TIL: eSports Popularity

There are many barriers in getting eSports, or competitive gaming, or whatever label you want to stick on it, to mass market appeal. I think the first one that needs to be addressed is making it easier for viewers to understand what is happening in the games.

For over a hundred years now, the rules of stick and ball sports have been ingrained into our psyche. Almost everyone knows about the pitcher and catcher and batter, an alley-oop, a touchdown pass, or they've heard of the term snapshot. None of the terms that commentators describe in an eSport match are recognizable to move causal viewers. Check out this World Cup match around the 5 minute mark,

How much of that do you think a casual viewer would have followed the first time?

The two grandfathers of the sport, Starcraft II and Counter Strike, are two different genres of games, with totally different play styles. Someone who just stumbles across one of them probably won’t be able to understand what’s happening in the game right off the bat.

I myself have spent a few hours just trying to understand what's happening in League of Legends, and I can still only follow part of the action. The hosts of the podcast Rally Point made a suggestion on one of their episodes that Twitch should have secondary streaming channels that provide an outsiders insight into what's happening in the game. For someone new to the game, trying to figure out what an Ultimate is and how fast it's charging, while trying to figure out which character we're now following is a daunting task. It's hard to know what's happening on screen when there is SO MUCH happening on screen.

In contrast, a football game starts with a group of men staring at each other on either side of an imaginary and slightly arbitrary line in the field, and then someone says "go" and they run at each other. Sure plays happen on a micro level and even in football the camera operators miss things, but decades of filming the sport have given us a pretty good ability to follow the important action.

In Overwatch, Blizzard's record breaking foray into eSports, has so much going on at the same time, we just haven't figured out how to broadcast the game successfully. We've only started to get instant replay functionality, and that's still hard to perfect because there just aren't enough cameras in a match. Still, in the semi-final match between Sweden and Spain, the very last round, went as long as it possibly could, with one team coming back from a 0-99 deficit and winning in overtime. Anyone could have tuned in to watch that and would have understood how exciting it was.

Some viewers might have missed the reason the "ulties" were being called and which teams characters were getting eliminated and having to run back into the battle. (On a side note, why do we have to use the term "ulties"?)

With all of the roadblocks and challenges the industry is facing, this is still probably the biggest challenge that has to be overcome. Duncan “Thoorin” Shields, and many other eSports analysts have commented on better ways to handle this and more accessible methods for getting casual fans, or viewers who aren't even fans, into the games.

Like I said, I had no idea how some games were played until recently. And games that I swore I'd never watch other people play are some of my favorite competitions to watch now. It's not that people unfamiliar with the games can't get invested in watching or following the games, we just have to help bring them in to the fold.

So, my two suggestions for helping attract new viewers and help keep them, is exactly the same as many other professionals in the industry. And that's because there are only a handful of ways we can start to fix this:

1. Better ways of communicating what is happening in the games.
2. Better ways of showing what's happening in the games.

Not everyone will start to enjoy it, not everyone will enjoy the same sports; just like baseball has its die hard fans and football has its die hard fans and never the twixt shall meet. But we can't let other people in if we don't respectfully lead them in.

As for the other barriers to eSports gaining main street popularity, those will be discussed in future articles. It's a complicated and multi-faceted challenge that lies ahead, but it's not an insurmountable one.

TIL: If You Don't Try

Most of us know the story of Gearbox's Battleborn game. Released against the Blizzard powerhouse of Overwatch, the game was unfortunately compared Overwatch and never given the proper attention it deserved. There are multiple reasons for this games quick decline into relative obscurity, from a horrible release date, to an incredibly unstable release on PC, and most reviewers and players thinking it was a direct contender to Overwatch.

I've spent a good amount of time with Battleborn, coming back to it every few weeks to spend a little more time with it. I've also spent the last few months siding further and further into the massive black hole of eSports. And while this isn't a game changing realization, I now know what some of the early opinions were of Battleborn not being an Overwatch game. It isn't. It's actually a MOBA. Randy Pitchford tried to do his best to distance Battleborn from the typical MOBA stereotype leading up to the game's release and I think that was a mistake. It's a MOBA. It's a first person MOBA plain and simple. I love the characters in Battleborn, I've always been a fan of Gearbox's art style and their sense of humor. I like the world and the lore that they've created for this game. I like it more than the Overwatch lore actually. But I'd personally rather play Overwatch. And this is why; I'm horrible at MOBAs. From League of Legends to Heroes of the Storm to Vain Glory. I should be in love with all of these games but I'm just not any good at playing them. I do however really enjoy watching them. And give the chance I would watch a Battleborn league in a heartbeat. I think the success of the Overwatch player base shows that there are people who would watch this kind of game. And I'm sad that it will never be given its chance.

According to a report from Riot two years ago, League of Legends averages about 27 million users a month. Valve's MOBA title Dota 2 averages almost 900,000 a month. Even the extremely popular mobile version Vain Glory had 1.5 million players when it was released.

Battleborn peaked at 12,000 according to Steam numbers. That's .008 of the player base of Vain Glory. Think about that for a second. There are times where there are more people streaming Gearbox's 2012 title Borderlands 2 than Battleborn. So Battleborn will never be given its chance to have a competitive league. Even if the game goes to a free-to-play model this battle has already been lost.