eSports in 360°
Cybersport Leagues and Their Significance
Over the past decade, the culture of eSports has undergone significant changes. It went from small computer clubs with square screens to Olympic stadiums and specialized cybersport arenas.
Modern championships in computer games are comparable with football tournaments in scores and ratings and the game arenas that appear in all major cities of the world — within the stadiums.
Currently, there are several professional leagues in the eSports industry with teams and players competing in certain disciplines, such as League of Legends, PUBG, CS: GO, Dota 2 and others. Each of which every day is leading, butsags in the ratings on downloading. As you can see from the graphs, to date, the most downloaded games, and therefore the best-selling — these are eSports products. A clear representative of free-to-play is Dota 2.
TOP BY PLAYTIME
STEAM STATS
Major event agencies make matches more interesting and “tasty” by adding within the broadcast of tournaments a video about the relationship between teams throughout the season, their ways to finals, etc.
Surprisingly, the tournaments of some games have their own unique ecosystems. For example, the new points system in Dota 2 divided championships into two classes — Major and Minor tournaments, the first of which brings winners five times more points than the second. In this case, regardless of the category of the tournament, the distribution of points is the same — the winner receives half and another 30% goes to the finalist. The third and fourth places get 10% (or 15 and 5, if there is a match for third place). To this day, industry experts and “sofa analysts” argue in the forums the pros and cons of this set-up, however, all agree in one thing — that the new system will be more demanding for Tier-2 teams, which now must more carefully prepare for each tournament, in order to get into the Top Four. The treasured invited for the most important event of the year are distributed according to the results of the tournaments at the end of the season. The International 2018, where the prize fund of the last major event exceeded $24 million.
The number of people who watch live-broadcasts is impressive! According to a recent study of SuperData, 665 million people watch online broadcasts of games. And this is without taking into account the Chinese market, which significantly exceeds in the quantitative indicators the rest of the regions! For comparison: the number of active users of the streaming platform Twitch is 100 million.
eSports is one of the most dynamically developing segments, in terms of growth dynamics, it is second only to the VR market. Market leaders certainly are games for mobile platforms, but eSports and VR markets showed the largest growth in 2017.
An important role in the structure of market growth is played by the fact that active viewers of cyber-prone events and users of game streaming platforms are. This is a solvent audience, which independently makes decisions about purchases and is ready to spend money.
The eSports match is first and foremost an amazing show. It is organized accordingly and requires a high degree of professionalism from everyone who has anything to do with it. Considering the million-level rates and profits, the activity of production is to be high from developers of games. Around the competitions themselves, a whole industry has been deployed to support the fan zone. The pleasure of the game is to get everything.
Cybersport should be considered a full-fledged sport, according to Tony Estanget, a member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), so that the Olympic Games remain relevant for new generations. “We can not say no at once. Young people are interested in eSports and similar things,” he adds. In the summer of 2024, the Olympic Games will be held in France, their program will begin to be formed in 2019.
Cybersport Production and Their Role in the Industry
Locations of cybersport production are scattered all over the world. Over the past year, ESL (Turtle-entertainment) held events in stadiums on five continents. This is North and South America, Europe, Asia and Australia. Let’s not forget that the interaction of players and fans occurs in an interactive environment.
DreamHack (MTG group) in 2011 conducted 11 events in six countries, including: Canada, France, Germany, Sweden, Spain and the United States. The current list of tournaments and schemes for esports: DreamHack Open (CS: GO), DreamHack Masters (CS: GO), DreamLeague (DOTA 2), DreamHack Hearthstone Grand Prix, Starcraft 2 World Championship Series and DreamHack Smash Championship.
This year, the EPICENTER (Epic Esports Events) tournament took place in St. Petersburg, which became one of the most important events of the year for the Russian cyber community. However, there were scandals. North and FaZe Clan, who took third place in the groups following the results of the matches, broke off the autograph session. The guys did not consider that communication with fans was an important part of the event. Having acted in this way, the team showed disrespect to the organizers of the tournament and to their fans. Absolutely not characteristic behavior for the Scandinavian teams.
All this time, players won attention only with their mouse and keyboard, but this year began a new era in the development of eSports. The era of the technological revolution.
Rotate 360 °
In June 2017, Intel announced a partnership with ESL and Oculus to launch the eSports league dedicated to VR games. This happened at the largest international exhibition of the gaming industry E3. The official page states that the ESL VR Challenger league, represented by Oculus and Intel, is the next step in the evolution of VR esports.
This takes on the organization of online tournaments and high-energy offline events. Players and teams in North America and Europe will compete for a total prize pool of more than $200,000 and get a chance to become crowned champions in the grand finals of 2018, which will be held in Katowice, Poland. The first games that hit the roster of VR Challenger League were “The Unspoken” from Insomniac and “Echo Area” from Read At Dawn.
VR Challenger League will be held within the framework of Oculus Connect, ESL One Hamburg, IEM Oakland and Dreamhack Winter. Some believe that it is not the time for VR in eSports and many large eSports like ELEAGUE are not in a hurry to add the VR discipline by looking at the views and ratings on Twitch.tv. However, it is worth noting that virtual reality adds physical activity to eSports games, which makes them closer to real sports, thus promoting the popularity of eSports throughout the world.
VR Discipline and eSports Product
Let’s return to the official disciplines of the ESL VR Challenger League, to talk about them in more detail.
“The Unspoken” is a one-on-one mage duel where the player himself activates spells by throwing fireballs at the rival, summoning pets, constantly scattering trucks and other objects on the map, and teleporting from one checkpoint to another. Very cool action!
In “Echo Arena”, teams consisting of three players each try to hit the opponent’s cube with a flying disc, moving with futuristic collisions in zero gravity, exchanging punches with each other and trying to block the opposite teams.
“We do not look at previous VR products to inspire, we actually just pull things out of our heads and ask, ‘Will this work? Let’s try it,’ says Ted Price, CEO of Insomniac Games. “This is a completely new frontier for all.” To be clearer, he gives an example. In VR space, the player’s head is actually a camera that sees the game, which is not always convenient. Sometimes, for a deeper immersion of the player in a virtual environment, tricks are used to move the camera. To find a solution, you have to constantly manipulate the characters and methods of their management.
Another problem is how to optimize the space in the VR — how to make players free to unfold, if they move back or to the side. And if the game is from a third party, then these problems are exacerbated, since it is necessary to control the control of the character that works on the screen. Developers are constantly forced to look for a balance between controls that give a lot of options for the player and aren’t too complicated. All efforts to optimize the game should turn it into a real eSports product, which means:
1. A random move should not determine the final outcome of a duel; everything must be solved solely by personal and team skills.
2. In-game balance
3. Same conditions for both parties
Particular attention should be paid, of course, to the balance sheet.
A huge number of successful titles have been buried by overspending.
