I specifically said eSport games for just that reason. People know Pac-Man, they don’t know DOTA2 or care about the teams. Hell, people know about Pac-Man but 99.995% of them have no clue (or care) what the possible high level or score is. Does your mom watch competitive Angry Birds or people streaming Angry Birds on Twitch? Everyone knows Monopoly, that doesn’t mean you’ll get 20 million people to watch someone playing it.
No - but it’s kinda beside the point. She was pushing 70 - doesn’t watch NFL/NBA/NHL/MLB, but was able to download and play Angry Birds on her phone. In her late 60’s and being pretty PC-illiterate.
My son and daughter are 8 and 6, love playing Minecraft, build amazing structures, watch youtube videos on Minecraft and my son is learning programming to build his own mods. I came downstairs the other day to see my 6-year old daughter and some of her friends - all girls - playing Minecraft together on the TV while the boys were upstairs making mods.
That’s the generation that will grow up watching other people play esports like we grew up watching people play traditional sports, and it will be just natural to them as traditional sports was to us.
I grew up playing video games and have zero interest in watching people play them. My son grew up playing video games and has zero interest in watching people play them. My younger son plays video games and unless competitive Toca Life becomes a thing, he hasn’t shown much eSport interest either. Even my friends who actually play the games that competitive eSports are pushing (Overwatch, R6 Siege, CS:GO, etc) don’t really care about the scene unless they’re getting bribed with in-game baubles for watching.
I don’t believe that interest in playing games necessarily translates to an interest in watching other people play them. I’m aware that it does for some people and that streaming is a thing, etc. I don’t see it getting to a level of penetration traditional sports enjoy any time soon. Even if people stop watching football, etc I don’t see eSports filling the same sized space.
I agree with those that don’t see Esports catching up with other sports. Even if football declines (and my guess is that the NFL will lose a lot of viewership in the next few decades) those fans are more likely migrate to soccer or basketball than Esports. For those that say it will be the younger generation that grows up to like Esports, I’m not sure that will pan out. Admittedly, I wonder about some of the numbers cited above. In particular Barkis is Willin quotes the NFL as making 10 billion a year and Esports at 1.5 billion. That means that Esports bring in about the same amount as 4 NFL teams. Even if we assume those NFL teams are some of the ones that are the least popular (Jacksonville, Tampa Bay, and both LA teams) I can’t even begin to imagine how Esports pulls in more than those four put together. It’s not like Esports has things like people buying season tickets for a luxury suite, or Phillip Rivers jerseys, or any number of things even these less popular NFL teams make money on. Are sales for all these games being lumped into the Esports revenues? If I go out and buy a copy of Madden 2018 does that count as Esport revenue? Are big companies buying big dollar advertising for Esport events?
I don’t personally watch e-sports, but I really recommend Things of Beauty: Super Smash bros. as Spectator Sport by Innuendo Studios for a look at how competitive fighting games (with Smash Bros. Melee as a case study) holds a lot of the same appeal as traditional sports – mythologizing, story crafting, irrational biases towards certain strategies or players because it “feels right”.
I’m sure some esport will break into the mainstream some day, but I don’t know which game. Hell, I don’t know if there will ever be a true “breakout hit”. It’s possible that there’s never going to be an “Overwatch Superbowl” as much as an “esports olympics” – a big event with a bunch of different games people compete at, and people tune into their favorite games. Maybe even including solo endeavors like speedrunning. Sort of a merging of EVO and Games Done Quick. These events already get bigger every year (GDQ moreso than EVO), and I think that’s only going to keep happening as more people grow up with games.
I think one thing that might help bridge the gap would be the emergence of multi-game guilds, with squads dedicated to specific games, but rolling forward to new games as the tech advances. The guilds would take on the role of traditional sports teams in providing continuity and a tribal attachment point for people, while a squad structure would prevent a guild from being obsoleted by the release of new games. Basically, you would have a “team” that does the equivalent of American football, baseball, and basketball; then, depending on popularity, it might, for example, add a soccer squad and backbench baseball at some point.
So, when PUBG drops off the radar, the Last Tide (or whatever) squad steps up.
I side with RickJay, at least mostly. Unless a particular game is going to be played for many decades you aren’t going to get enough fan loyalty to give it the kind of devotion needed to become a big thing and overtake athletic sports.
However I did say “mostly”. I do see one way in which esports might gain longevity. If esports players can transcend a single game and become multi-talented games players it might work.
Let’s say, for example, you don’t have someone who’s just good at Overwatch or Battlefield, but FPS games. And so this person enters tournaments for various FPS games, and even as old games become obsolete and new games become popular he continues playing them. And so parents watch these games on TV or go to arenas with their kids to see them live, and those kids grow up to share these experiences with their own kids, and it becomes a generational thing. Because the games change with the technology but the genre stays consistent.
