Whither Pro-Gaming

posted onApril 17, 2002

by hitbsecnews

Over the last 4 or 5 years, I’ve seen an enormous number of gamers, usually the serious sorts, breathlessly predict the onset of professional gaming for those of us that love first person shooter games. Yet, today we seem no closer to that goal, and the general type and format of competitions has not changed appreciably since 1999. So where is this expected onrush of money and fame? Why are we stalled? Are we kidding ourselves? Does professional gaming have a future?
If you're planning on reading this article, make sure you have nothing else to do today. This is one long-ass article.Introduction

Before I start, let me present my bona fides. I’ve been operating one of the largest online leagues for about 4 or 5 years now, the OGL. While OGL isn’t necessarily focused on the “hardcore pro” gaming fans, we continue to provide the proving grounds that most such gamers come from. I’m also heavily involved in one of the largest and most popular LAN parties in the world, Quakecon. Additionally, I am responsible for a lot of the planning and operation of the tournaments that take place there every year, along with a lot of other dedicated and experienced folks. I also continue to play competitively in a clan, and typically play in one or two matches a week, just as I have for a good many years now. I operate a series of public servers on the net, and provide several private bookable servers for people playing matches in my own league, or in the several others leagues out there. Occasionally, I write an article or two. Probably badly, but what I lack in talent, I make up for in volume. I write long articles baby.

The upshot of all this is, I’ve had the opportunity to get a look at gaming from the perspective of a player, a league operator, a tournament organizer, sponsor chaser, and even as a server admin. That tends to give me a unique point of view on the whole gaming scene. Like all gamers, I’m highly opinionated and vocal. We gamers love our flames.

So let’s get to it. I’ll spare you a treatise on the history of competitive computer gaming, simply because most of you, as gamers, know it as well as I do. It’s part of our folklore, and we cherish the telling of it. Instead, I want to focus on the how and why of things and to do a little prognostication about the future. I do want to provide a simple definition however.

Professional Gamer – a person that makes enough money engaging in gaming activities, to enable him or her to forsake any other career in favor of a career as a gamer. A professional gamer earns a living by gaming. Gaming, is his profession.

The Wall

Lets face it. Professional gaming, although talked about endlessly, hasn’t really gotten any closer to reality than it was in 1999. The same sorts of events are available, the same amount of prize money is paid out, and no one is really making a living anywhere, in any capacity. Pro gaming has run head-on into a wall and further progress is plainly stalled. We often hear hopeful hype to the contrary, but concrete results are not happening.

That’s not to say that what we do have is bad, far from it. In fact, I think we are currently living in the “golden times” of computer gaming. Most of you will one day look back on these days, as the time you were free to pursue your passion, and enjoy the company of lots of friends of the same interests, without too much interference from people shaking you down for money. We have a lot of freedom to enjoy what we do and lots of places to do it, that doesn’t cost us a dime. In fact, two or three times a year, you can take a vacation out to the Dallas area, and get in on some very cool events, have a great time, see your friends from online, party, and play. You might even win some pretty damn cool prizes. You won’t make a living, but you might just end up with enough scratch to buy that new crotch rocket you’ve been lusting for, a really pimp computer, ultra fast graphics card, or any of a bunch of other “really swell stuff”. In the process, you won’t have to sign your life away, and you can still carry on with your career plans to get a degree and become a counselor to transvestite shop teachers, and make big money the old-fashioned way. You’re also free to engage in your favorite pastime of joining in forum flame wars, and calling Quakers flea-infested mentally deficient sheep fondlers, or those counter-strike players scum sucking skinhead booger eating pole smokers. That is, you can flame away, and no one will revoke your contract, sue you, and leave you sitting on credit card bills you can’t pay anymore, because you got a bit hotheaded on cached.net whilst arguing about config settings.

Yessir, these are the good old days®

Even so, a good many folks are desperately hoping pro gaming will arrive tomorrow, and that they’ll be the pioneering stars in a new sport. The problem is, there are significant barriers in place that prevent the arrival of “real money”. Until those barriers are overcome, we are unlikely to see pro gaming arrive, in any fashion more profitable than some silly human interest stories about geeks playing Super Mario Bros. on G4 television. So let’s look at those barriers.

Organizational Issues

First, the fundamental problem is Revenue. In all big-time pro sports, revenue is primarily obtained through spectators buying tickets to see the games, broadcasters paying for the rights to show games, and advertisers paying for the rights to sell their products to the assembled crowds watching the games. “The Gate” remains a fundamental ingredient of any sport seeking professional status. In fact, virtually every professional team is primarily financed through ticket sales, and those are primarily collected at the venue, usually a stadium, or some other large building with lots of seats. Those ticket sales go to pay player salaries, provide the owners with money to cover expenses and to show him/her a profit. A big pro stadium typically seats 50,000-100,000 and takes in revenues measured well into the millions of dollars per game. Bought a ticket to see a football game lately? Baseball? Basketball? 100,000 x $40.00 a ticket = 4 million bucks, and that’s not counting hat sales, hot dogs, peanuts, and – oh yeah – television and radio broadcast rights and advertising revenue (which exceed the gate substantially, once they arrive). How many games do they play a year? Now you know why they can afford to pay salaries like that.

