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I am a professional athlete. I get paid to play the game I love. I have traveled around the world participating in tournaments – Turkey, Spain, Brazil, Sweden, England, Singapore, Italy, Chile, and many more. However, the game I play is not football, basketball, baseball, or soccer; I play a video game called Counter-Strike, a team based first person shooter. Instead of putting on pads or helmets or gloves and playing in front of thousands of fans in a stadium, I plug in my keyboard and mouse and put on my headphones and microphone. Our fans logon to the internet to watch streaming video while listening to the shoutcasters broadcasting the match.
eSports has grown immensely in the past few years. What started as a few gamers playing with their friends is now a multi-billion dollar industry with year long international tournaments worth $1,000,000. Teams are now sponsored by companies such as Subway, Kappa, and Tylenol. Mainstream news coverage has increased dramatically, with this year’s World Tour being aired on MTV, multiple articles in newspapers around the country, and CBS’s 60 Minutes airing a segment on the Cyberathlete Professional League (CPL) and World Tour champion Johnathan "Fatal1ty" Wendel. Fatal1ty was also listed as second in Fox Sports’ "Ten most feared people in sports" list.
Even with all the recent exposure, eSports is not quite what anyone would consider a mainstream sport here in America. In Korea, however, it definitely is. Starcraft, a real time strategy game, is played by millions of people everyday. There are 2 national TV stations dedicated to Starcraft, and major tournament finals have had as many as 8,000 live spectators. The top players earn over two hundred thousand dollars a year. SlayerS_’BoxeR’, arguably the best and most known Starcraft player, has a fan club with over one hundred thousand members, has written books, and earns several times the national average wage in South Korea.
I don’t think eSports in North America will ever get to be as large as Korea, but I would like to see more coverage, especially on TV. The average gamer is in the mid-teens to early-twenties, a market that executives are always trying to capture. For the CPL Summer 2004 Championships, a single match had over 34,000 unique connections to HLTV, which is used to view the matches live. While this may seem like a small number compared to other televised sporting events, there is another factor. All 34,000 of those spectators needed to own the game, find out the IP of the server the match was being played on, and connect to the server. There are also gamers that watch on streaming video over the internet, live at the event, and on IRC scorebots, which are like a box score for the match that is updated live. If the finals were on a TV channel, you would get all of those spectators and more that were unable to watch for other reasons. In addition to the live spectators, recorded broadcasts of the matches are downloaded from eSports websites all around the world. On just one site, GotFrag.com, there were 36,783 downloads of one match alone, and over 25 other matches had been downloaded more than 10,000 times.
This week, from Wednesday the 14th to Saturday the 18th, is the CPL Winter 2005 Championships, held at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in downtown Dallas, Texas. Over 600 gamers will attend to compete for a total of $100,000 in prizes in three different games. In addition to the tournaments there will also be a BYOC, or a Bring Your Own Computer area, where gamers connect to a LAN network and play their game of choice with hundreds of others. There are also exhibition booths to show off the latest products from sponsors and other companies in the gaming industry as well as workshops and raffles. Some of the workshops show you how to get the most out of your gaming equipment; others are aimed at educating parents and non-gamers about competitive gaming. If this were not finals week for me, I would definitely be in Dallas at the CPL.
However, this will be the last event at the Hyatt Regency which has been the venue for CPL Winter events the last several years. The reason for this is there is not enough room available due to the growth of eSports. The CPL Summer 2006 Championships will feature almost 2,000 gamers in the official tournaments as well as a 2,000 seat BYOC area. The CPL has also been receiving tons of requests from the media to cover the CPL World Tour 2006. But even though eSports is growing in numbers and recognition, there is still a long way to go before it is truly a mainstream sport. Most professional sports have been playing the same basic game since it was invented, with only minor changes in gameplay and rules. In eSports however, there are new games that come out every few years with improved graphics, more life-like physics, and updated gameplay. There are also several different types of games played; the three biggest being real time strategy, team based first person shooter, and deathmatch, which is a one versus one first person shooter. The Counter-Strike community has been split within the last year however, with a new version called Counter-Strike: Source released. The basic gameplay is the same, you can easily recognize it as CS, but there were many changes made including new graphics, physics, and gameplay. Many players felt it was too different from the old version, 1.6, and decided to not switch to Source. However, there are other players that have never even played Source yet say the game is bad. This leads to another reason why eSports has a long way to go – the maturity of the gamers.
The majority of gamers are in their mid-teens to early twenties. Most are mature, but every so often you will play against a team that is immature. While playing they will harass you for anything you do. It is not uncommon to see insults, profanity, racial slurs while in game or on forums at gaming sites. It doesn’t seem to matter whether you are winning or losing the match, some players feel the need to insult others. The only bright spot in this is that most of these incidents are online rather than on LAN. At a LAN everyone is together playing in person on a truly equal playing field. Online there are many factors which can give a team or players an advantage over their opponents. Most of the mature, professional gamers that I have played against have all been to LAN’s. They are the players that will always say "gg", or good game, even if it was a blowout or tell you "nice shot". Even on forums they come off as more professional. This is not the case with every team or player, but from what I seen eSports could use more professionalism.
I will never be one of the world’s best players. I will not be playing when and if eSports becomes a mainstream sport. But I still play the game because I have fun. Growing up I played baseball, basketball, football, and hockey. I focused on baseball and went from little league to high school, but playing Counter-Strike is more fun and more rewarding to me. Even if eSports never takes off, I will still play. Attending a LAN tournament and meeting the teams and players you have played against online is always a good time. Some teams have players that have never met before, and a LAN tournament is the first time for the team to actually get together in person. Some of my best friends I first got to know through playing video games with them. Others I have introduced to competitive gaming and they have loved it as much as I have. I don’t expect everyone that I tell about eSports to immediately start playing and understand, but even if one person decides to learn a little more about eSports, that is just another step in the right direction.