month)
I'm already at 35GB/month. And that doesn't even include our VoIP usage (skype and ventrilo), downloading of OS/software patches or downloading/seeding linux distros, or anything else I might want to legally do every month.
It was probably around late '96/early '97. I had a friend online who I played Quake with who was constantly spouting off about linux. I've always been interested in computers, but had not really ventured outside of the realm of DOS and Windows save for some dabbling with OS/2 (which I thought was great, but lacked the needed support to be a really amazing end-user OS).
After some nudging, he walked me through downloading and setting up RedHat (Colgate, I believe). I was enthralled by the seemingly endless customization and control over the operating system. Back then, I remember having a proud feeling just being able to get things like my sound card and nic working in this... foreign thing. I felt like I had actually accomplished something when I was able to get Quake running (w/ sound!) for the first time in a non-Windows environment.
After getting used to RedHat, I moved onto Slackware. After all, RH was for n00bs! Heh. Anyone remember glibc vs. libc5? *grumble*
Ironically enough, the same thing that got me into linux was the same thing that took me away from it: gaming. See also: the directx vs. opengl wars. OpenGL lost. As more and more developers started using directx, I ended up booting Windows to access many of the games I wanted to play.
Desktop linux today? Many things have changed, yet so many remain the same. Most hardware is supported out of the box in distros like Ubuntu and Fedora. Gone are the days of having to edit a few lines of source to get your nic driver to work (mostly gone anyway). Everything 'just works', to steal some Apple thunder.
However, gaming under linux is still a terrible prospect. Most games don't natively support it. The wine project, even at 1.x, is still in its' infancy. Even if a directx game does work under wine, it's usually buggy or performs poorly.
Oh, I still boot to linux and regularly tinker. I also maintain an install via virtualbox. And there's nothing that I'd love more than to be running linux exclusively. But unless something miraculous is done, desktop linux will always play second fiddle on my home PC. Sad, but true.
Like most of my online buddies who enjoy playing multiplayer games competitively, I was very disappointed when I purchased L4D and learned that only 2 of the 4 campaigns were playable in versus mode.
And while Campaign mode (humans vs. bots) was fun for the first week or so, the game quickly became stale and I shelved it. "Survival Pack" is a fitting name when you consider that L4D has been steadily slipping in use since it's initial boom at release:
So, thank you Valve... for giving us what we should have received at launch. When the Survival Pack is released, how about putting together a real DLC with more maps?
While I'm somewhat disappointed by the staggering number of pirated copies vs. legit copies of Demigod, I'm not at all surprised. I fully support their stance on DRM and while I do admit to pirating some video games, I went out and bought Sins of the Solar Empire. It's a terrific game.
Now, I have a friend who I was trying to coax into buying Sins. He didn't have the money at the time, so he downloaded the full game. We were able to play online together with no problems. Did he eventually buy the game? No. Why not? Like the rampant movie and music piracy that we see online, I think the answer is simple:
People, in general, have no moral issues with not paying for something that is readily available for free. After all, if you've already received the full product and "gotten away with it", why should you pay for it?
Now, Stardock has smartened up regarding Sins. You can no longer receive updates and play on the legit servers unless you register a legit CD key. In this way, most online games are safer from piracy in that they require a valid cd-key to play on legitimate multiplayer servers.
But here's my question to developers... whatever happened to releasing a partial shareware demo of your games before retail release? This is the business model that seems to have worked so way back in the day and got me to buy games like Doom, Quake, and the like. When did it become so important to get the game out the door that a game demo became a crippled, afterthought that might be released several months after launch?
Game developers really need to rethink their strategy on this one. Stardock has the right idea and should be applauded for their efforts to cater to the gaming community, but more can be done. Bring back shareware before release. Allow users to trying a full episode or 2 of your game, or maybe even grant temporary cd-keys to everyone at launch and let people play the full game for a few days and then lock them out. I want to buy your games. But show me that they are good and worth buying first.
Side note: I'm still goading said friend into buying the game so that we can play the new Entrenchment expansion online. We'll see how that goes.
