eSports Shady Numbers And Bad Business: Inside The Esports Bubble (Kotaku)

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

I think the "traditional" eSports genres like fighting games and LoL/Dota 2 will be fine, but newcomers like the Overwatch League will be toast.

 

“I feel like esports is almost running a Ponzi scheme at this point,” Frank Fields, Corsair’s sponsorship manager, told an audience at San Francisco’s Game Developers Conference last March. He smirked. The crowd laughed uncomfortably. The smile dropped from Fields’ face as he continued. “Everyone I talk to in this industry kind of acknowledges the fact that there is value in esports, but it is not nearly the value that is getting hyped these days.” Later, Fields would clarify that this value, and future value, “as of now, is optimistic at best and fraudulent at worst.”

 

[XxEvil AshxX]

I think eSports should be left to local small tourneys and fun events.

 

Video games should be just that. Video games.

[Bacon]

8 minutes ago, XxEvil AshxX said:

I think eSports should be left to local small tourneys and fun events.

 

Video games should be just that. Video games.

 

[TwinIon]

Quote

One Riot employee with knowledge of League of Legends’ esports revenue, when asked whether the League Championship Series makes money, laughed. Its current goal, they said, is to prevent it from losing money indefinitely.

Wow. I didn't think that teams made any money, but I'd have thought that Riot at least made money from their esports. It's been going for so long now, do they just see it as an advertising thing? Something to keep the game going?

 

Quote

To sponsors, advertisers, team owners, and the rest of the investors pouring money into esports, the industry has a great thing going for it: those supposedly massive viewership numbers, which are said to be packed with a hyper-specific and highly attractive consumer group: 16- to 24-year-old men. When Sebastian Park got into the industry after working in tech, he was excited about one thing in particular: “We were like, ‘We don’t even have to do targeting!’ Everyone is male and 18-34 in this community!”

This is an obvious problem with esports that will take a long time to change. Games are beginning to have a more broad appeal, but I'd have to expect that even as games have wider audiences, the competitive scene is going to lag behind any progress.

 

Quote

 

Last month, Magic: The Gathering put on its biggest esports event yet to debut its brand new pro league: a $1 million tournament at Boston’s PAX East convention. At first, viewership on Twitch hovered at around 20,000—a pretty typical amount of viewers for a pro Magic tournament on a weekday. Suddenly, in the afternoon, something miraculous happened: viewership quadrupled to a remarkable 88,000...

the number of people logged into Twitch chat did not meaningfully increase...

The tournament’s stream could have been embedded in hundreds of websites across the internet affiliated with the company Curse, ...

Users scrolling through a wiki about video game weapons or browsing a gaming forum might suddenly be confronted with an embed of the livestream, which would play when they view it, even briefly.

 

I remember seeing that on twitch, but I had no idea how shadey those numbers were. When I'd see people say things like "LOL got more viewers than the superbowl," I always assumed that was BS, but I wasn't aware of how much the meager numbers on a twitch stream are gamed.

 

 

 

All the comparisons to standard sports feel pretty misguided. I haven't seen a game that people would watch, but not play. Certainly DOTA and League are basically incomprehensible. Overwatch is a nightmare of fast paced action that I can't really watch. Other FPS games like CS are slightly better, but I still can't imagine them finding an audience beyond their player base. The same holds true for Hearthstone (the only esport I actually follow) or Magic. Rocket League is perhaps the closest I've seen to something non-players could watch, but I don't think it's ever been particularly successful in that way.

 

I think it's conceivable that a future video game will become the next NBA/NFL/MLB, but I don't think that game exists yet. In the meantime, there's the question of what esports are even for. I think most of them exist simply as promotional tools for the games, and that's fine, but it does get pretty silly when you see the money getting poured into the scene.

 

Where investment is justified is in sponsored streams. Forbes had a piece on how much sponsored streamers get paid, which fits along with this video I saw a while back. Esports don't seem worth the investment, but I can easily see how paying Ninja $1M to play a game for 20 hours will be a better investment than putting that money into traditional advertising.

 

[Keyser_Soze]

22 minutes ago, TwinIon said:

Certainly DOTA and League are basically incomprehensible.

 

At least Valve tries during the international with the newbie streams.

 

22 minutes ago, TwinIon said:

All the comparisons to standard sports feel pretty misguided. I haven't seen a game that people would watch, but not play.

 

Kinda like Wade said, fighting games are the most straightforward thing to understand and watch. Heck I used to go to the arcades back in the day and just watch people play fighting games, this is the most basic esport.

 

Edit: I really don't feel like anything is incomprehensible as long as you're trying to understand it. Heck, this girl at my work doesn't even know how NFL Football works, I tried to explain it to her in the simplest way possible and that is basically that was something that was incomprehensible to her.

As for DOTA it was always something I wanted to play and understand but felt the learning curve was intimidating. But I watched that "Free to Play" documentary on DOTA (made by Valve) and it sparked my interest. I read some build guides, practiced against bots and it was pretty easy to figure out after that. As long as you try to understand what you're seeing you're going to understand it.

[XxEvil AshxX]

I dunno.. tons of people watch streams on Fortnite and that's just a bunch of jittery garbage. I can't watch that shit for 30 seconds without getting a headache.

[AbsolutSurgen]

I would much rather play games, than watch them.

I recognize that, at some point, an electronic game will hit the mainstream in terms of being watched by spectators.  However, I don't think the game/genre that gains mainstream appeal already exists.

 

And, IMHO, twitch streaming and eSports are NOT that closely related.

 

[DarkStar189]

3 hours ago, XxEvil AshxX said:

I dunno.. tons of people watch streams on Fortnite and that's just a bunch of jittery garbage. I can't watch that shit for 30 seconds without getting a headache.

I can't stand watching people stream some shooters. The way they mouse back and forth super quick is hard on the eyes. 

[Keyser_Soze]

3 hours ago, DarkStar189 said:

I can't stand watching people stream some shooters. The way they mouse back and forth super quick is hard on the eyes. 

 

You had me at "hard on"