Spawning Esports

Around 2010/2011 the big money, top gaming publishers, first started to look into esports seriously. That got many people, myself included, really hopeful.

Before that time, no one cared.

The Starcraft pro scene was born and had evolved for 12 years with Blizzard hardly even noticing its existence, if not for a couple lawsuits already threatening the Korean pro scene. The same had more or less been going on with Counter-Strike and Valve, minus the lawsuits. And I won’t even mention the story of DotA. So you can only imagine how much EA, Ubisoft and any publisher without an esports platform on their own cared themselves.

What triggered the publishers’ interest, and everyone else’s later on, was League of Legends. Released in late 2009, the game took most of what we knew about esports and made it more accessible, bigger, while preserving the core character of a truly competitive game.

Here I need to add League of Legends wasn’t expected to do well in esports, especially not by esports professionals: most of them rejected it to start with. After a few years though, it was getting way more people excited by esports than ever before: the game’s success took the industry by storm and everyone adapted to the big splash as they could.

The launch of Twitch in June 2011 came to reinforce this new interest. As the new media crystallizing the new phenom, at least in the West, Twitch was yet another major hint that esports, and games-as-a-service altogether, were becoming increasingly important.

Since then, the esports hype has only been going up. Many have been announcing a cultural and economical tsunami and I believe that’s where we’re headed as well.

This growth hasn’t been coming without its pains though of course and here I’d like to deal with a topic that I hold dear to my heart: the creative one, the question of new and better games for esports.

When launching Gamoloco back in 2014, following the new-born interest of billionaire companies, I thought we were going to be able to use our data to tell the story of amazing new games taking Twitch viewerships and esports to new heights… Not only would I have loved to do that in the first place, it would also have made for great content marketing to promote our service.

That’s not how it happened though.

Force is to say that while esports have been growing exponentially in all kinds of ways in recent years, the data we collected from Twitch says they almost didn’t grow in what I would consider to be some of the most important KPI’s for their future:

• the number of games with very strong esports potential
• the number of people interested in watching tournaments

Don’t get me wrong, esports did grow during that time. What I mean is that these 2 KPI’s simply didn’t go through the roof or grow nearly as fast as the hype and investments.

With all the esports fuss going on and wealthy publishers now in the mix for years, this has to sound like a very disapointing result, at best… And it is. But how is that possible? How come esports didn’t grow that much in terms of high potential games and viewers?

It turns out making esports games is incredibly hard and almost no one in the industry understood how hard it was… up until now maybe. These games are rarer than a Legendary card in Clash Royale’s Arena 1. Mind you. Across the past 20 years, there was less than 1 truly impactful esports game released each year around the world. I’m not even sure that was 1 every other year... That’s way less than AAA blockbusters for example.

Also, the first and by far most successful esports platforms were all born out of accidents. By that I mean they either came out as budget-less fan projects (Counter-Strike, DotA), or they just weren’t intended to be played as « esports » by professionals practicing daily and competing for money (Starcraft, League of Legends). Or both.

One has to stop here and take notice of how crazy that is in the first place: Counter-Strike was created by an 18 year-old who started with 0 development and promotional budget. And yet, in these conditions, it was all the rage, the game everyone was playing and talking about. It’s only with little additional help that CS went on to become the #1 esports platform in the West.

The same more or less goes for DotA.

This means these games generated very very very powerful momentum by themselves, just because of how interested people were in playing them, sharing them and later on competing with them. From my own experience, when professional game makers hear about these stories, they simply deny them… and never fail to make me think of Salieri facing Mozart.

From Shootmania to Overwatch, it’s that kind of amazing spontaneous momentum I couldn’t see in the new games that have come out this decade so far.

To be clear regarding Overwatch, in my view, it still hasn’t to this point taken off like it should have to become really major. And that’s after spending how many hundreds of millions to market it?… Maybe the game will do super well in esports in the end but by my book this has been a pretty rough start, to say the least.

Esports need so much hardcore passion burning for so many years in the hearts of so many people that absolutely no one is rich enough to fuel it with money.

I believe we’re very far from having reached the golden age of esports. That means we should expect a lot of amazing new things, amazing new games pleasing more gamers and bigger audiences than ever.

So for all these reasons my main idea was that if CS and DotA could burst spontaneously the way they did in a time when there weren’t either Twitch, Twitter or Youtube to support their communities, nowadays games with the same kind of momentum should litterally explode to our faces, catalyzed by all the social media and video sharing.

And yet, instead of having more powerful phenomenons than before, we only ended up with weaker ones… all the while investments to make that kind of games happen had never been that high, by an outrageous margin.

To cut it short, a few years after publishers finally started paying attention and investing to build more esports platforms, we surprisingly ended up with no truly powerful new title to grow esports in big chunks from.

I consider the drought finally came to an end with the release of Clash Royale in March 2016. Before that it had been almost 7 years since a new groundbreaking game (not a “remake”, not an improved version of an older game) had hit the shores of the esports world, back when League of Legends was released in October 2009.

I won’t list all the games that didn’t make it, or made it halfway, or 1/4 of the way… Let’s just say there have been quite a few projects which led to disapointment, one way or the other.

Indeed I started smiling again a bit more than a year ago with the release of Clash Royale.

What I saw immediately in Clash Royale, even before the high Youtube viewerships confirmed that, was some kind of genius game design miniature masterpiece packed inside irresistible humor and art direction… aka a new and very big door for more gamers to enter esports.

Despite its small form-factor, Clash Royale combines many qualities that any esports title should or could have, making it the most accessible esports game out there as well as a mind-bogglingly deep one.

Still, unfortunately for myself, after years of waiting for a truly impactful new game to track the numbers of, I couldn’t actually chart CR’s amazing viewership performance, and esports potential, as most of the viewers gathered on Youtube, which we at Gamoloco don’t collect the data of.

So my patience was tested again.

2017 though is the year of the relief and that’s because of Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds, a new game by Korean studio BlueHole.

PUB came out of nowhere as a Steam early access title last March and started trampling Twitch viewerships right out of the gate. It hasn’t stopped since.

When it comes to Twitch, on a daily basis, when no special event was supporting any of those games, PUB has been beating CSGO, DotA 2, HearthStone, Overwatch, GTA, FIFA and any other game you might think of, but League of Legends.

Considering the steadiness at this level, we’re now talking in months, this shows tremendous potential, something I never could see in our data before.

It was about time.

PUB is a skill-based competitive game coming out of nowhere with limited promo budget, almost no previous community to build itself from, no established esports scene, even less a pro league or the promise for it, so no synthetized expectations for fame or cash for anyone… In these conditions, its amazing viewership performance, significantly better for example than Overwatch at launch +3 months, is something striking.

By my book, PUBG is the almost perfect template for an esports revolution.

Right now I’m that scientist in Akira finally witnessing the curves go up after many years of waiting… And don’t worry in our case PUB will not destroy the city or world like Tetsuo, it should only crush Twitch data records like a meteor.

After years of seeing no new game to build the future of esports on, despite many resourceful attempts by more wealthy companies than ever, we now have 2 very different titles showing amazing new potential.

I wish I could tell more about Clash Royale but as said it’s a bit difficult since it’s been growing mostly on Youtube.

Twitch is where the PUB phenom has truly blossomed lately, though. That will allow me to observe it in details and find out if it does hold true to its early data promises.