Potato is yum

Esports is dying. It has been dying. It’s been dying for years. But… this is a good thing! Trust me. The death of esports is incredibly good for gamers and average people alike. Let me first explain how this bubble even came to exist in the first place.

So the success of any sport can be measured by how popular it is… or can it? Those in the US would say that football and baseball are the biggest sports. Those across the ocean would say cricket is the biggest sport. When you look at the numbers, the discrepancy in statistics is kind of surprising. The US has so much less watchers than cricket. Cricket is wildly more popular than baseball and football combined. But then how does baseball and football in the US have more money? It’s all about who the viewers are. Statistically, US citizens have a higher disposable income compared to other regions leading to higher ad costs and more marketing for their attention. Alright. So it’s not purely a numbers game. So what does that mean?

Esports is the perfect sport. On paper. A single game that caters to every region the same. A game with a low barrier for entry. A game where you too can work hard to also make it to the top. Or can you? Well. No. Pro gamers typically have better concentration and focus than typical people. Their reaction time is better than normal people. It is not true that anyone can be a pro gamer. Just like how it’s not true that anyone can be a pro football player. Sure, everyone needs to put in the work but there is an aspect of inherent advantages some have over others. The issue is that esports sells itself as something you the person playing the game for fun can do if you just grind the game and learn it more. This kind of takes away from people understanding just how hard it is to be a pro gamer. Spoiler alert, it is really hard. Like really really hard.

So, what has funded esports all these years? If it isn’t the incredible talent or the money coming in from advertising, who is even funding this stuff? Speculation. Speculation that one of these games will be the next big thing. So has any esport become the next football? Well, going purely off the view numbers counterstrike has been getting more peak concurrent viewers during the grand final than the Superbowl. The biggest live TV event in the US. But the counterstrike major grand final makes a tiny fraction of the revenue that the super bowl generates. Why? It’s all about the audience. The audience that the Superbowl markets to is ripe for advertising and advertisers pay huge quantities of money to both broadcast and create advertisements for the Superbowl. However, many companies are still sinking large quantities of money into esports because in a decade or two, the people watching esports will be the same demographic as the people that currently watch football. In a decade or two, all of these people will be working jobs, making money, and looking for things to spend their money on.

So from the limited research I’ve done, the current funding towards esports is mostly on speculation that everyone can hold out until the demographic starts making money to put into the system in the future. The issue? The money is running out. The problem is that everyone wants to get in at once causing costs to balloon and everyone to quickly run out of their million dollar budgets really quickly. So now we end up with this situation where everyone has run out of money.

This is a good thing. Why? It means that gamers can now host tournaments for gamers not for advertisers or for some large entity but for their games. Instead of focusing on the production they can focus on the experience. It is pretty clear that my generation doesn’t want to sit in a cold packed stadium to watch a videogame. It never made sense to sit in a stadium for a video game. Like seriously, what is the point? Sitting in a stadium just to stare at a big screen? The reason why you go to big events is for the experience. The people. The events. If you look at all the major esports events, you’ll notice that over the years more side booths and events have been run. The reason? That’s what my generation likes. We like to go somewhere for an experience. Not for the game.

This shift is healthy for the game and for the average person. It makes esports more accessible to the average gamer. Since the events start to be about the experience of the tournament, knowing everything about the game isn’t really expected. Traditional sports has a clear advantage in this aspect. You get a very visceral connection with the sport as it happens before your very eyes with the sound of the game playing through the whole stadium. In esports, the amount of sounds must be filtered and modified heavily in order to produce something that is acceptable to listen to. These kinds of barriers put distance between the viewer and the game. Distance that removes from experiencing it.

One of the most recent events hosted by fl0m in Vegas outlines my thoughts on this exactly. The venue in Vegas sold out in under 2 hours. The event was a massive success and the losses were not egregious. This is proof that the experienced focused approach works. The problem is seeing if organizations and producers would be willing to adopt a new philosophy.

Ah, and that post about the importance of writing as a skill? That’s gonna be the Tuesday post. I wrote almost a whole essay for that thing. I had a lot to say.