You can't play multiplayer without a valid one. Just like most other online games these days. The problem with Demigod is that it runs some other http requests (checking for updates, querying system info, etc.). This is why the launch was borked. Not because there are tons of players with pirated copies trying to play on legit servers, but because their servers were effectively getting DDoS'ed by a level of traffic that they were not expecting or ready to serve.
You think? It doesn't really matter what you think because I've declared Martian Law. Under Martian Law, Pod 6 is now referred to as Node 3. Also... under Martian law, doctors and other wizards are forbidden!
There was a time when I was interested in online broadcasts, too. But it was mainly to see who my team might be playing next round in a playoff bracket, or to see what kind of tactics the winner/winning team might be using to possibly gain an advantage. So again... like watching and studying demos, it was a menial, self-selving task.
I know that you're not alone and that there is a entire community of gamers that enjoy watching/listening to e-sports. But like I tried to say before, it's a niche market.
Think about the fact that there are millions of Counter-Strike players, yet several pro gaming leagues that had CS as their staple game are dead or dying. Why is that? Maybe, it's because interest is limited to a small portion of that community? Maybe because it's just not that lucrative of a business model to sponsors/advertisers? I don't have all of the answers.
I think there will always be pro gaming in some form or another. But, like chess or backgammon, it will never be something that anyone should aspire to make a living at. At least, not in my lifetime. There's just not enough money to go around for these types of activities. If there was, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
'I've never understood the spectator part of any real sport either.'
That's an entirely different discussion. Major sports are exciting (imo) because they show us the very limits of what we are capable of physically. I watch and enjoy many different sports from baseball to (American) football to tennis and even motorsport.
Watching a human being hit a 100mph fastball, knowing that if he were to blink his eyes he wouldn't even see it coming across home plate, or seeing a wide receiver grasp a football by the tips of his fingers and haul it in while maintaining his footing in-bounds, or watching a driver make a perfectly timed pass at 180mph... these are special and amazing feats, in my mind.
Again, I know it takes a good deal of skill to play video games at a high level. It takes the highest level of concentration and reflexes, much like real professional sports. But it just isn't visually impressive... at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently, the tech report should have benchmarked their web server before putting this article up.
You are a smelly pirate hooker!
...who discovered the wheel and built the Eiffel Tower out of metal and brawn. That's what kind of man I am. You're just a woman with a small brain. With a brain a third the size of us. It's science.
... of making me buy the same shit over and over again. How do they do it? Damn you, Nintendo!
I can remember tinkering with it back in the early days. Of course, it was just a vector-based web animation tool at that time. Building flash animations and seeing what people could accomplish with this amazing tool was fun and entertaining.
Now, I just want it to die a horrible, horrible death. Browser focus-stealing advertisements, poor support on consoles like the wii and ps3, complete lack of support on certain portable devices, an awful video interface that suffers from performance issues... what the hell happened?
Flash has gone from a purpose-built vector graphics program, to a plague upon the www. Please kill it.
Just a few things off the top of my head...
-The Rendition Verite (V1000) was the first "true" 3d card that I can remember. It was capable of running accelerated Quake and the included Indy Car Racing II was breath-taking at the time with it's high framerate (30fps), high resolution (640x480), and bilinear filtering. I remember sitting in amazement as I watched the ICR2 demo play when I first bought this card. It was truly the first amazing 3d acceleration I had ever seen in my life. Probably the closest thing to it was the Race Drivin/Hard Drivin arcade game, with all of it's blocky polys and 10-15fps goodness.
-The article gives us a huge list of 3d cards, but little depth into the actual performance or market penetration of any of them. Most of these cards are barely worth mentioning. Even at the time, some of these cards sold in miniscule numbers or performed horribly. That's not to say that they shouldn't have been mentioned, but how about focusing on the major players a little more?
-How about 3dfx's "16-bit color is just fine!" rhetoric when Nvidia upped the ante with 32-bit color? I think the reason that 3dfx neglected to move to 32-bit color at the time was because they had tested it and performance on their cards was horrible. Hey, I bought 3dfx's bullshit at the time, mainly because I wanted to run Quake 2 as fast as possible.
