How Rocket League Could Become The World’s Biggest Esport
Comprehensibility and watchability are key
If you asked 100 people what the most legendary moment in esports has been, you’d probably get 100 different answers. And most of them would be variations on the theme, ‘what?’, or ‘what is an esport?’, or ‘those darn kids should go outside.’ Maybe two or three people of those 100 have ever chosen to seek out esports to watch. Probably less.
Esports, while they’re becoming more established — with multimillion-dollar prize pools and real talent at the broadcasting booths — are still, overall, pretty niche.
Their popular appeal to non-gamers is limited, and at times, even nonexistent.
To see why, let’s look at two things: comprehensibility and watchability.
Comprehensibility
To define this term, let’s look at one of the world’s premier esports, League of Legends.
League doesn’t have what it takes to bring esports to a wider audience.
League is a brilliant game; I’ve only played a few rounds myself, but as a strategic, smart, fast-paced game with team thinking and quick decisions at every turn, the possibilities are limitless.
I’ve never felt like putting in the time to get, you know, good at it or anything, but I can appreciate that it must be amazingly fun for the people who do.
And I can see that, kind of, when I’m bored and I tune in to watch a few rounds. The commentators are amazingly skillful, breaking down all this complex, technical gameplay for someone who barely understands.
But the thing is, at the end of it all, I still find myself struggling to keep up with the pace.
There’s so much strategy that at times it feels like I’m watching two chess grandmasters: I can see everything that’s happening, but every move has implications beyond anything I could possibly understand. That makes it hard to watch for a long time, especially when you’re not a player.
That’s the thing. I don’t mean this as a diss on League fans, or on their game. But in terms of popular appeal, League doesn’t have what it takes to bring esports to a wider audience, because it is incomprehensible.
Non-players need to be able to understand what’s happening. Generally, MOBAs (Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas, like League) and RTS games (Real-Time Strategy games) struggle the most with this. Think Dota or Starcraft II, complex games with very limited appeal to those who don’t play.
Watchability
To understand watchability, we’ll look at two of the biggest esports, CS:GO and Fortnite. For esports to ever break out of the limited audience they have now, they will need to be watchable, so that people can tell what in the world is going on as they see people play.
Fortnite, well, doesn’t really do that all that well. I know it’s fashionable to dunk on Fortnite, but come on. Look at this.
There are 27 name tags on that screen alone — I think. The amount of information in this picture is massive. Understanding this screenshot and everything that was happening within it took me two minutes or so, as someone who’s played maybe 100 hours of Fortnite in my life.
The commentators — again, truly talented individuals, but they can’t possibly break down a game this complex, with 51 players all performing complex actions at a massive speed. It’s honestly overwhelming to watch.
And again, that’s for me, someone who’s actually played their game. How can they hope to break outside of their current audience if even I can hardly understand them?
That’s one way watchability can be destroyed. For another, let’s look at CS:GO.
It’s a first-person shooter, with teams of 5 going up against each other. The issue here isn’t that there’s too much information, actually, quite the opposite. There’s not enough.
If two players on opposing teams can see each other, one of them is probably about a tenth of a second away from being dead.
First-person viewpoints, then, are hard to understand as the audience can’t keep track of where all ten players on the field are, and thus, their positioning can seem like a meaningless dance until suddenly one team strikes, ending the round in seconds.
Things like flash bangs and smoke grenades, used tactically to obscure other players’ view, only exacerbate this problem of limited audience visibility, making it, again, less pleasant to watch.
So, I believe, for an esport to be widely successful, beyond the limited market of gamers, it needs to be two things.
- It must be comprehensible. It can’t be too hard for non-players to understand (like League of Legends).
- It must be watchable. The video can’t be overwhelming (like Fortnite), and it can’t be too limited either (like CS:GO).
There is only one major esport that satisfies both of these constraints: Rocket League.
Rocket League, hereafter referred to as RL, is not a MOBA or FPS or RTS game or anything like that.
Its ‘genre’ can be most succinctly described as car soccer.
In RL, you are a car, equipped with a rocket booster and the ability to jump and control your aerial motion. You try to hit a ball into your opponents’ net (like in regular human soccer).
The game lasts 5 minutes. At the end of the timer, when the ball hits the ground (an important twist that creates great suspense, as it can even be scored with the timer on 0:00), the team with more points wins, or, if tied, it goes to overtime, which lasts until someone scores.
(Oh, and the ball explodes when you score, but honestly, that part’s just cinematic.)
You have now been told literally everything about the ‘rules’, if you will, of Rocket League, and what’s more, you wouldn’t even need to know that much in order to watch it and get what’s going on.
