esports
Esports get bigger and bigger every year, but not every game that pursues that goal achieves it. We dig deep into what it takes for games to draw in the massive crowds esports have started to pull.
Esports was worth USD$905 million (AUD$1.285 billion) last year, with investors spending a rumoured USD$60 million (AUD$85 million) to buy-in to teams in some cases. Tournament prizepools are clocking in at over USD$30 million (AUD$42 million) It's big business, and it's only getting bigger. But knowing that it's a big deal isn't always enough.
No game launches as an esport out of the gate — and many of those that try to become an esport fail. The big ones — the few everyone knows about — are surrounded by also-rans and not-quite-theres, games that might have gotten there but for one fatal flaw.
Why do some games make the cut while others drift away into the background? How does Call of Duty have an esports scene where its most popular competitor, Battlefield, does not? Why do StarCraft and Overwatch have robust esports scenes while Blizzard's Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA), Heroes of the Storm (HOTS), shut its doors after just a few years?
If it were an exact science, then we'd already have all the answers. HOTS would sit alongside the DOTA 2 and League of Legend competitions, because if the precise answer to the question of 'how does a game become an esport' existed, then Blizzard would have solved it for sure.
Nevertheless, I'm going to do my best to breakdown the key factors — and we'll use some high profile successes and failures to illustrate the concept along the way. Obviously, there is a lot of nuance in this discussion that might be lost — think of this as a beginner's guide more than anything.
What is an esport?
When a game is played competitively, and prizes are available to the best players, then it is an esport.
The exact definition of an esport is a contentious topic, but I hold a broad and holistic view. When a game is played competitively, and prizes are available to the best players, then it is an esport.
That means fighting games are esports — although some feel the Fighting Game Community (FGC) is separate, it's good to remember that it's all part of the big esports family. It means a Pac-Man competition at your local bar, with a bar tab up-for-grabs, that's an esport. Speed-running races are esports — they're actually one of the oldest types of formal video game competition. It's a broad definition, but it's broad for a reason. To me, esports is about the celebration of excellence that comes with appreciating people who compete at the highest level available to them at the time.
So, article over right? If there's a competition for a game and there's a prize at stake, it's an esport right? Easy peasy. If I wrapped it here I'd get fired, so let's dig into what makes for a big, internationally recognised esport instead.
The biggest esports in the world are League of Legends, DOTA 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Overwatch and… let's say Fighting Games as an umbrella term for Street Fighter, Smash Ultimate et al., because so often a fighting game event will feature a cavalcade of other games, and it's near impossible to determine what each competitor is there for specifically.
Below those, there are a stack of prevalent esports titles that haven't quite reached the heights of the top five, but that doesn't make them any less legitimate. Rainbow Six Siege, Rocket League, Fortnite, PUBG, Hearthstone, StarCraft 2, World of Warcraft — the list for insanely popular esports that, despite having million dollar prize pools still don't quite measure up against the top 5, goes on and it varies depending on what region you're in.
Early Esports
Games have been competitive since day dot. The first board games on record involved competition — Senet was played by Ancient Egyptian pharaohs against, I assume, people who let them win. And the second ever video game, Tennis for Two, saw players compete in a Pong precursor played out on an Oscilloscope.
Some TV game shows in the 90s involved kids playing video games as part of the overall competition. Here in Australia, we had A*mazing, where kids competed in games like Bubsy and Donkey Kong Country, racing one another to beat a level the fastest — speed-running it, essentially. It was the format used in the Nintendo World Championships, one of the first publisher-driven competitive series.
In the FGC, games like Super Street Fighter 2 were drawing in crowds of players and spectators, leading to the creation of competitive circuits and large scale international tournaments.
First-person shooters like Quake 3 Arena and Counter-Strike and the rise in large scale LAN parties — where competitors would bring their own computer hardware to play — in the latter half of the 90s lead to the organisation of the earliest Leagues.
In South Korea, StarCraft started to take hold and was getting broadcast time on TV as the critical spectacle itself (unlike in the game above shows, where the video game round was often a sideshow).
The path was paved for large scale esports by the likes of the above — the StarCrafts, Counter-Strikes and Street Fighters got us to where we are today. The prize pools were a lot lower, and watching competitions required a lot more effort — the first competitive match I watched involved a prolonged transfer of a Quake 3 duel video file at a LAN (where transferring the file meant slowing down the network for everyone else present) — but the core factors were present. The blueprint for esports existed, even then.
The Blueprint
Three key factors lead to an esport's eventual success or demise. Think of it like the Fire Triangle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_triangle. Each of these contributes to getting a game to a critical mass point where it is accepted as an esport, and if that point can't be reached, the game will fade into the background like so many before it.
