Whether you played Nintendogs on your Nintendo DS back in primary school or if you came home from school and jumped on your Xbox 360 to play some Call of Duty with your mates, gaming has become an increasingly popular hobby and past time for people around the world. With an estimated player count of 2.5 billion people, the gaming industry is set to reach over US $90 billion by 2020.
To put into perspective at how successful the gaming industry is, Marvel and Disney’s Avengers: Endgame took just 5 days to make over $1 Billion worldwide. Whereas Rockstar’s GTA 5 back in 2013 only needed 3 days to reach the same number.
With the increasing popularity of the gaming industry, it was only a matter of time until competitive play was created. Esports is the term used to describe the world of competitive, organised video gaming.
From console, to PC and even mobile, competitors from different leagues or teams face off in the same games that are popular amongst casual, at-home gamers. Games include the recent hit Fortnite, League of Legends, Counter-Strike, Overwatch and Call of Duty. However, with the rise of the Esports scene particularly in Fortnite, it has ultimately impacted on the casual play for non-Esport gamers. This is due to professional gamers using their large followings on Twitch, YouTube and social media, to directly voice their problems about certain game mechanics with game developers either via social media, or through Twitch and YouTube’s affordances. After receiving thousands of complaints from disgruntled fans, the game developers are then forced to make changes to suit the Esport agenda, ultimately taking the fun out of the game and ruining the casual vibe videogames are notorious for.
If we take it back to July of 2017, Epic Games released the now widely acclaimed Fortnite. Being a free-to-play game on all platforms, Fortnite made an estimated $2.4 Billion in 2018 and is set to reach over 250 million players worldwide this year.
Its success can be largely due to the explosion of Twitch which was bought back in 2014 by Amazon. For those unaware, Twitch is a live-streaming service where players transmit their games live to viewers around the world. In March of 2018 when Fortnite was at its peak, Tyler ‘Ninja’ Blevins played alongside famous rappers Drake and Travis Scott in a game of Fortnite, which was live-streamed on Twitch at the time.
This stream not only reached over 600,000 concurrent viewers, but it was Ninja’s break out moment that skyrocketed him into stardom. Gaining over 14 million followers on his Twitch channel (which he no longer uses), he became and is still regarded as the voice of the Esports community in Fortnite.
By being such a prominent figure within the gaming community, you could say that Ninja is a cultural intermediary, which is a term used for influencers among a community which are able to facilitate change in an industry due to their status or power. It was with Twitch’s affordances that enabled Ninja to use his celebrity status to change the way Fortnite was played to suit his Esports endeavours and consequently take the fun out of Fortnite.
One such affordance Ninja used on his now inactive Twitch channel was clipping. Clipping allows Twitch viewers to highlight and share iconic moments from any given stream. It allows broadcasters to grow their channels through social sharing of these clips, which was evident with the rise of ‘Highlight Video Channels’ on YouTube. This specific genre of videos consisted of mash-up’s of popular clips from Twitch, all collated into a 10 minute video.
Ninja used clipping to share his thoughts about certain game mechanics directly from his stream onto his YouTube channel and social media accounts.
Now it is important to realise that professional gamers like Ninja have a very specific fan base. They are typically very young, impressionable and extremely gullible children. These young gamers idolise Ninja and only make up a small part of the gaming community. We can categorise these gamers as ‘tryhards’ or ‘sweats,’ which are terms used to describe how these people play Fortnite. They all want to be the next Ninja and get paid to play, and this is one problem that I have with Esports. It sets unrealistic goals that not everyone can achieve. Seeing Ninja and other e-celebrities living expensive lifestyles attracts young people and it hooks them. Esport fans actually make up less than 5% of a games community, but are the players who are the most involved in the game. This means that when cultural intermediaries in Fortnite share their thoughts on why certain things should be removed or changed, these young gamers agree with them and take to social media to facilitate change. Unknowingly, these youngsters are destroying a great game to benefit Esports competitors gaming experience. I think people have forgotten what gaming is at its core, its supposed to be fun and relaxing, not a life or death experience.
What is also interesting is that after the introduction of the competitive scene in Fortnite, global searches of the Fortnite dropped and has continued to drop over the past year. Now this may be an indication of the game getting old, but I think there is more to it than that. With all of these high profile players constantly complaining and making the game developers change the game, it has taken the fun out of gaming and turned it into a ‘sweat-fest.’
Over on social media, this is where we truly see how the Esports community and its followers are able to make changes to Fortnite. Another cultural intermediary in the Fortnite community, Faze Sway, took to Twitter after a game mechanic was changed.
This hashtag actually became trending worldwide and surprise surprise, the game mechanic was released back into the game 2 weeks later.
It is rather disappointing to think that game developers are listening to these high profile players and their fans when they are actually the minority of their respective games. This lack of understanding game developers have for their community just goes to show how powerful cultural intermediaries can be in many communities. They are able to use their mass followings to facilitate change within their given industry. This symbolises how powerful a group of like-minded people can be and the impact they can have in this digital age. Esports is unknowingly creating a divide between casual and competitive gamers as it encourages exclusivity and negativity rather than fostering creativity and, ultimately, fun. And if game developers continue to listen to cultural intermediaries, then sadly, gaming will never be fun again.
