Esports is dying but...
Seems like Esports is dying because they can't find a sustainable business model. Although I have one for them, players should compete as we compete in poker, which sounds sustainable.
Thoughts?
4 Replies
Great thread. I always think of the mess that the professional Call of Duty (CoD) league is in when seeing how e-sports will probably keep going downhill. There used to be the CWL (Call of Duty World League) which seemed to really help improve and grow the scene and seemed to have figured out what similar game leagues couldn't (ie. Counterstrike and Quake).
Then of course they sold it to Activision who then turned it into the CDL (Call of Duty League) and then decided to rebuild set teams based in certain cities and then charged the teams millions to be in the league...promising to help grow and really promote the league. Teams in turn, then signed players and took cuts of their content (like streaming and youtube) and merch revenues as well to recoup money. The only positive of the change to the CDL was teams had to pay players a base salary; before that it was "here's a t shirt and maybe a practice office, gl!"
Of course it's Activision, they basically took the money, let some teams flounder, never brought back as many in person events as pre-covid ("to save money"), then laid off like 95% of the staff that ran the league. So you have pro players in their bedroom or home office playing 4v4 championships from 4 different parts of the country lol. At the same time they really crippled the, then, growing opportunities for anyone anywhere to grind in game Ranked mode and ladder up and maybe get picked up by a team; by letting Ranked mode flounder. I imagine many aspiring pros simply shifted to being content creators on their own rather than try to grind for limited slots that the same handful of players seem to rotate in and out of. They did create Challengers, which lets pros who were dropped from rosters a chance to grind, what's akin to the WSOP circuit, for some wins and showcase themselves to try to get signed somewhere again.
And if you think that league is bad, just read up on the Overwatch League (Activision also bought then when they bought Blizzard). Blizzard got potential team owners/interests to bid on having a team then having to pay to rent/lease or build an Overwatch arena (like an actual physical arena) in their city. The idea was, like pro sports, teams would travel around the league arenas to complete. Yeah that didn't work out to great. Most teams are gone, arenas are empty or were re-purposed or sold, and now there's a few "major" series every so often.
It's a mess.
Decades ago pro gamers shifted to poker because they could make much more, then you saw more kids going towards pro gaming and not poker because you could make more in gaming with less risk, now I think it's shifting back to gamers going to poker again.
Esports suck so maybe that's the problem
In that sense, esports will never die.
They'll just go back to community-run leagues with token payouts. You can find Starcraft tournaments with $100 first place prizes on any given week.
OP is indeed delusional if he thinks it can move to a player-funded model like poker tournaments, and Vanhaomena already explained why. The skill gap between the top players and the good-but-not-great players is more like a continent-sized chasm and there's no pre-determined deck of cards to save them. You jus
It really sucks that everything is an esport. Starcraft invented esports because it was hard. it was hard core to even play multiplayer sc at a good level. now every game, including things like brawl stars, hearthstone, and tiddly winks is an esport- not good.
Needs reality TV or gameshow.
