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.

eSports: Quick View of Overwatch

One of the exciting new formats to hit the stage of eSports is none other than the infamous Overwatch, created by Blizzard. Overwatch which is predominately a newer game created in May of 2016 has finally hit the stage for its new competitive format. Just this January, Overwatch had launched its new Overwatch League Season 1 system for competitive and companies around the world have taken advantage of this.

A majority of these companies including the Miami Heat, Texas Rangers, Golden State Warriors, and Cloud9, have already funded and sponsor multiple teams for the new league. In fact 12 teams have already been formed and are currently competing that started January 10, until July. What is also interesting is the current prize pool is an astounding 3.5 million dollars, with first place winning a million dollars.

What many people do not realize about the culture of eSports is the player base itself. A majority of the professionals who play the game average an age of 20 years old, with players who are 18 being some of the younger players. There have even been cases where players as young as 16 have been signed for contract to play the format with a starting contract of 50,000 per season.

Lets Talk About The Media

Over the years I have found that media in particular, social media, plays a huge part in how we identify and judge  certain aspects of life. This could be sports, TV shows, or even our friends, and largely what we find on these websites such as Facebook or Twitter, generally leaves us with a positive or negative impression. Of the many news that dominates the news world, eSports is one, that hardly receives any recognition or notice when considering the large scale events that occur for certain games, like League of Legends, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, or even newer games like Rocket League.

Many of these competitions that occur on a yearly basis are massively wide scale, with some championship matches holding a stadium of 30,000+ fans and millions of dollars as prize pools. For instance the LoL 2016 Championship held a total viewer count of 43 million people. However the issue with such an event was hardly publicized towards any major news platform, and news channels such like Sports Center had only made a brief comment on the standings.






This brings up the question as to why popular gaming events receive such a small amount of spotlight in the media world? Part of the reasoning behind this lies with, where exactly does eSports fit, in terms of media coverage? Is it a traditional sport like Football, Lacrosse, or Basketball? Or does it play into a new hybrid of entertainment/strategy game?

Lets Talk About Impressions.

Lets Talk About Impressions.


When considering the eSports world, our initial impressions on how we want to perceive ourselves and how others view us, are often lost in the electronic world that we plug ourselves into when we are playing games, surfing online, or posting something online on one of our numerous media platforms. When we play a new game for instance, we are often found creating a new avatar or character that portrays no significant resemblance to us, and because of this we would act and behave differently in the game than outside of the media/digital world.

If we look at the different media platforms that are in popular use including Facebook, Instagram, Snap chat, Reddit, etc, we come to the conclusion that we want to be perceived differently depending on the platform. For instance, ones profile on Facebook might be portrayed as more casual with your posts being centered around close friends and family. While on the other hand, ones Instagram page might be centered around a focus point of blogging about alcohol or food.

One of the most recent trends that has formed in the gaming community and that has potential to impact the eSports industry are the VR consoles, or Virtual Reality consoles. One of the newest games that has been released under the console is a game called VRChat.  When considering the values of first impressions or building a reputation among others, VRChat examples those values and solidifies what the online community desires, a new and ever changing image.

For those who do not understand what VRChat is, it is primarily a chat room where people of all ages can use their VR headsets to communicate, interact, and play with others across the world. However without using your physical appearance to engage with others. Players can pick and choose an endless array of appearances, voices, and usernames to identify themselves. The problem that could arise from this? VRChat could potential stimulate trolling behavior in our society and ironically might change social behaviors with younger audiences. Why talk and communicate with others face to face, when I can talk to others in the comfort of my room online?

An Intro to an Intro.

                       So before I began on the weekly news and updates of the eSport world, I figured it would be best to at least explain what eSports is in todays society, and how it has grown to be one of the largest growing trends in my lifetime. But first lets talk about where it all began. The eSports industry or competitive playing has existed for as long as video games have existed. From the earlier games such as Space Invaders, came one of the first, if not the first gaming competition held by Atari in 1980. Afterwards came a huge influx of different competitions that would range across all platforms. However the eSports era did not fully bloom until the early 2000's, where the gaming industry had grown both in size and developed new technology to play more advance games. With computers become smaller, more compacted, and more powerful at this time, the PC era had official dominated much of the games being played. It was in 2000 where one of the largest competitions at this time had taken place under a game called Quake. The game itself was being played at a competitive level, with nearly 2,000 competitors, each of them fought one another in order to win a new Ferrari from the owner of Quake.

                     Fast forward to today's time, MOBAs or Massive Online Battle Areas, have become of the largest and most popular form of eSports that the world has ever seen. A couple of these games includes League of Legends and Dota 2, are being played on a multinational level with millions of daily users playing the games. For instance, League of Legends has broken a multitude of records held by a game, including being of the most played games, and also holds one of most views in its competitive format. In 2015, LoL held one of their largest championship competitions, with an astounding 360 million views over the course of a week in which the competition was being held. The prize pool, 2.13 million dollars to the winning team.

Welcome!

Hi! My name is Noah Cline, and this is the beginning to a hopefully long and fruitful experience of the growing sensation that is eSports. Throughout my childhood and growing up as an adult, I have always been in-tuned with the growth and popularity that is the video game era. From the small hand held devices that would play Pokemon, Animal Crossing, and Mario Kart, including that of the Game Boy Advance and the Nintendo DS. To the more powerful and capable console such as the Xbox One, which holds a wide array of games, including but not restricted to the Call of Duty franchise, the Halo Series, Forza, and so much more.


However my interest with eSports did not began until I entered my first year in college. It wasn't until I started playing one of the worlds most popular game, League of Legends, did I realize the magnitude that eSports could hold, and how impactful it could be in our society. In this rant of mine,  I want to discuss some of the latest trends and news of the eSports world, including games like League of Legends, (LoL) Rocket League, (RL) and many different games that hold a huge market in the eSports world.