Do eSports have a future?
March 17, 2009 by Jin
Filed under Games, Jin's Corner, Recent
I read on WoW Insider a while ago about H O N, a team from Korea, winning the Electronic Sports League’s Intel Extreme Masters Global tournament. Before I read the article, I’ve never heard of H O N, or for that matter, either the Electronic Sports League or the Extreme Masters Global tournament. I have heard of Intel.
Apparently, the tournament was a big deal. The winning team of three took home $30,000 prize money. It’s a novelty for me because it’s the first time I’ve heard about a tournament based on the World of Warcraft. I’m out of touch, I know. World of Warcraft based tournaments have been going on for sometime.
World of Warcraft features a Battle Ground mode where you can engage in player versus player battles. Matches can be straight kill the other team before they kill you or objective based matches where you capture the opposing team’s flag before they grab yours. It’s a popular feature and with a subscriber base of 12 million players to draw upon, it certainly has a large enough pool of potential participants. Further, with $30,000 in prize money, the tournament can actually attract professional video game players…the young men and women who play games for a living.
So with prize money, a large potential audience, professional caliber players and corporate sponsorship, you should have all the ingredients to have an exciting event that captures the attention of media. And yet this event was almost a non-event from the standpoint of media.
Sure, sites like WoW Insider will carry coverage because World of Warcraft is their niche, but I’ve yet to see coverage on this on any of the larger game-related sites. The news as such didn’t warrant any attention in larger, more mainstream media. I have some Korean language ability, and in making a cursory check of some of the larger Korean news sites, this win for the home country wasn’t mentioned much there either. Like in the US, some of the game related sites did carry the news, but we’re not talking about mainstream coverage. The win received niche coverage both in the US and in Korea.
Overall, the event had about as much media impact as a little Johnny winning the local spelling bee.
E-sports have been trumpeted by various organizers as having huge potential. They argue that the video games of today are the sports of tomorrow; that thousands, perhaps millions of fans will watch their favorite players engage in virtual battle.
I just don’t see it. Where are the household names? Those individuals that become synonymous with sports, real or virtual. Starcraft sort of had it with BoxeR (Lim Yo-hwan), but he’s long past his prime, and virtually unknown outside of Korea and professional Starcraft. There’s no one in the video game world right now who has anywhere close to the charisma of a Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods or David Beckham. They may be good players. They might have a loyal fan following, but the guy down the street won’t know who they are.
The members of H O N may be great at World of Warcraft but they lack charisma.
That lack of fan recognition doesn’t bode well for the nascent professional e-sports leagues. People are attracted to personalities. It’s why events like pro wrestling does well even though the competitions are largely staged and scripted. The wrestlers are billed as bigger than life personalities, an they largely live up to the billing. Video games may have great competition, but they lack the drama that comes with the clash of personalities.
Further sports athletes possess the ability to inspire through play. It’s easy to be awed when you see a brilliant dunk, an incredible drive that lands mere inches away from the hole or a home run. The play is demonstrative and immediately shows what these athletes are capable of. Video games also require a great deal of skill and physical abilities yet because their play happen through the medium of a video game, it’s more difficult to be inspired by it. Sure, incredible play happens, but it’s simply harder to accomplish and less dramatic.
Call me a skeptic. I love video games to death, but I don’t see e-sports being anything more than a curiosity, and occupying about the same niche as skate boarding, surfing and lacrosse. The people who think that video games will become anything close to a phenomenon like European football or the NBA are fooling themselves.
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Several hundred thousand people tuned in and watched the ESL Extreme Masters event(s) live through an internet stream, broadcast from the ESL’s office in Germany.
Esports is already widely recognised in Germany. It wasn’t long ago a a FIFA player from SK Gaming was featured on one of Germany’s most popular variety shows. I can’t recall the name of it, but a lot of big celebrities pass through it.
It’s also starting to catch on in a pretty significant way in the UK, now with the support of the UKeSA it should start progressing a lot quicker.
As for skateboarding, it’s anything but a niche market. I’m not going to go into detail, but the fact that you’d call it that, I think, speaks volumes about your knowledge in the areas of which you speak.
No, esports isn’t as big as soccer, American football, baseball, golf or most any other established sport you care to mention, but most of those have been around for a very long time. Esports is roughly 10 or so years old, it’s growing at a rather large pace.
Esports is one of the largest, if not the largest sport in South Korea, millions of fans follow events, now we’re seeing something similar take off in China. Germany is progressing at a good pace, now the UK is starting to really take things seriously.
I don’t think we’ve seen even a fraction of what esports is capable of. That’s just PC, WoW, Counter-Strike, Starcraft, Warcraft, Quake and so on, Xbox and PS3 is an entirely different kettle of fish
I’m sorry, but what you’ve written is simplistic and naive. If you insist on writing about the subject then atleast make an attempt to do even a modicum of research, otherwise just shut it.