The Race to Become the Next Big eSport

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While Ono tries to make Street Fighter less intimidating and thus for more accessible for potential viewers, Capcom is quietly building up their own eSports infrastructure with the Capcom Cup - a tournament founded in 2013. By turning existing tournaments like EVO into qualifiying events for the Capcom Cup Pro Tour, they've managed to integrate it relatively smoothly into the existing fighting game ecosystem. Electronic Arts is trying something similar with the Madden Bowl - taking an existing event and repurposing it for eSports - but its current status as a glorified Super Bowl party makes it an odd fit. When I attended last week's Madden Bowl, it felt like I was one of the only gamers there.

The scramble to adapt continues apace with other games. EA Canada rebuilt their EA Sports Hockey League mode with eSports in mind. Ubisoft has built Rainbow Six Siege from the ground-up to be an eSport - a new global competition set to debut at Intel Extreme Masters in March - but it has yet to catch fire in competitive circles.

The most successful of the old-guard competitive games is Counter-Strike - arguably one of the "Core Four" eSports alongside League of Legends, DotA 2, and Hearthstone. Etienne counts himself as one of its biggest fans, "I sat down and within five minutes I understood [Counter-Strike Global Offensive]. It's core stuff: Big guns stronger than little guns. Terrorists versus counter-terrorists. Very simple, black and white. There's no healing, there's no tanking, and it's five-on-five. I think this allows people who don't know anything about eSports to understand and get excited about the game immediately, and by the end of my first game, I'm like, 'I am getting a team in this sport.'"

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has been available since 2012, but it's only within the past couple years that it's become a major eSport - a product, perhaps, of the space's rapid growth. It has benefited from its excellent name recognition as well as the stewardship of Valve, which has also shepherded DotA 2 to prominence. Developers will be hard-pressed to copy CS: GO's success, though. Valve's keen instincts, knack for putting on major events, and near monopoly on PC digital distribution via Steam is tough to replicate.

The shooter that probably has the best chance to match CS: GO's success is another member of the old-guard: Call of Duty. There's been quite a bit of talk about making CoD into an eSport, but the game's competitive infrastructure has existed longer than most people realize. In particular, Etienne praises the franchise's massive Twitter following, which he views as a huge asset because ad agencies can immediately grasp its reach. Nevertheless, it has a comparatively weak streaming presence, which will have to rectified.

The reality is that even established players will have to make a large investment in both infrastructure and game development if they want to have a chance to compete at the highest levels in eSports; and as time passes, the competition is going to get more fierce. It's worth the money, though. The reward for success is a chance to potentially help define the future of gaming.

What it all means

As time passes and the eSports space continues to grow, the stakes are only going to get higher.

Advertisers are only now beginning to understand what eSports can offer them. Sports command massive television contracts because they are one of the only remaining examples of appointment television - that is, people won't record an event to water later or wait for a streaming service. eSports offer similar benefits, and the impact of cord-cutting on them is negligible.

Etienne remembers trying to convince sponsors that eSports would soon be filling stadiums. Now the most popular games are attracting millions of concurrent viewers. More than that, there's an almost inexhaustible supply for the demand. If you head to Twitch, you are pretty much guaranteed to find a pro player streaming their games. Cloud9 alone puts out a staggering 10 million viewable hours per month.

Etienne laments that sponsors haven't quite kept up with the current growth, "My sponsor that was with me when I had two million view hours every month did not increase their spending with me five times even though they've grown. They've just kind of benefited from this massive growth in working with me. So there's still a lot of catching up to do as far as the amount of reach you get when you sign up with an eSports team. That is so much greater than - as far as value - what you would get from other media sources. We have massive reach, but it's just hard for them to grasp."

It won't be long before they do, though.

Naturally, things aren't perfect. Teams will suddenly disband, leading to a sense of instability. When the Chinese Team DK disbanded in November 2015, CEO Teng "Andy" Zhao lamented in a statement, "The gross overinflation of prices has made this industry more and more exaggerated. It really makes us sad. With the creation of all these streaming platforms, the value ascribed to the players exploded, to an unbelievable point."

There have also been match-fixing allegations across multiple games - the sort of scandals that can badly harm a sport's legitimacy.

Still, the race is on. In an email, Blizzard senior manager of eSports Kim Phan wrote, "We imagine that in the next ten years, there will be more competition across the industry. Not just among players and teams, but among developers, video streaming platforms, sponsors, event services, broadcasting talent, and more. More and more young adults will graduate from college and pursue a career in esports, whether as competitors or in the surrounding ecosystem. Ultimately, as esports grows and becomes more widely viewed, we can see a point where the most prolific and successful players will become global icons. Millions of viewers will regularly come together to watch individual esports competitions online, and it will be a common occurrence for thousands to gather in person at regularly scheduled events in their cities to watch the best players in the world compete."

As Phan points out, even Blizzard itself is becoming rather crowded with eSports, with Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm, StarCraft, and soon, Overwatch, all jostling for position.

Ultimately, a lot can happen in the next few years. Activision Blizzard's MLG investment might pan out. Street Fighter might explode back into the public consciousness. It's hard to say what the future might hold. But with so much money at stake, the competition is only going to get more intense. The battle to legitimize eSports is over; now comes the battle to dominate them.