Those three factors are:
- Playability
- Spectatability
- Support
No single factor is more important than the others — each is critical. But a game lacking in one area can still reach its critical mass point if it goes above and beyond in another. Think of it like blowing air onto a campfire to get it to flame on.
Let's break down what each factor involves.
Playability
If a game isn't 'fun', then it's going to struggle to become an esport. Hell, it's going to stumble selling at all in many cases. But fun isn't the only element at play here. For esport success, a game needs to have the sort of compelling play experience that keeps players coming back, over and over again.
This can be achieved in many ways, but the easiest way to chase a long term compelling experience is through complexity. In games like League of Legends and DOTA 2, there's always something new to learn, always something you haven't yet mastered. So playing it for a thousand hours makes absolute sense.
Rocket League is the perfect example of playability, thanks to an extremely easy-to-understand basic premise and almost limitless room for players to grow. At the lowest level, it's a game about crashing cars into soccer balls. It's fundamentally simple in that way. But at the top level, an array of elements like air-control, zone tactics and boost management lead to a game that is near impossible to perfect.
Complexity is why some of the more simplified MOBAs never really stayed at the same critical mass point. Heroes of the Storm streamlined a lot of the complexity inherent to the MOBA formula, which was a great move in some ways. It provided players with a much simpler point of entry compared to the other two more popular variants, League of Legends and DOTA 2, and a lower skill floor is a fantastic entry path for new players.
But with lower complexity thanks to the absence of gold and items, HOTS has a lower skill ceiling compared to its contemporaries — and when reached, the overall emphasis on teamplay means the best players can have a harder time shining. The comeback mechanics built into HOTS also make it less naturally competitive — the end result is that for a lot of players, the longevity didn't exist (compared to LoL and DOTA 2, anyway).
That's not to say that HOTS was a failure, or that it's not currently worth playing. It still gets updates to this day. But in a landscape as competitive as esports, and in an area already populated by two of the biggest games, HOTS had an uphill climb from the get-go, and it's understandable why Blizzard eventually decided to focus its support on other titles (although the way they announced it was terrible).
Spectatability
Spectatorship, viewability, whatever you want to call it — it's a crucial part of esports success. Obviously being able to view a sport is critical to its success, but in esports it's more than that. Because games are at our fingertips whenever we want — there's no need to book a basketball court or head to a track day — esports serve as an educational tool as well.
While Twitch and Youtube have made it easier than ever to watch competitive games, it's still not as simple as just 'having streams'. There's a great deal that goes into making a game a compelling viewing experience — and getting it right can often be extremely tricky.
Fighting games are the ultimate spectator esports in many respects. It's all there on the screen for you. Two fighters, — Ken and Ryu, Sub-Zero and Scorpion, Bayonetta and Bayonetta — do battle, and the winner is the one left standing. It's easy to follow, it's quick and it's relatable to real life combat sports. Whether you're watching the best in the world fight for the ultimate prize at EVO, or just standing on your tippy toes behind two players at an arcade, fighting games are the perfect viewing event.
Other games have it tougher, and it's often something they need to work hard to fix. PUBG is an excellent example of a game that has it tough here. An unbelievably compelling player experience, PUBG is tough to showcase because of the sheer numbers involved. Even more conservative competitions still have nearly 80 players all competing at the same time. To overcome this, certain competitions have implemented a variety of solutions.
We've seen sites featuring 'team streams' so you can watch the viewpoint of your favourite team, player specific streams, PUBG Corp itself has worked hard to implement robust spectator tools, and the decision to include replays of personal matches as a tacit way to allow people to practice with the spectator tools is brilliant too. At the end of the day, though, spectatability will always be trickier for esports than it is for traditional sports.
Take football, for example. There are 22 players on the pitch in any one match, but the focus of your attention is (almost) always on the ball — there are times when half the players in the game aren't even on the screen, and it doesn't change how you view the play of the game itself at all.
But because of the aforementioned 'playability' focus of games, people don't want to play a game where they're not doing anything for large portions of the play experience. The other problem is that if the esport doesn't resemble the general gameplay, spectatability lowers as a result.
A great example of this is the Battlefield series. As a series, each new game routinely sells around 15 million copies — an absolute success, no matter how you look at it. And Battlefield itself is a competitive shooter — similar to huge esports titles like Counter-Strike and Rainbow Six Siege.
But Battlefield's focus is on massive scale battles featuring teams of 32 players-a-side — there are tanks, planes, (sometimes) helicopters and more. It's a huge, complicated competitive shooter, with a lot going on in it. To create an esport variant, DICE has toyed with small-scale five-a-side modes like the (unimplemented) Incursions mode.