I could go on, but the bottom line is this article isn't much of a "history" at all. It's nothing more than a list of cards with specs and brief summaries. How disappointing.
"They shot themselves in the foot with Windows ME too, luckily for them they had the reasonably stable Windows NT ready to go out the door."
Not exactly sure what you meant by this. Windows NT was around long before ME. I thought, maybe you meant Windows 2000. I was pretty sure that ME and 2000 were released around the same time. Nope. According to wikipedia, Win2000 came out in February 2000, while ME came a full 7 months later in September. So... what exactly did you mean?
Information wants to be free. Sure, you may think it's a silly cliche, but the message holds true.
So why would I pay for something that is readily available for free? The internet already provides me with an insurmountable amount of information on a daily basis... more information than I can ever recall reading in a week's worth of newspapers!
Digital readers will neither save or condemn the newspapers; it's up to the newspapers to save themselves. Learn a lesson from the RIAA. Your business model has changed. Adapt or die.
I get it. You're very proficient at wiring ethernet cables. For what it's worth, I agree with you in principle. I've run some lines in my home and it makes no sense to me to spend the extra money on pre-crimped wire.
In a corporate environment, however, it makes all the sense in the world. It's alleviates quality control issues and is easier. These conveniences come at a cost.
Oh, and that technician you're talking about hiring... the one with years of experience? That costs money, too.
I'd love to see you grab a spool of cable, measure and cut it, strip it and sort the wires, then crimp both ends in 15 seconds. I'm good, but not that good. When someone comes to me with a problem, it's much easier for me to reach over and grab a cable from a drawer.
And if your company is into the whole cable certification thing (mine is), it's much more complicated than a simple continuity test:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper_cable_certification
To me, it makes a hell of a lot more sense to use 1 or 2 manufacturers' products than you know are of good quality, than having to worry about a site where 3 or 4 technicians (with varying degrees of skill) may have crimped different lines throughout that location.
Using manufacturers' cables isn't only easier, it's also a form of standardization. And again... if your company can't afford to stock its' sites with spare patch cables, I really don't know what to say.
Compared with... filling in an internal requisition, having to justify the expense, waiting a week for order delivery, followed by resuming doing what you were doing when you needed the cable. If you can even recall what it was.
I'm not sure where you work, but I have a plethora of patch cables sitting in a cabinet next to my desk. It's very rare that I don't have what I need (in terms of ethernet cabling, anyway). And in the ultra-rare instance that I don't have what I need? My district office can have it shipped to me next-day. I think you're being a touch dramatic... or maybe the company you work for has some seriously screwed up policies if you can't even have a few cat-5e/6 cables on hand.
Yes, you can use handmade cables that are as good as mass-produced factory cables. But that really isn't the issue.
It's just not worth the time spent to cut and crimp your own lines anymore. In my experience, it was a more common practice years ago in IT. That may have had something to do with the fact that there weren't nearly as many PC's or ethernet ports in buildings as there are today.
My advice: Find a good supplier (i.e. not one that charges $800 for a 6 ft. adamantium-coated cable) and do something else with the rest of your time.
Here is a list of games (and communication apps) that I tried to get working recently and the result:
Cross Fire (www.crossfire-en.com)
http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=9335
-Complete failure via wine. Tried via virtualbox w/ wined3d, crashed X server.
Team Fortress 2
http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=9335
-wine appdb reports TF2 as a "gold" game. Great, I thought. Installed fine, but the framerates were absolutely horrible! Severe stuttering and fps lag on a system that rarely drops below 100fps with all eyecandy enabled (c2d 3+ghz, 8800gtx). Under wine, I would drop to 5-10fps frequently whenever more than a few players are on screen. Unplayable.
Ventrilo Client
http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=2169
-Yet another app that is reported as "gold". Client installs after significant tinkering. Unfortunately, push to talk does not work unless ventrilo is active window (effectively making it useless if you are in game and attempt to chat in real-time). There are several scripts that supposedly fix this PTT focus issue; none of them worked for me on Jaunty x64. So, the primary VOIP client that I use for gaming was useless to me.
