Daily Observation: April 30 Esports is like Track and Field
Competitive video gaming has been around for a long time. When I first heard about “esports”, it was when news broke in 2016 that the Dota II world championships in Seattle had filled a stadium to watch teams compete for a share of an $11M prize pool. While the world of the media was obsessed with declaring video games an illness (The World Health Organization added Internet Gaming Disorder or IGD to their list of diseases) game publishers had quietly transformed video game competitions into something extraordinary. They had turned what seemed like an invisible, solitary activity, into a spectator event worthy of drawing a crowd on par with any major sporting event.
Say what!?
While parents, educators, administrators, and the media were busy reviling the ills of video games, players and publishers tuned out the rhetoric and quietly built a form of entertaining competition with an enormous following. Like all new trends, esports seemed to explode out of no where.
As the creator of GameTruck, and a parent myself, children’s mental health around video games has always been a top concern of mine. In fact, it still motivates me today. I believe the greatest risk to gamers is social isolation, but that’s a topic for another day. When I realized that children liked to watch other kids play video games, I knew there was a major shift underway.
For a long time, esports seemed to be largely a personal computer (PC) centric industry. Games like DOTA, League of Legends, and Counter Strike Go (CS Go) are all played on personal computers.
In case you didn’t know, the $140B video game industry is divided across three different hardware “platforms” — with each platform having it’s own variants. We have:
- Personal computers
- Consoles (Sony, Microsoft, & Nintendo)
- Mobile phones (iOs & Android)
Within each of these platforms is a constellation of games. There are so many variations and so many details it can be confusing to know where to begin. If you are looking for a way into the industry, or to understand it, chances are, like the parable of the blind men touching an elephant[1], you can grab one piece of it and think you have the whole picture only to be surprised by something completely different a little while later.
To make esports easier for people to understand, I often refer to it as “track and field” type of competition. There is not one game but a whole host of games… just like a track and field event. Some forms of competition are more popular than others, but the reality is there are many events that players can compete in, and some competitors are talented enough to compete in multiple events (games).
As you take a look at esports, the number one takeaway from todays observation is this: esports is not one game. It is like track and field. It is a collection of competitions played in a variety of ways — some PC, some console, and only just recently, some mobile.