Maybe not, but I haven’t been able to think of a good metric, so I was trying to see what shook out if we looked at something other than traditional sports vs. e-sports.
Well…I guess call me when Coldplay, Beyoncé and The Rolling Stones do a 30 minute performance halfway through one of PewDiePie’s YouTube videos.
Those numbers are not a valid comparison. You would need to compare PewDiePie’s “eyes” with the number of people who casually watched a single NFL game. That 167M viewers is people who all tuned in simultaneously to watch a single NFL event.
I’m a bit skeptical of the digital world in general, and I work in that space. Sure, it’s a marketers dream. You can show a advertisers how a site has a bazillion “hits” and they will want to put content there. But how much of that content converts to real sales?
It’s like if TV advertisers counted every time you flipped to a channel for 2 seconds as “viewing a show”. Or the difference between a thousand Facebook friends and people you actually spend real time with in the real world.
I don’t know about this. Like, I love me some Overwatch, but I would never really enjoy Counterstrike, and I’m not a big fan of CoD or Battlefield. Even within specific genres, there are huge differences. Ask a LoL fan what their opinion on DOTA 2 is, and you will probably hear some vigorous disagreement, even though from the outside I could not tell you the difference between the two. And of course, the skills don’t always transfer well - I can’t really imagine a successful Lucio main transitioning to Counterstrike effectively; he’s trained on a weapon with low damage whose shot speed is literally about as fast as his character can run. 
Seems like a poor choice for two reasons:
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Fighting games are really really complex. Like, “this attack leaves me two frames in disadvantage if it’s blocked, meaning I am safe but cannot press buttons or I will get punished” - I know what that means, and I know that’s really important to understanding what’s going on… but do you? Do most people? Fighting games are horribly complex and difficult games to play and learn. But even if you insist on making your fighting game an e-sport…
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Street Fighter V had a terrible, incomplete, broken launch that justifiably shattered people’s trust in the end product, followed by a string of quite pricy DLC characters which you need to own in order to really play the game at a competitive level.
I think it’s a mistake to frame videogames as entertainment in the same context as professional sports or even movies and TV.
IMHO, the videogame experience is largely an individual one. Even when played with other people. It’s not about watching Eli Manning do extraordinary things. It’s about “being” Eli Manning (digitally). So I question the interest level in watching someone else pretend to be Eli (compared to actually watching the Giants play).
Videogames also have a limited ability to create a shared experience for the audience in the way movies and film or even sports do. Probably why movies based on videogames tend to be poorly received.
No argument from me on either point but there’s some justification here:
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Even if you can’t see stuff like frames, it’s still obvious who is winning and who just scored a major comeback, which is honestly not that obvious and doesn’t happen as clearly in other genres.
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Yes, but Capcom is the closest thing to a company with money in the genre, unless you count Microsoft and Killer Instinct, which I don’t think anyone does. So if’s going to be a fighting game…
Good points… for me, the “I’d rather play game X than watch someone else play game X” has always been a big strike against the idea of e-gaming.
One thing that they really ought to do is build in a commentator view for e-sports; so if we’re taking Overwatch as an example, you might want the ability for the commentator POV to be say… 50 feet in the air overlooking the entire map, or from some kind of non-player position best suited to see what goes down. It’s the difference between watching the press-box cameras of a football game vs. seeing the game from a Go-Pro stuck to the quarterback’s shoulder.
Spectators are going to want to watch the entire attack on the objective unfold at once, not try and keep track while watching from Tracer’s jumpy perspective, or as Torbjorn trying to repair his turret.
They have this for MOBAs already, and it gets used to great effect.
The in-client DOTA2 tournament stuff is really excellent. You get to choose what commentary to listen to, then ALSO choose whether you want to watch the commentators’ POV or use your own. Blizzard has a lot of catching up to do with their game in that respect.
The problem with a broader POV for FPS games is that it changes the perspective so drastically that it might make it difficult to parse for some viewers. I think it would take a really talented caster to be able to shift quickly and effectively between player views and broader ones.
It would; but if the majority of viewers were used to that perspective, it might not be a big deal.
I mean, using sports as an analogy, it’s a very different thing to watch a football game from the sidelines than from the press box, and still another to actually see it from the perspective of a player. I played in high school (offensive and defensive line), and most of the action actually unfolded behind me when on offense, and on defense, it was either not toward me, or a totally confused struggle if they were running toward me, as I was either being double-teamed or trying to avoid getting chop-blocked or blindsided on a trap play.
The press box is by far the best perspective to watch the game from, just like trying to follow a game of Overwatch by watching things from Winston’s perspective is pretty tough, with all the jumping and what-not, but having a sort of God-perspective would be awfully useful.
On PC, where you don’t need a company and venture capital to release a game.
What you’re taking about is a direct result of the economics of AAA game* production, which is, much like the big-budget movie industry and what’s left of the serious, big-budget network TV industry, the foundation of millions of dollars and thousands of jobs per game. With stakes like those, you don’t take risks. No sane person risks thousands of jobs on a neat little indie game which pushes the genre forwards but is more likely to crash and burn worse than Daikatana.
*(In the gaming world, contrary to the baseball world, AAA games are the top-flight most expensive games, as opposed to being the semi-pro beer league. ;))
This is exacerbated by the fact consoles don’t have a hobbyist development culture fully on par with the professional developers: You can’t compete in the same realm without a developer license, and that’s a big up-front cost even if you already own the console you want to develop for. (Microsoft’s XNA stuff for XBox is an exception, but it’s still somewhat crippled compared to what the pros use.) In the PC (inclusive of Mac) world, there’s no essential difference between professional and amateur: Everyone has the same tools and the same access to the Internet, which is where people buy software anymore. You don’t need any special license, you just need to get up and go. No big discontinuous step right up front.
Some of this is down to you getting older (and having less time and reflexes) and, yes, the gaming industry changing to favor Internet play and, therefore, encourage subscriptions and DLC and other revenue-generating practices.
I’m seriously into my games and this is how I feel. Watching other people play video games - be that as an esport or on YouTube - is an unpleasant combination of boring AND frustrating for me.
What people trying to talk up eSports and Twitch etc forget is there’s basically no recognition outside a niche market. A YouTube game streamer with a million subscribers is still a total unknown to most people, even other gamers.
As an example of just how fragmented gaming is, one of my colleagues is really into Hearthstone, and figured because I was a gamer I would be too. He was really surprised to discover that I wasn’t into it - just as he’s not into the Civilization games.
The other part is just budget; Lots of game genres are no longer cost effective to make with modern graphics. This is part of why Japan has moved heavily in the direction of handhelds, where expectations are lower due to less powerful hardware, and a number of genres that have been driven out of the traditional console space are still viable.
This sort of stuff doesn’t really require cutting edge graphics though:
A lot of that lends itself to cartoony or abstract style graphics. 2D platformers, kart racers, puzzle games, etc. Graphics wouldn’t be a barrier to putting a rhythm game like Melody’s Escape on a console.
However, maybe there’s a lot more of that sort of thing available via download on modern consoles rather than sitting on shelves at GameStop. I don’t really have my fingers on the pulse of the Xbox One indie market.
Is there any data on the number of active Steam users? I’ve only been able to find the number of active users two years ago and the number of present concurrent peak users.
Check SteamSpy? Their Steam Stats page currently shows ~42 million active users in the last 2 weeks.