Let's Talk About eSports Partnerships

With the eSport's world continue to grow around the world, so is the access to it throughout several generations. One of the main topics in the competitive playing field, are should pro-teams help sponsor and promote eSport genre games to the public. This would include both high school and college programs. One of the most recent news was that NFHS or the National Federation of State High School Association has partnered with PlayVS to form school level eSports programs.

The thinking behind this deal remains the following. If colleges around the world are offering education towards professional play, than shouldn't there be programs to help students become better prepared before college?

The recent deal with the NFHS and PlayVS includes that nearly 19,000 members in high school will actively become apart of several programs, classes, competitions, and other meetings to help round out players as they progress into their eSports field. The price to currently become a member is a fee of 16 dollars per month, and will also include the internet and infrastructure to learn on.

Currently the types of platforms that are being taught include multiplayer online battle arenas, fighting and sports. With the already increase in popularity, ESPN has already made several coverage of the current state of this partnership as it continues to grow.

Lets Talk About Shaming in the eSports World.

For as long as I have been playing video games, there has always been the constant debate on whether or not video games should be considered a sport on a professional level. The argument throughout the years have been constant, players want to be recognized by the mass media, that video games are not just another outlet for entertainment, but a very competitive and skill based format. The problem with this idea is that throughout the recent years there has been large amounts of criticism and backlash over the ideas that video games should be labeled as sports on the competitive level. 

One of the more recent news that brought in a lot of discussion was the debate, should certain games like League of Legends or CS:GO Global Offensive, be considered to be part in the 2014 Olympic Games or possibly any form of eSport coverage be a part of any Olympic Game. While this idea seemed progressive at the time, as the term sport can be broken down to many different types of activities, many different generations both young and old, had mixed feelings. These mixed feelings eventually led to harsh criticism that such eSports player were never "true" athletes and had no place in any Olympic Games. 

The discussion was only further increased when in 2016 a new petition was formed and created by several different eSports teams to be sent to the White House.The petition asked the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services to recognize competitors as athletes in order for them to be eligible for P-1 visas, allowing them to compete for money at major tournaments. The petition surpassed the 100,000 signature threshold in under one month, which allowed an official comment from the White House. With the petition in place, it is only a matter of time before we start to finally gauge if eSports will finally be considered a "sport" to the community or will it still remain in the grey area that it once was in the past. 

The Recent Craze With Battle Royal Games.

By now, many of you might have heard about the recent genre of battle royal game modes being released almost on a yearly basis, with arguably the most popular one, Fornite just being released later last year. For those who haven't heard much about Fornite, King of the Kill, and Playerunknown's Battlegrounds or short for PUBG, have dominated the gaming industry in terms of user amount, sales, and overall growth in the community. Each of these games hold the common interest of the battle royal genre, with each player being pitted against one another in a 100 man battle to be #1. The concept is quite simple, but each of these games have brought something different to the table, as each has taken ideas from other games and formulated concepts that differentiated itself from the others.


But lets take a step back on where these battle royal games even came form. The format is rather new, but the premise holds similar attributes to older games like the infamous DayZ survival game, and the slightly newer game H1Z1 in 2014. In 2014 H1Z1 has been credited has one of the first battle royal game modes under the name King of the Kill, with its inspiration coming from the movie, Battle Royal in 2000. While the game became very popular in the matter of a couple of weeks, the game soon fell flat as the leading developers made slow progression to the product of the game, and by 2016 the game saw non existent play.




It wasn't until 2017 did we see the true competition of the two titans we see today, PUBG and Fornite. Each of these two while sharing similar game play have greatly appealed to different audiences, with Fornite being a more kid friendly game with its cartoonist graphics and easier game play. PUBG on the other hand holds a more complicated game play with more detailed information including weapon statistics, armor, and more strategic game play. This in turn overall has greatly appealed to the "hardcore" gamer and other enthusiasts of the genre.





Overall the two have seen amazing success in just the short time of their conception, with both holding total revenue sales in the hundreds of millions and millions of active users.

Recent News: League of Legends

With the League of Legends season 8 finally making its way into its first half, we are already beginning to hear the most recent news related to the 2018 League of Legends Championship along with the Mid Season invitational coming up around May. 

