Esports is not esports, esports is gaming
This piece alongside the third edition of my newsletter, Emerging Technology and Media. Check it out here.
When people discuss esports, they are really talking about more than the esport itself. Sure, when fans engage with esports they are engaging with high-level competition and professional players. They engage with the fans and community around the esport. They see the game played the way they would like to play it. Some of the younger fans, like those in previous generations who looked up to Michael Jordan, imagine becoming those professional players. But it is the game at the center of the esport that is critical and games have come a long way in the past forty years.
Physical sports such as football and baseball did not need innovation in graphics, computing power, and networking to become realistic, social, multiplayer activities. Sports were not imaginary worlds that had to be rendered in real-time, they were already real. Innovations in broadcasting and architecture enabled them to become cultural mainstays though. Physical sports have been around long enough to become embedded in our society, to create hereditary loyalty, and to be a natural activity on fields and playgrounds. But only recently have video games become comparable to physical sports in the dimensions that matter.
The story of esports is also the story of gaming. When I was growing up, a world of professional gaming was not something easily imagined. Games had simple graphics, could support up to four players, and had to be played in the living room. Graphics would naturally improve over time, but the Internet had not gone mainstream and getting players together inhibited competitive play. Esports at the time involved massive local area network events where people had to transport expensive, massive gaming computers. Can you imagine the high school esports team piling onto a bus with tens of thousands of dollars of equipment to compete at the regional playoffs?
In 1996 Blizzard launched Battle.net, a service which enabled matchmaking and multiplayer games that spanned the Internet. This was a critical step forward for gaming, as it enabled ranked, competitive gameplay unrestricted by geographic proximity. Microsoft would later follow suit in console gaming with the introduction of Xbox Live in 2002. Internet-enabled multiplayer became the standard and would allow players to ceaselessly grind the competitive scene in pursuit of higher ranks and greater skills. While some markets embraced esports at this point, notably South Korea, most markets did not as games were not as culturally accepted. There were other challenges that also prevented esports from taking off.
The Internet not only facilitated multiplayer gaming experiences, it also changed the way software was developed and distributed. Games, like all software products, were distributed on disks or cartridges through retailers and the mail. This slow and expensive form of distribution meant that games developers and publishers relied on sequels to sustain and grow franchises over time. Expansion packs were used to bridge gaps in product development lifecycles. The consequence of this model was that the player base for a given game would fragment and fracture over time. Games also cost significant amounts of money, to kids at least, to buy so the barrier to try a given title was high.
The Internet supplemented and eventually replaced the physical distribution model. With digital distribution, regular updates could be made to games cheaply and effectively. Optional downloadable content or DLC could be produced and given away for free or sold to players well after the initial game release. The cost to distribute games dropped dramatically, allowing developers to give the game away for free. Enterprising developers such as Riot Games adopted a strategy where the game was freely available and players could choose to purchase supplemental content such as cosmetic skins for in-game characters or access to characters that were released after launch. This model, now known as free-to-play, dropped the barrier to adoption and was capable of attracting millions of players to a single game. The supplemental content proved remarkably popular, earning the most successful free-to-play developers amounts comparable to their peers in traditional game development.
The free-to-play model with cosmetic add-ons proved to be a good foundation for esports. The lack of upfront pricing generated large amounts of awareness and trial, which meant that these games had large audiences available to partake in esports. The open-ended development and business model meant that the developers didn’t need to fragment their player-base to generate more revenue, and could continuously expand the original game. This form of development was more stable and more predictable than the sequel-based model, making it very attractive and profitable. Profits could be reinvested into the community and build the ecosystem for an esport. This is exactly what Riot Games did with League of Legends. But there was one final piece of the puzzle — how would content be packaged and distributed to an audience?
Justin.tv was a website created in 2007 to broadcast 24/7 the life of one of the website’s founders, Justin Kan. It would later relaunch to allow anyone to broadcast video online. In 2011, Twitch was spun out of Justin.tv as a separate streaming platform and site for video game live streaming. This included esports broadcasts. By 2013 Twitch was one of the largest sources of peak internet traffic in the US and had 45 million unique viewers. Riot Games held the first League of Legends Championship Series from 2012–2013, broadcasting games on Twitch. The final series was reportedly watched by 32 million people, with a peak concurrent viewership of 8.5 million. In 2014 Amazon bought Twitch for almost a billion dollars. By 2018, there would be a plethora of livestreaming services including YouTube Gaming, Facebook Live, Microsoft Mixer, and Azubu.
