Enjoy the Refs & Ads, I’ll Watch eSports

Hello there! Chances are your interested in eSports and I’m here to tell you good call. Live sports is a big deal. Live events are one of the only factors keeping cable in business and the reason the Twitch business model is so successful and they do it without the need for it’s users to subscribe. If you DO subscribe with Turbo (billed about the same as Netflix) then cool, no ads for you with a slew of little extras. Popular channels can also implement a subscribe only feature so chatrooms are less noisy and the streamers/commentators can focus on those people more which is super good.

Now all this brings us to eSports: Dota, Smite, League of Legends, Starcraft II, World of Tanks, Hearthstone, Call of Duty and more. And like most sports its fun to know whats going on but with a list like this I might as well be listing off tennis, baseball, basketball, football, soccer…they’re all different games. For instance I can follow Hearthstone and Starcraft II and know who’s winning and what needs to happen but if its Dota/LoL I’m mostly clueless whats going on BUT I don’t mind watching it with people who actually like it. Sort of a guy bringing a girl, or the reverse, to a NFL game. They might not know ANYTHING about football but they might be watching just to fit in with everyone else who enjoys it and might actually try to figure out what’s happening. Or maybe the guy who’s not a hardcore NFL fan but enjoys watching the home team play might not know all the rules but you don’t need a book to know when a team scores and you can cheer. You don’t need much intuition to know when a player is killed and can be excited when it happens. People are playing a game at the highest level which is such a draw.

The reason I bring this all up is a major criticism of eSports is simply eSports itself. People just view it as some kids playing games that they themselves don’t know the rules to and I would argue if you understood ANY of the games to their fullest you’d be much more invested in watching them. Not knowing anything about a sport typically makes watching it way less fun. There’s also the “I’m just not into it” reason which is also valid. When I watch tennis I usually have to tell someone to change the channel because I didn’t put it there. Nothing against tennis but wow it sure makes golf seem more exciting.

My gripe about eSports is actually spoilers and game scheduling. I know a lot about Starcraft but have no idea which are the events I need to pay the most attention to, when the events are, how the scoring works for people to make it into events, which cups are the most prestigious (other then the Blizzcon ones). And I want to subscribe to certain YouTube channels and follow people on social but don’t because I don’t want to know who’s in the semi finals if I haven’t watched a favorite player of mine in the quarter finals. I actually pay a small fee to a website that brilliantly lays out all this information without giving away any spoilers whatsoever and the most curious thing about this is I’m watching eSports without watching live. To be fair to watch live I’d have to be on South Korea time which is 14 hours ahead so events tend to start at early hours of the morning . Regardless I love watching my favorite players play and in a format that makes balanced updates to the game, occasionally adding new classes/units, no commercials after a game starts (similar to soccer) and seeing the same names make it to the championships year after year proving that there is a real skill to the game; that not just anyone can win a championship.

One last important aspect eSports can boast is NO referees which I feel is the major selling point. If I were marketing eSports I would solely focus on a game finally played with only the players and no referees that determine the outcome of the game. I would run clips of famous bad calls in sports and then present an environment where that doesn’t happen. The last minute of a close sports game can be the most frustrating thing on the planet. It’s a lot of timeouts, review on plays, penalties some of which are CLEARLY seen but because a ref didn’t see it, it doesn’t count. Dumb. This stuff kills the energy and integrity of the game. Whenever I see an umpire I always think to myself “How is that not a robot with sensors to determine the batter box to determine strikes/balls?” It’s outdated.

Now I wrote this article because I just wanted to get this topic off my mind and discovered more then what I thought I knew. If there’s a takeaway here its eSports offers truly one of the only pure gaming experiences. Its player(s) vs player(s) without the need of refs to determine whats fair. They just need to organize a better system to distribute the content. The one interesting thing I can’t help but think about is the future of sports in VR. When you start to add more physical elements to a game well now its a sport, you can drop the “e”. Oh and when an eSport sells out the entire Staples Center they should spread that information like the plague.