It Isn’t Just Stigma; “Esports” Faces Unique Challenges
Pictured: Crowd at ESL Birmingham, Credit: ESL
Screaming announcers, cheering crowds, and moments that viewers will never forget are all reasons we love and watch sports. These are also all reasons that fans watch Esports. Just as a soccer fan never forgets Germany’s 7–1 defeat over Brazil, a football fan New England’s 28–3 comeback, or basketball fan the unstoppable Chicago Bulls at their peak, Dota fans will never forget OG’s back to back The International wins.
When Esports first came into the mainstream with games like League of Legends, DotA 2, Super Smash Brothers Melee, and more acclaimed titles, there were a succession of tournaments with large prize pools and growing crowds. DotA 2’s The International breaks prize pools year after year with a $34 million dollar prize pool in 2019 and League of Legends smashed records with LCS with 44 million concurrent viewers in the same year.
The commercial success of Esports is irrefutable, but games like soccer, football and basketball have a certain je ne sais quoi that just feels different. In order to understand why, we need to identify the core elements of traditional sports that are difficult — and perhaps impossible — to capture in Esports. Among the most important of these are:
- The lack of “anchoring” in Esports to create lifelong fans spanning generations,
- The issue of games having much shorter lifespans,
- The inaccessible differences in understanding the rules and mechanics
- A lack of professionalism and “institutionalization” that has taken place among mainstream sports.
First, the vast majority of Americans support a team because they love to rep their hometown. Even though they are not setting the league on fire, I am a Hawks fan because I’m from Atlanta. For members of the local counter-cultural movement, Hamburg, Germany’s FC St Pauli has long been a home for people of all races, creeds, sexual orientations, and a few anarchists. Most teams that make it big in sports do so through a storied history through the years, good or bad. Esports is completely different.
Pictured: Fans of FC St. Pauli, Credit: Yahoo Sports
Esports teams tend to start in three ways. The first is for a sporting giant, such as Galatasary or PSG to sign a team of professional players in the game. The second is for Esports organizations to decide to enter a game by signing a team/group of players. The third is that a group of players who are already known on the scene will get together to start their own team from scratch. An Esports org is rarely involved in only one game, and orgs drop or add games on a whim all the time. It is not an uncommon occurrence for an org to enter a game, leave it (with nearly a completely different squad), re-enter it, and leave it again all within 2–4 years, as Mousesports did with Dota. The Hawks have only ever played basketball and will likely do so in perpetuity. There are very few ways to burn cash and disgruntle fans as quickly as if a college were to start, end, start, and end their college football program in as short a window.
Besides this, what connection would I possibly have with an Esports team that started in 2014, between players that may have never even met each other in real life? I may love soccer and I may love Dota, but I would never in a million years buy a LGD jersey because the history, identity, and symbolism are simply not at the same level as if I were to purchase an Atlanta United jersey. This isn’t to imply that these connections are impossible to form with Esports, but, rather, that they are much harder and much less mature in doing so at this time of publication. If Tottenham Hotspur were to up and start a CS:GO team, it is entirely possible that kids in the suburbs of London would feel more connected to the Tottenham CS:GO team than any other, except for one key issue.
Let’s imagine that Tottenham Hotspur, The New England Patriots, or whoever else you could imagine all sign teams to play in next year’s The International. This is great, we can begin to form rivalries, drama, and gripping entertainment for years to come, right? Well, perhaps not.
The years — sometimes decades — it takes to form these traditions, identities, and histories rely on the game being around and consistently popular. Games are much more subject to being “the flavor of the month” than sports, and games are dependent on the support of their developers to keep existing. If FIFA goes away, people will still be able to play soccer. If Riot Games goes away, no one will be able to play League of Legends for quite some time and never on the same scale as it is played today. At any moment, a developer can decide hosting the game on their servers, maintaining them to keep the “patches from getting stale”, and generally promoting the game to new players to keep the rosters fresh with exciting talent is not worth it. The Heroes of the Storm Esports scene was effectively killed on the whim of their developer, Blizzard, as they downsized the game.
Even if enough players love the game, Heroes of The Storm, it is not as though they can start up a “Heroes of the Storm Federation” because the IP for the game is owned by Blizzard. This means that Blizzard maintains some control of the representation of their property in streams. ESPN has to be careful in which tournaments of Dota they stream, because Valve owns the IP for Dota. The NFL may be very powerful in football, but no one is stopping Vince McMahon from starting his own league and licensing the games to ESPN because the NFL does not have copyright claim over football. Lawfirm DLA Piper explains the copyright issue in excellent detail in a blog post in 2018, stating “Creators can limit how a video game is exploited in online video, streaming gameplay, at in-person tournaments and otherwise.”