Xfire
http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=2573
-Another supposed silver/gold app. Xfire installs fine, but the text on the main window is garbled. It is also unstable. Workaround = installing the gfire plugin for pidgin to chat to friends on xfire. It has no in-game functionality, but it works.
Quake Live
http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=15796&iTestingId=37688
-Yet another gold app that I could not get working properly.
Left 4 Dead
http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=14592
-Gold app, even rated as Platinum by one submitter. Works, but performance is terrible compared to native under windows.
Wine is a great tool, but it leaves much to be desired. Is this really a 1.x program? Probably not. Are some of these games really worthy of a Gold or Platinum rating? Definitely not. Admins should be reviewing these submissions.
So I do appreciate the fact that you've had some success with wine. It appears, however, that we're just playing different games.
No way, huh? This is sarcasm, right? I can easily use that amount of bandwidth per month legally.
Example of usage:
I stream internet radio pretty heavily.
-streaming internet radio @ 128Kbps x 6 hours/day = 345MB/day = 10GB/month
Hulu hd content is between 480Kbps and 1000Kbps.
Figuring for an avg. of 700Kbps:
-hulu hd @ 700Kbps x 4 hours/day (figuring for my usage and my wife's... VERY generous estimate) = 6.3GB per 5 days/week = 25GB/4 weeks (month)
I'm already at 35GB/month. And that doesn't even include our VoIP usage (skype and ventrilo), downloading of OS/software patches or downloading/seeding linux distros, or anything else I might want to legally do every month.
Ridiculous.
It was probably around late '96/early '97. I had a friend online who I played Quake with who was constantly spouting off about linux. I've always been interested in computers, but had not really ventured outside of the realm of DOS and Windows save for some dabbling with OS/2 (which I thought was great, but lacked the needed support to be a really amazing end-user OS).
After some nudging, he walked me through downloading and setting up RedHat (Colgate, I believe). I was enthralled by the seemingly endless customization and control over the operating system. Back then, I remember having a proud feeling just being able to get things like my sound card and nic working in this... foreign thing. I felt like I had actually accomplished something when I was able to get Quake running (w/ sound!) for the first time in a non-Windows environment.
After getting used to RedHat, I moved onto Slackware. After all, RH was for n00bs! Heh. Anyone remember glibc vs. libc5? *grumble*
Ironically enough, the same thing that got me into linux was the same thing that took me away from it: gaming. See also: the directx vs. opengl wars. OpenGL lost. As more and more developers started using directx, I ended up booting Windows to access many of the games I wanted to play.
Desktop linux today? Many things have changed, yet so many remain the same. Most hardware is supported out of the box in distros like Ubuntu and Fedora. Gone are the days of having to edit a few lines of source to get your nic driver to work (mostly gone anyway). Everything 'just works', to steal some Apple thunder.
However, gaming under linux is still a terrible prospect. Most games don't natively support it. The wine project, even at 1.x, is still in its' infancy. Even if a directx game does work under wine, it's usually buggy or performs poorly.
Oh, I still boot to linux and regularly tinker. I also maintain an install via virtualbox. And there's nothing that I'd love more than to be running linux exclusively. But unless something miraculous is done, desktop linux will always play second fiddle on my home PC. Sad, but true.
Anyone can see that. Carry on.
What the hell does that mean exactly? It was "true" because of world changes? Ultima Online was the first graphical MMO with true PvP, IMO.
Like most of my online buddies who enjoy playing multiplayer games competitively, I was very disappointed when I purchased L4D and learned that only 2 of the 4 campaigns were playable in versus mode.
And while Campaign mode (humans vs. bots) was fun for the first week or so, the game quickly became stale and I shelved it. "Survival Pack" is a fitting name when you consider that L4D has been steadily slipping in use since it's initial boom at release:
http://www.xfire.com/cms/xstatics_2009_january/
http://www.xfire.com/cms/xstatics_2009_february/
http://www.xfire.com/cms/xstatics_2009_march/
So, thank you Valve... for giving us what we should have received at launch. When the Survival Pack is released, how about putting together a real DLC with more maps?