But a five-a-side mode isn't educational any more. You can't take what you've learned in a small-scale mode and attempt to replicate it in the large scale battles of BFV Conquest. The skills don't translate.
And because it's not immediately familiar, there's another problem as well. Even at five-a-side, it's still tricky for Battlefield to display all the relevant information for you at once. The way other games get around this is by leaning heavily on player experience.
Those graphs in a MOBA might not be the most attractive way to take in information, but anyone experienced with DOTA 2 will know how to read them — and this knowledge transfers pretty well between games in the same genre, so they'll have half an idea on how a LoL game is going as well. But if the game and the esport aren't even similar enough to make the same mental leap, it's always going to struggle to get off the ground.
Support
By support, I mean publisher support. To be utterly clear, a publisher/developer doesn't decide if their game is going to be an esport, and the road to esport success is littered with games like Tribes Ascend, Shootmania and Firefall. Only players can decide if a game will succeed as an esport.
But support from the publishers of these games is still as relevant as either of the other two factors and with the right amount it can save — or kill — an esport.
At the end of the day, esports are tied to the wills of their respective publishers. Where sports fans might read rulebooks to work out how exactly a nail-biting tie could possibly be decided by something as arbitrary as 'boundaries hit', esports fans look instead to the patch notes.
So the right kind of support is critical to any esports' success. Take Tribes Ascend, for example. Published by Hi-Rez Studios, it had a significant amount of potential. The skill floor wasn't low, but it was a shooter, and those are common enough to be pretty easy to understand. And the skill ceiling was astronomical. You needed to aim as good as any Counter-Strike pro, but you needed to hit your shots while moving at many times the speed of any CS player.
It released to rave reviews, earning a flat out 10 from AusGamers, and averaging an 8.6/10 on Metacritic. It was popular too. But Hi-Rez's made a mistake with their monetisation — something then-CEO of Hi-Rez Erez Goren himself admitted in a post on Reddit — most notably the introduction of overpowered weapons that players could skip their way to, a soft style of pay-to-win. So after a year, in 2013, Hi-Rez stopped supporting the game outright. Tribes Ascend was dead.
Ecosystems
That's not the only kind of support publishers give their games. It comes in many forms, but it's generally seen in two lights — closed and open ecosystems. Closed ecosystems cede all control to the publisher, letting them control every level of the competitive scene. Open ecosystems are hands-off affairs, where the publishers basically let the scene control itself.
The best example of closed ecosystems are Blizzard's Overwatch and Riot's League of Legends — two games where the publishers exhibit near total control over the scene. Valve has mastered the open ecosystem, working hard to do almost nothing for DOTA 2 and Counter-Strike Global Offensive -- relative to Blizzard and Riot, anyway -- and The International notwithstanding.
One of the most evident examples of the difference between Open and Closed ecosystems is StarCraft. StarCraft 1 was built off the back of an Open esports ecosystem, in the sense that management elements at Blizzard didn't even realise there was a StarCraft esports scene until was already in full swing.
But beyond the oodles of free marketing StarCraft received from South Korea's love for the game, Blizzard didn't see much of a return. So for StarCraft II, they changed tacks and took full control. The rest is esports history.
That's not to say one ecosystem is better than the other. Both are forms of support and provided the support exists, an esport can flourish in either. After all, the biggest esport in the world is in a Closed ecosystem. The second? Open. You couldn't point to the form of esports support as any sort of reason why one is bigger than the other — but the fact that support exists overall is critical.
Why would a game want to become an esport?
The way we consume entertainment has changed. We're no longer bound to the rigid watching schedule dictated to us by the TV Guide. Video on Demand services mean shows are watched when it is convenient to the viewer — except in a few cases, where timeliness matters.
In traditional entertainment, this leads to shows that lean deep into their own discourse. Game of Thrones was a show that you needed to watch as close to its air date as possible, lest your little brother spoil a big reveal for you via a careless Facebook post.
Reality TV competitions are similar — filled with moments that require immediate discussion by those who enjoy them, leading to live threads online and viewing parties where possible.
Outside of blockbuster television moments and shock Bachelor reveals, however, the only entertainment products that 'demand' timely viewing are those where the results are determined 'on the fly'. And this is why sports are thriving more and more — the results aren't pre-determined, anything can happen, and the only way to be genuinely involved as a spectator is to watch it live.
Esports — especially those that can run on cheap hardware, like League of Legends and Rocket League — are poised to fill — and in some cases are already filling — the same space that sports already do. And with that in mind, we'll see more games trying to enter the same space, vying for the same eyeballs, the same limited attention span. They're all heading to the same destination — esports success — but the paths each take will be different.
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