re:Think Games — May 5, 20 Esports Industry Observations
Yesterday, I put forward the contention that South Korea sparked the modern esports revolution.
South Korea’s late 90s early 2000s cultural phenomenon of small apartments, internet cafe’s and extremely fast internet turned Blizzards Starcraft Real-Time Strategy game into a national pastime. No one stayed home to play. They went out to internet cafes and LAN centers to play. And they played Constantly. The news at the time was around how some people even died playing — they sat there so long they fell over from hunger and dehydration. LAN (Local Area Network Centers) spread to the United States. It seemed every strip mall opened one. In the US, however, the cultural dynamics and need for parking made owning a LAN center a mediocre proposition.
I know. I looked into it heavily in 2005 when I started to work on my video game party concept GameTruck. Licensing complexities, hardware upgrades, and the strange culture of people who stayed up all night like zombies did not fit my sensibilities. While running Rainbow Studios I had become enamored with consoles. We had developed PC games for Microsoft, the most famous of which was Motorcross Madness. The deal with Microsoft made it hard for the game to make money. And, despite the large number of PC’s out there, the incredible variety of controllers, graphics, cards, CPU’s and configurations made the game shoot for the lowest common denominator that could support the business model.
When we shifted to consoles with ATV Offroad Fury, which was intended to be a launch title for Sony’s PlayStation 2 — the beauty of designing for a single hardware specification unlocked the potential of the team. Every single ounce of engineering, design, and art went into making that ONE platform look as good as possible. We shipped more game for effort in my opinion.
At this time I don’t want to overlook the impact shooters like counter strike. Some will argue that fighting games also preceded the wave of MOBA’s. Yes, you can make all of these arguments. The video game industry has always been a fluid one. However until the launch of StarCraft no other video game had watched a single tiny Asian country generate two-thirds of its global revenue. Something else was going on.
Playing Starcraft became part of the national vocabulary in South Korea. I remember interviewing Korean engineering students from the University of Michigan and Georgia Tech, asking them about the game and the cultural impact. Engineers are usually a dry lot to begin with (I have two engineering degrees so these are my people) but you could not believe how excited these kids got when I brought up the game. It was part of their identity. If you didn’t play, you were nearly an outcast. A lot of the team at Rainbow played Counter-Strike — but that game did not shift our culture.
A few years later, Blizzard would launch Warcraft 3 — and eventually World of Warcraft — blowing away any and all expectations for video game sales and remaking the world of massively multiplayer online role-playing games in the process. But South Korea kept going, focusing on ever increasingly complex battles set in a game system that supported teamwork.
From my perspective, several forces, or macro trends moved in unison during the early 2000s. First, the explosion of inexpensive video streaming made it easy for players to share their gameplay sessions. I saw it with YouTube and my own children. They watched more experienced players play the games they were into. They could learn faster by watching others play. I was shocked when I saw them watch nearly as much Minecraft as they played.
Two of the three legs were starting to come together. Team-based video games, a hungry audience, and a platform to share their passion. YouTube opened the doors for people to broadcast what they were into. They did not need to seek the approval of a gatekeeper at a network.
Below the awareness and approval of most adults, young people across the globe were connecting and sharing their interests in video games. When the video gaming platforms monetized their streams… they made playing games, not just winning, but playing, a lucrative profession.