Because it fits so well within the existing mental models we all have, of soccer, we just get it, almost instinctually. It passes the test of comprehensibility with flying colors.
As for watchability, unlike other games, there’s really only one thing you need to focus on at a time, and that’s the ball, and whoever has it at the moment.
Other graphic design choices, like the orange or blue colored nametags that float over the roofs of every car, and the colored walls of the fields, make it easy to tell who’s on what team and where the ball is going.
It’s possible to see the whole of the game happening in front of you, and it never feels like too much information at once. For all these reasons, RL is incredibly watchable as well.
Because it fits so closely to what we think of as ‘normal sports’, RL is an esport unlike any other. It is an esport that can pull people, non-gamers, into the community to watch cars play soccer.
In fact, I know one of them. An ordinary guy, who doesn’t own RL, doesn’t really play video games at all, who watches the RL esports scene with the dedication of an NBA fan in March (well, any other March at least). It actually has appeal outside of the gaming community, which makes it truly one-of-a-kind.
There’s one little thing that’s just icing on the cake for RL, and that’s the fact that it’s incredibly exciting.
Don’t believe me? Watch this clip, the most recognizable moment in RL esports history.
It’s game 7 in a best-of-seven series. It’s the grand finals, of the biggest ever tournament that’s ever been played, and there are seconds left on the clock. It’s in the Copper Box Stadium, which seats 7,500, and there are hundreds of thousands (including me) watching live on Twitch.
I don’t know about 100 random people, but if you asked me what the most legendary moment in esports was, I would give you this clip:
The crowd — and all those hundreds of thousands at home — go absolutely wild. And the thing is, it makes sense, even to those who don’t play, because as an esport, Rocket League is comprehensible and it’s watchable.
And just like traditional sports, RL esports creates idols, the top players becoming stars as well.
The names of players like ‘Jstn’, who scored the famous “This Is Rocket League” goal in that clip, the most famous in the game’s history, or ‘Rizzo’, a popular streamer and community icon, are becoming more and more recognizable. These players, to this community, hold the same appeal as a quarterback would to a football fan.
Unlike regular sports, RL gets an advantage in that its players can connect more readily with fans, through Twitch streaming or even through running into them in-game.
If you’re an amateur footballer, you’re never gonna run into Aaron Rodgers in a game, but if you’re a player in RL, you might just get into a game with Jstn, Rizzo, or another professional.
Players pay to decorate their in-game cars with the logos of teams they support, just like a jersey of your favorite team, with a part of that money going back to fund those teams.
For its core fanbase, RL is more than just another video game. It’s a game to play, yes, but it’s also a sport to watch and a welcoming community.
Because of the esport’s openness to non-gamers, the community has the potential to truly expand to an extent that no other video game possibly could.
And the time for that to happen is now. With everyone stuck inside due to the coronavirus, RL is smashing through its previous player-count record, reaching a peak of almost 120,000 people online at one time this month on PC alone (and nearly 500,000 across all platforms), up from only 80,000 the month before.
With people bored and stuck inside, RL being so easy to pick up and yet so difficult to master is the perfect game for them to start playing, and even once this crisis ends, many of them will stay with the community, propelling it ever higher.
It has the potential to bring esports from a niche thing into a true sporting event, and people are starting to notice.
RL is slated to be featured alongside the Olympics at the Intel World Open, an honor given to only one other game, Street Fighter V, for a prize pool of 250,000 dollars given out to the best of the best.
In an interview Josh Watson, the RL esports operations manager, said that the developers’ long term goal is to make RL the biggest sport in the world.
Not the biggest esport. The biggest sport.
RL is easy to pick up — if you can drive, you can play — but difficult to master. I’ve played for 1,500 hours, over 7,000 games, and I still haven’t achieved the game’s highest rank, let alone begun competitive play.
This low initial investment — it’s fun right away — combined with an incredibly high skill ceiling makes it ideal for something like ‘becoming the biggest sport in the world.’
Anyone can play, but perfection is impossible, and so from the lowest to the highest level, anything from neighborhood tournaments to Olympic tie-ins are fair game.
Of course, it’s a long road for RL to become the world’s biggest sport, or even the biggest esport.
But with the advantages of comprehensibility and watchability on its side, with a dedicated core community and millions of fans, I believe that it is well on its way there.
Bennett Jester is a Rocket League player currently ranked at Champion II, a writer, and a high school student from Wisconsin.
If you want to try watching some Rocket League yourself, try starting here, with the Rocket League Championship Series Season 5 Grand Finals series. It showcases some of the most explosive highlights ever, with an incredibly hyped-up crowd, and may be the best series of Rocket League that’s ever been played.
