The Maturation Process of Professional Esports
Esports in general are a fairly new phenomenon, and you take each individual game within the genre and you will find a scene that has grown fast but now is looking to hit that next stage. How do they hit that? Do they look toward the other major sports and copy that process, or will they continue to pioneer new territory? Let’s explore.
Other Popular Leagues
Some of the discussion in the scene is exploring how the various popular sports leagues made that leap from from niche to super popular. Is that really applicable in esports?
The NFL’s famous tipping point was the famous Heidi game. This game really showed the networks how popular the NFL actually was and stopped preempting the NFL with its regular programming. This only propagated the popularity of the NFL by people tuning in to watch things like Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and instead seeing the end of of Washington and Oakland playing.
The NBA did not have much of a tipping point other than a huge personal college rivalry moving from college to the NBA with Magic Johnson and Larry Bird. From there they transitioned to Michael Jordan and the rest has just been trying to sustain the popularity those superstars built. But seeing someone do an insanely athletic feat is significantly more accessible for the masses than seeing someone’s avatar in a game make a crazy athletic feat.
The stories go on and on with each league but the lesson learned is they all have their own story. They almost all gained their popularity in different eras. Even looking at sports like golf yields nothing, despite the competition model being extremely similar, due to the age of professional golf competition.
Maturing Businesses
Where the real lessons can be learned for esports making the leap is in business. Silicon Valley has many examples of a business that is small but has a product built to grow fast and how they built out their infrastructure to handle that growth.
Are we currently seeing this explosive growth? Not quite. Sure we are seeing larger prize pools every year breaking records constantly. But this growth has been incremental, not exponential. Ask the creators of Instagram or Snapchat what true explosive growth is.
Where the problem lies is that these games are all separate entities. What I would love to see is the game makers and the tournament organizers and what ever other stake holders there are all get together periodically and share notes. They need work on on building the size of the pie together rather than competing for the biggest piece of the currently minuscule pie.
Is this about media coverage? I don’t think so. We’re in an era of shifting media where organized media doesn’t mean all that much anymore. It’s more about twitter retweets or facebook shares than a 30 second blurb on the CNN late night reel. Interest is infectious, assuming you can understand the infection. People that are not into a game have a hard time understanding the syntax and mechanics of the game itself, even those of us that love all sorts of games.
So will we ever really see esports hit it big? I hope so as I find them fascinating both in game and outside of the game. But will we? If we do, it will be a while.