That sort of thing might make esports become an important part of culture. But only if the sport transcends the games to have players for entire genres, and if those genres last for generational appeal.
Beyond the driver, the physicality IS the car, careening along at 200+ mph with their big loud engines and avoiding fiery death. Or being involved in fiery death if that’s your thing. But the physical nature of it is paramount, otherwise ESPN could just show footage of people playing Forza and get the same ratings.
I mean, this already happens. Professional esports players hop to new, better playing games as they get popular. A lot of League players were former Starcraft or Warcraft players, for instance, and a lot of teams like Team Liquid are cross-game, spanning multiple genres.
Part of the issue with this is that, like real life sports, games are reflex heavy and reflexes decline with age, so older players often retire when they can’t compete anymore. Competitive Starcraft 1 was known to favor players in their late teens and early 20s for instance, even late in its lifespan (when it had been out for over a decade).
Football, boxing, racing cars - it’s the implicit promise of violence and death that holds the appeal for the vast majority of casual viewers. It’s the secret hope of most of the people watching that they’ll see mayhem and destruction that pulls people in, not the ‘physicality of the car’.
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That’s an interesting point - what are the prime years for an e-sports FPS game? Ninja played Halo (IIRC) and now runs Fortnite, but will he be over the hill at 30 and have to retire to making minecraft videos?
More generally I think it could happen - esports eclipsing sports, it’s certainly a reasonable conjecture. You can predict a linear sort of growth from where they are now, which is not insubstantial, but there’s also the chance of a huge step change in how important video games, VR-type experiences become in our lives in the next decades. The opposite seems true for sports, there’s far more chance of the superbowl suffering a precipitous decline in popularity than it suddenly taking a huge leap upwards - it seems pretty maxed out in that respect.
Season 1 of the LoL WC in 2011 was watched by 1.6 million viewers. Season 7 in 2017 was watched by 60 million viewers. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think esports might eclipse or at least rise to the same level as traditional sports at some point.
I don’t agree entirely but it doesn’t matter. No one watching for real life violence & death gives a shit about League of Legends and little video game people running around with video game fire. So if that’s why they’re watching, they’re not going to be an easily attainable audience.
I think Jophiel nailed it. Society simply considers it far more admirable for an athlete to compete in a sport that involves sweat, hard labor, pain or endurance than for some gamer sitting in front of a computer to click and type. And the visual body of an athlete - physically toned, powerful muscles, leaping jump, hard abs, etc. - is much more aesthetically marketable than some glasses-wearing guy wearing a gamer T-shirt.
The vast majority of its viewers came from China (over 98% of viewers and hours watched were both from China). I don’t know enough about Chinese sports culture to guess why it’s so popular there or whether or not traditional sports hold a greater niche since I was having trouble finding viewership numbers for individual Chinese sporting events. It would be interesting to investigate whether or not that can translate to other audiences though.
I’m wondering if this isn’t somewhat old-school thinking. I can’t tell you how many kids I know that would rather watch people play video games on youtube than watch a real live football game. Trust me, I personally don’t get the appeal. But I’m not the target demo.
Youtube’s a little different. A lot of people there aren’t so much good as much as they’re entertaining (to the viewers anyway) and they’re not playing competitively. I don’t think that a Let’s Play of the latest Resident Evil game compares to a live football game in the same way a streamed DOTA2 match would. Plus, of course, you can put something like that on Youtube and collect clicks over time since watching you blunder through Monster Hunter isn’t as time sensitive as watching a world championship game.
But why are we comparing it to the Super Bowl? Or even a Heavyweight Fight in boxing. Most sports can’t compete with that (esp the SuperBowl). You think the WNBA Finals get close to those numbers (I believe the highest WNBA rating is 600,000 viewers)? Are we narrowly defining “traditional sports”.
Um… this shows a lack of understanding of the intense limits that NASCAR drivers go through. You are going 200 mph with your car mere inches away from other cars. You are actually far closer to other cars in NASCAR than you are in F1. Also consider they feel 3 Gs of force on turns while being in cars that are usually over 100 F.
Driver Jamie McMurray a year back shared his heart rate statistics for the New Hampshire race, which showed that his average heart rate was 144 beats per minute during the 3.5 hours race. That’s quite the physical exertion - probably due to the G’s faced, the heat of the cars, and the stress of being that close to other cars.
Yep. There are many young folks (teens mostly) from Church who I was kind of surprised spend a good deal of time watching eSports, but couldn’t care one whit about Football, Baseball, Basketball, or Soccer.