With studios scrambling to keep up with light-speed growth, a reactive wait-and-see attitude seems like the industry-wide solution.”I think it has all the tools to really go the distance and become something powerful,” says Peter Guber, CEO of Mandalay Entertainment, to CNBC about the future of esports. This roughly translates to, “it looks cool, but no ones’s really thought about it too hard yet.” Until it becomes something more powerful, you can find me playing games instead of watching t
Coverage is bad because esports are hard to watch, not the other way around. It all stems from an inability to produce universal coverage. Too much diversity or segmented viewership may not seem like an issue on the surface, but it is. Maybe you’re simply saying “well, no one is asking you to watch every esport,” and that’s fair. Maybe communities are fine existing in their own worlds—far out of the reach of other gaming communities. But it does create a barrier for the industry to break into mainstream entertainm
But it’s mostly a farce. Those who play the most popular games at the highest level get all the limelight and all the cash. For everyone else, streaming—where personality trumps skill—is the only way to make money from gaming. If the community stays as segmented and hastily constructed as it is, it’s tough to imagine esports becoming anything better than what it already is. If you’re happy with the current state of esports, good for you. But for someone who wants a more entertaining and structured esports community, something has to cha
At the end of the day, esports is still relatively new. In the current state of things, most games are simply not worth watching. However, that may change. The most popular games will likely develop more polished ways of conducting business, acting as their own miniature industries. As a result, better coverage for games will take some time to arrive, with bigger titles leading the
With success comes imitation. Many game developers saw the incredible financial success of both LoL and Dota2 and thought they could change the classic MOBA formula just enough to stand out. Titan Forge Games released Smite , a mythologically-themed third-person battle arena, in March of 2014. Although certainly popular by most standards and also featuring a world championship with a $1 million top prize, Smite never quite gained the rampant popularity of either LoL or Dot
It’s unclear whether universal control over games that operate under the catch-all domain of esports will ever exist. Escalating conflict between streaming platforms that compete for viewer attention certainly isn’t helping the case for unified growth. It’s also worth questioning whether universal control is even needed. Larger titles seem to be doing just fine supporting their own leagues. A 16-year-old just took home $3 million at the first-ever _ Fortnite _ World Cup, after
It’s more than a semantic concern, however. Unlike traditional sports, it’s nearly impossible to tune in to games that you don’t play personally. For instance, I’ve never been into Overwatch , and although I understand how the gameplay works, Overwatch League is completely unenjoyable to watch. You can’t appreciate the level of difficulty that certain moves take to execute unless you’ve attempted them yourself. This rule is almost universally applied across all of esports. Unlike traditional sports, where pure athleticism can be appreciated void of any tactical or technical knowledge, esports requires a higher degree of familiarity. At best, this means that viewership rarely crosses between games. At worst, this means esports isn’t viewer-friendly and may never have what it takes to reach wider audien
A common issue in DOTA2 is that people will often throw games because they are denied their favorite hero that gets picked during the hero selection phase. League perfectly solved this issue by ensuring that you pick your position and champion early
Those who think esports occupy a small, forgettable faction of the entertainment industry are unequivocally and undeniably wrong. Esports may seem small due to a lack of mainstream coverage, but the budding industry is a global phenomenon with a fanbase in the hundreds of millions. Still, esports continues to be difficult to wa
Based on a Vertigo Comics series, iZombie centers upon Liv Moore – an undead coroner who uses her power to gain a person’s knowledge and memories when she eats their brain to solve mysteries. No air date or time has been set for when the show’s fifth and final season will air, beyond it airing sometime in the spring of 2019 on The
There’s a term in economics called “market saturation.” It basically means that a product has become so common in the market that everyone who wants the product either already has it or can easily get it. It happens to basically everything, but you can see it often in certain widely distributed items, such as cars, Techies Support build snack foods, and yes, video ga