Live streaming was the technology that allowed esports to gain distribution in a time when it was unclear how many people would tune in and how valuable the audience would be. But livestreaming was not driven by esports, rather it was driven by gaming and content creators. As Twitch grew, it grew off of the efforts of millions of content creators similar to the creators fueling YouTube. The commercial viability of Twitch streaming created a positive feedback loop, attracting more creators to Twitch and professional streaming. This in turn expanded the audience and engagement of Twitch. Today, Twitch’s most popular streamer is able to attract audiences ranging from around 100,000 concurrent viewers to upwards of 600,000 viewers during special events. The next tier of streamers regularly attract between 30,000–60,000 concurrent viewers. Popular streamers can earn hundreds if not millions of dollars per year.
It is the intersection of live streaming entertainers and esports that distinguishes the most successful games today, at least in the West. Popular live streamers have needs similar to those of the game developers — they want to play evergreen games that will attract audiences for the foreseeable future, have deep mechanics to create high skill gameplay, and will evolve over time to maintain interest. But the streamers need to tap into large audiences or bring their audiences into new games. Game developers want to develop additional features and content that will grow and monetize their games over time. Because of these interactions, esports is not what makes a game successful. Rather, successful games become esports and develop streaming communities.
The largest game developers and publishers often discuss esports on earnings calls and they use the term to drive up excitement, but this is missing the point. These developers need to focus on building the core products that will attract the right audience and engage them deeply while adopting business models that will retain them audience and monetize them fairly over time. Bolting a competitive league onto a game and holding a purse out for the best player or team isn’t what drives success in esports. The foundation, the game itself, is critical. Continuous efforts by the developers are required to maintain the relevance of the game as well as the business model. But this is not a sure-fire recipe. Gaming has its fads and even established franchises such as League of Legends can be impacted by a phenomenon like Fortnite.
Esports is a complicated subject because esport viewership, live stream viewership, and the factors that drive them are often conflated. While esports is growing commercially, its promoters often seek to inflate the market size and engagement to further legitimize it. The most popular streamer on Twitch routinely gains more viewers than the nascent Overwatch League, which is sponsored by Blizzard and is an outgrowth of one of the most successful new game franchises in years. Esports viewership and content is not what drives Twitch, though it is very significant. It is the day-in and day-out efforts of individual content creators and the audiences they attract that are the foundation for Twitch.
The point of this essay is to draw out the parallels between the evolution of gaming over time and the rise of esports. The story of esports is not that it wasn’t a thing and now it is. The story of esports is that gaming has evolved to the point where it is mechanically indistinguishable from sports. But unlike physical sports, the amateur scene is far larger and the professional leagues are far from the only ones using the sports to create audiences.
One way to view this story is that esports resembles a disruptive innovation relative to physical sports such as baseball and football. Video games initially were less entertaining and less capable as sports but are now, for a distinct market, more entertaining and capable. The progression of esports isn’t done yet either as video games inherently utilize modern technology and distribution in a way that physical sports do not. Video games and their associated esports have the potential to transform how we think of entertainment and sports.
Games already offer fully immersive worlds and the ability for anyone to compete at the highest levels. The open, large-scale tournaments of Clash Royale and HQ Trivia offer a glimpse of a future where the entire community of a game competes for prizes. The community-organized tournaments for Fortnite show how popular online personalities can self-organize their own esports events at will. The battle royale genre itself shows that conventional team vs. team format isn’t the only one that will work. Games and esports can transcend distance and other physical limitations that have always constrained physical sports, which means that esports have the potential to continuously evolve and adapt to contemporary conditions. Physical sports adapt to contemporary media distribution and create by-products such as talk shows, but they don’t reinvent their mechanics. The future of gaming, and thus the future of esports, is very promising.
Thank you for reading
If you liked this edition of the newsletter, please give it a clap and consider following me on Medium. Every bit of support is helpful and appreciated.
You can also find me on Twitter and follow me there. I tweet about tech, games, and sports but I promise that the tweets won’t be overwhelming or too annoying.