While I'm somewhat disappointed by the staggering number of pirated copies vs. legit copies of Demigod, I'm not at all surprised. I fully support their stance on DRM and while I do admit to pirating some video games, I went out and bought Sins of the Solar Empire. It's a terrific game.
Now, I have a friend who I was trying to coax into buying Sins. He didn't have the money at the time, so he downloaded the full game. We were able to play online together with no problems. Did he eventually buy the game? No. Why not? Like the rampant movie and music piracy that we see online, I think the answer is simple:
People, in general, have no moral issues with not paying for something that is readily available for free. After all, if you've already received the full product and "gotten away with it", why should you pay for it?
Now, Stardock has smartened up regarding Sins. You can no longer receive updates and play on the legit servers unless you register a legit CD key. In this way, most online games are safer from piracy in that they require a valid cd-key to play on legitimate multiplayer servers.
But here's my question to developers... whatever happened to releasing a partial shareware demo of your games before retail release? This is the business model that seems to have worked so way back in the day and got me to buy games like Doom, Quake, and the like. When did it become so important to get the game out the door that a game demo became a crippled, afterthought that might be released several months after launch?
Game developers really need to rethink their strategy on this one. Stardock has the right idea and should be applauded for their efforts to cater to the gaming community, but more can be done. Bring back shareware before release. Allow users to trying a full episode or 2 of your game, or maybe even grant temporary cd-keys to everyone at launch and let people play the full game for a few days and then lock them out. I want to buy your games. But show me that they are good and worth buying first.
Side note: I'm still goading said friend into buying the game so that we can play the new Entrenchment expansion online. We'll see how that goes.
You can't play multiplayer without a valid one. Just like most other online games these days. The problem with Demigod is that it runs some other http requests (checking for updates, querying system info, etc.). This is why the launch was borked. Not because there are tons of players with pirated copies trying to play on legit servers, but because their servers were effectively getting DDoS'ed by a level of traffic that they were not expecting or ready to serve.
You think? It doesn't really matter what you think because I've declared Martian Law. Under Martian Law, Pod 6 is now referred to as Node 3. Also... under Martian law, doctors and other wizards are forbidden!
Because Node 3 is jerks. Total suck node!
There was a time when I was interested in online broadcasts, too. But it was mainly to see who my team might be playing next round in a playoff bracket, or to see what kind of tactics the winner/winning team might be using to possibly gain an advantage. So again... like watching and studying demos, it was a menial, self-selving task.
I know that you're not alone and that there is a entire community of gamers that enjoy watching/listening to e-sports. But like I tried to say before, it's a niche market.
Think about the fact that there are millions of Counter-Strike players, yet several pro gaming leagues that had CS as their staple game are dead or dying. Why is that? Maybe, it's because interest is limited to a small portion of that community? Maybe because it's just not that lucrative of a business model to sponsors/advertisers? I don't have all of the answers.
I think there will always be pro gaming in some form or another. But, like chess or backgammon, it will never be something that anyone should aspire to make a living at. At least, not in my lifetime. There's just not enough money to go around for these types of activities. If there was, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
'I've never understood the spectator part of any real sport either.'
That's an entirely different discussion. Major sports are exciting (imo) because they show us the very limits of what we are capable of physically. I watch and enjoy many different sports from baseball to (American) football to tennis and even motorsport.
Watching a human being hit a 100mph fastball, knowing that if he were to blink his eyes he wouldn't even see it coming across home plate, or seeing a wide receiver grasp a football by the tips of his fingers and haul it in while maintaining his footing in-bounds, or watching a driver make a perfectly timed pass at 180mph... these are special and amazing feats, in my mind.
Again, I know it takes a good deal of skill to play video games at a high level. It takes the highest level of concentration and reflexes, much like real professional sports. But it just isn't visually impressive... at all.
I need new glasses.
Anyway, I think the answer is 'Simply by existing'?