Players and fans can simply churn out of the games for one reason or another (i.e. patches going stale) and leave the game, slowly but surely. For another case study, the annual IEM Katowice tournament for Starcraft II went from 212 thousand concurrent viewers in 2017 to just 80 thousand in 2019.
Dota, despite its slowly declining player numbers, shows an amount of promise in that players have been playing it in some capacity since 2003. After 17 years, the game still attracts millions of people to play and watch the game, even if it is not at the peak it was at in the mid 2010’s. The Super Smash Bros franchise has shown resilience as well. What both these games have in common is that they were supported by the community of players for some period of time between their start and their current state. If a game is solid enough on its own merits, fans will modify the game, host their own servers, and take on other tasks that the developer may have abandoned. Nonetheless, Super Smash Bros, one of the only current grassroots supported Esports, still has the fraction of the competitive activity, viewers, and recognition that games propped up by their developers have. Even if Esports figures out how to build a long term culture and set of traditions, developers need to get behind supporting the games, even if they hit a rough patch in popularity, and a total rework of intellectual property with regard to Esports is required for the same level of innovation to take place among organizers of tournaments and competitive scenes.
Another problem that Esports has is that the rules of sports are easier to understand to non-players than they are with Esports. With sports like soccer, basketball, and football, there is a defined goal that a casual watcher can generally understand, even if there are some added rules that may take a few games to get. With most Esports, this is much more pronounced. Dota 2 has over 110 playable heroes. There is not a ghost of a chance that someone tuning in to watch it by luck will understand anything that is going on and the same follows true for many Esports. There are cooldowns, damage amounts, mana costs, attack speeds, and attack priorities that players will have memorized through thousands of hours of play at the pro level. These tiny mechanical factoids that stack together make Esports much less accessible than Sports, where anyone can appreciate a simple show of athleticism, not as many people will understand the significance of the perfect flashbang or smoke gank. Unless you play the games I am referring to, you have no idea what I just said-and that is exactly the problem.
The last thing has to do with the maturity of the scene. Organizations frequently take advantage of even some of the top players. Tournament organizers, particularly in regions with unstable currencies, often are not able to pay prizes. Match fixing is common and one case was egregious enough it spawned a meme across multiple games. Whenever a team or a player is winning a game and makes an uncharacteristically bad play, fans may spam twitch chat with “322”. This is a result of when Alexei “Solo” Berezin intentionally lost a game just to win $322 dollars through a betting site. For this, he was banned from future Valve organized tournaments.
Match fixing, financial difficulties, exploitative organizations, and sexism are rife in Esports. There are no significant biological differences that would make men higher performers in Esports compared to women, yet very few women ever make it to the top levels, often because they are pushed out by the overwhelming sexism on the scene. Private companies will only go so far to guarantee a place for women in their games, which is why non-profit motivated governing bodies may be needed in years to come. There is a severe lack of structured auditing of tournament organizers, Esports orgs, sponsors, and general HR incidents in the Esports world.
As an example of the benefit of these institutions, in China, the biggest Dota teams are members of the CDA, or Chinese Dota 2 Association. The association was mutually established by the giants of Chinese Dota and has an inherently different motive from a Tournament Organizer (such as ESL) or a Developer. When Newbee, which is (was) a massively respected The International champion, was caught match fixing, the organization and all of their players were given lifetime bans by the CDA. Fans of soccer, football, basketball, or any other “major” sport may be frustrated at the associations’ actions in governing the games, particularly FIFA, but they do not know how good they have it, as institutions that are as organized as the CDA are rare in Esports.
Esports’ biggest challenge was never the stigma of “nerds playing games” or no-lifers. Rather, it is all the little things that we tend to forget that make sports the phenomenon we love. Esports needs to find ways to promote cultural traditions among its teams and players, fix the IP issue for broadcasting and tournament organizing, figure out ways to explain the games to newcomers such as “newbie streams”, and develop professional associations that can step in without profits at the front of their mind, but rather the integrity of their scenes. Until these issues are resolved, Esports may remain confined to the devoted forums of their fans, never to see the kind of mainstream success that its supporters believe it can have.
If you enjoyed reading this piece, please consider subscribing to our Substack newsletter. You’ll get to read our stuff, hot off the presses, each time we publish.