This global event will be taken by storm as heavy hitting teams like Fnatic, ROX Tigers, SKT Telecom, Cloud9, etc are eager to get into the swing of things as the Mid Season invitational is coming up. Already Riot Games, the creator of LoL have openly released the bracket to the public as more teams are finishing up from their qualification.  The current countries that are competing include the following:

MATCH-UPS

NORTH AMERICA VS. EUROPE

HOSTED IN USA

CHINA VS. KOREA VS. LMS

HOSTED IN CHINA

BRAZIL VS. LATAM NORTH VS. LATAM SOUTH

HOSTED IN BRAZIL

OCEANIA VS. SOUTHEAST ASIA VS. JAPAN

HOSTED IN AUSTRALIA

VIETNAM VS. RUSSIA VS. TURKEY

HOSTED IN VIETNAM

These current hostings will begin this year from July 2nd to the 8th and will mark the 8th time League of Legends has hosted this type of event. With each year, new teams around the world are making their mark, with older teams including SKT Telecom and Cloud9 are struggling to compete with this uprising of newer teams like ROX Tigers and  Kingzone DragonX.

Lets's Talk About Why eSports Has Gone Viral.

           In the last decade, we have seen an enormous amount amount of growth in the gaming community in both the amount of participants and the popularity that is seen around the world. A large part of this is how easily accessible it is to view an eSport's game and how "viral" the videos can take off. Much like watching football or baseball on cable television, watching an eSport competition like League of Legends or Rocket League, is incredibly easy, free, and accessible.

           One of the most popular and widely used platforms to watch these games is through the streaming service of Twitch. Twitch, which is a website built and designed for streamers to upload and live stream their gaming content, is also an avenue for viewers to watch their favorite streamers and professional players. Twitch offers a wide variety of game play, and offers special offers and deals for their viewers to have. Unlike having cable television, Twitch is completely free and can be downloaded on any mobile device, computer, or tablet. What makes Twitch the ideal streaming platform, is that it allows a lot of these games to go instantly viral across the world. Since anyone can watch a live stream on Twitch, this gives the endless possibilities that anyone around the globe can view the games in real time.







         Twitch also supports its "viral" videos by sharing them and allowing the most popular videos to be up front on its main website for anyone to view. This gives plenty of opportunity to instantly tune in and watch without much difficulty. Overall websites like Twitch have only increased the ways we can watch eSport's events and have made them even more popular as Twitch continues to grow. This is one of the reasons why we see eSport's videos go viral, with millions of viewers watching them daily.

Lets Talk About Fitness

             If you were to ask me what makes eSports, a "sport", what do you think some of the underlining values that makes eSports, a sport in relation to physical sports like football, soccer, tennis etc..? Is it the teamwork that comes involved with many of the different games or even the mental capacity of understanding the strategy involved with playing against an opponent? While we never consider eSports to be in a category with physical fitness,  a vast majority of professional eSport players have a daily regiment of physical activity mixed in with their regular practice schedule. 

          Major professional eSports teams like Cloud9 or SKT Telecom hold their own athletic facilities and hire private trainers for their players. In the most recent years, teams have found that mixing physical fitness with  their daily playing has helped increase performance, energy levels, and overall health to the players. When considering that many of these professional gamer play anywhere from 12-16 hours a day, mixing in a different training regiment is often healthy. 

        What is interesting to hear is just how recent teams have included physical fitness into their training programs for their eSports players. In fact we do not see such a change in a players overall fitness until the mid 2000's, where eSports finally started to grow. 

Lets Talk About Community.

When we talk about the gaming community, what would be some of the first things, off the top of your head, that would best describe the community as a whole? Would it be the toxic environment that some communities hold, due to their younger audience members? Or would it be the rather dedicated, hardcore gamers, that play the game for its competitive reasons? In all honesty, there isn't an exactly right or wrong answer primarily because the gaming community as a whole is well diverse, and holds great potential.

One of the great things I find in any gaming community is that there is usually always a great following of people, who love a certain game, and can greatly become impacted by it. One of the first games in which I held great respect for is community, was the Pokémon games Ruby and Sapphire, off of the Nintendo Game Boy Advance. At the time I was 9, me, along with several friends, and people I didn't even know well at the time, had formed a strong bond and connection, simply by all having one thing in common, and that was playing Pokémon.




While many can argue that video games may not be the best platform to form connections and friendships, I find that it is a great avenue to become part of a larger support group and friend group who all have one thing in common, and that is playing games. Over the years, as the gaming community has grown and developed, so did the need to create sub groups for support groups, and other forums began to arise. In todays age, it is in fact extremely common to find support forums on certain games, and even advise on how to play the games, understand the community, and so forth. In fact games like Pokémon Go, the most recent Pokémon phenomenon, that occurred just shy of two years ago, had brought millions of people together all for the sake of catching Pokémon online. Such a thing had never truly occurred on such a scale.