So what possible equivalent mechanism does computer gaming have to attract large audiences who will pay real money to watch the games? GTV? And more fundamentally, how much would you – a diehard fan – pay to watch the Steaming Dookeys play the Dirty Sanchez Brothers in a Counter-Strike match? And even if you wanted to watch it, where would you go to see it? How much are you going to pay to watch a match on your own computer? Where’s the hotdogs and beer?

Any discussion of professional gaming’s future is utterly meaningless without a concrete method to collect real revenue. And no matter what you hear, or whom you hear spewing it, until revenue arrives there will be no professional gaming, period.

LAN Parties you say? I’ll let you in on a little secret. They don’t make money. Most of the money provided by sponsors goes to prizes, and the “gate” at such events barely covers the expenses of providing the event itself (assuming there’s any admission fee charged at all). LAN Parties are primarily promotional events and the companies that sponsor them are doing so because gamers, as a group, are probably the most vigorous bunch of early adopters and extreme hardware enthusiasts out there. So if you want your equipment to be seen as “the” product there’s no better way to do it than getting it out in front of gamers, and gaining their mind share. At current prize levels LAN Party tournaments are a cost-effective means of getting your product out in front of the gamer market, and as such, are a good deal. Even that 50,000 or 100,000 prize, is still cheaper than an ad campaign in PC Gamer, and a hell of a lot more effective. But we won’t see prize levels increased much farther because we’re coasting around the limits of what the companies see as the “value point” such tournaments provide. Even so, certain games drive heavy hardware purchasing cycles (*cough* Doom) and getting in on that whole market is just plain smart business. Yet, the simple fact remains that our very biggest LAN parties have attendance levels of only about 3000 people (Quakecon) and most do well to top 1000 attendees. That just isn’t enough to do much more than pay expenses, sorry to say. If LAN parties were profitable, you’d see a whole lot more of them and have a lot more opportunities to compete for prizes.

In many ways the games themselves provide a major impediment to the success of pro gaming. I pointed out above, that ticket sales typically pay the bills and the simple fact is, people buy tickets to SEE the game. Can you think of a single game that has a spectator mode that really provides enough view into the action to give the average Bubba something to watch while he drinks his beer and munches his hot dog? Most viewpoints are typically “in-eyes” and that’s just too limited a view to give the spectator any real sense of what is going on. As a comparison, think of a baseball or football game. You can easily see the entire field and everyone on it, from any seat in the stands. You might not be able to see the snot coming out of Nolan Ryan’s nose, but you can see he’s throwing a pitch and do get a real sense of the entirety of the game. In other words, it’s easy to follow the action. There’s no such viewpoint within any computer game I am aware of. A typical CS or RTCW match (even if they had the ability to really reach a huge audience) provides the ability to see only a very small section of the map and a very few players, and only from a limited FOV. Not good enough, not by far. People just aren’t going to pay unless they can see. The simple truth is that today’s computer games are meant to be fun for you to play, not for other people to have fun watching.

And what motivation do game developers have to invest the time and money into writing such view mechanisms into the games? Not much. The cool factor, a desire to see their game played seriously, and that’s about it. If Joe Bob’s Professional League suddenly were to make a million bucks a match showing league games to fans, how much of that would the guys that wrote the games get? Even worse, if the game “Company X” just wrote suddenly spawns a whole professional scene, what effect does that have on future sales of their next big game? Think the NFL will be switching from Football to “Football Forever” anytime soon? Once a game develops a whole professional base, rules structure, marketing engine, etc. the resistance to changing to a new game becomes huge. And that creates a pretty strong disincentive to developers who make their paychecks writing new games. Beyond that, is any game likely to ever become the “one true game” that we all stick with, to the exclusion of anything new? Not bloody likely. When the New Doom gets here, I’m buying a Geforce 4 and hitting the road baby. I’ll have lots of company too.

And what happens if the League does switch games? It gets ugly, and fast. Each time a switch occurs, all the players that currently support the league get abandoned in favor of a new group of players. All that time that the players invested getting expert at the game is squandered, and the players are discarded like rubbish. Contracts broken, rules changed, everything. Once this happens, what reason does any player have to commit the time and resources necessary to become a professional league player? Game turnover is anathema to professional sports. It just doesn’t happen. The rules change slowly, a little at a time, over a long time. But the game itself never changes at all. Never.

With regards to watching games, I frequently see various persons gushing about the possibility of Internet video broadcasts of their matches, and the “huge opportunity” this presents. Forgetting for a minute the problems with the various video formats, the amount of bandwidth needed to get a reasonable picture, and the other technical issues associated with online video broadcasting, I’ll go out on a limb here and tell you that we’re a long way from the ready availability of such shows, and for reasons you may not be aware of.

If you’ve been following the various regulatory actions or lawmaking enterprises going on right now you might have heard of a recent action by the FCC deregulating the cable companies’ provision of broadband services, and a little bill trying to make it through congress called HR1542. Why do these actions matter to you, the hopeful pro gamer?

First, you should understand that the delivery of streaming video takes bits. A lot of them. Big pipes are just a necessity, to get video people are going to be willing to pay anything for. Unfortunately, the cable companies provide 70% of broadband connections. Do you think these companies are going to allow third party video distributors to use their lines to send you video which competes with their bread and butter products? Go take a look at your terms of service agreement. Welcome to “why video online ain’t gonna make it.”

That isn’t all. HR1542, while pretending to be a bill designed to increase the penetration of broadband internet connections into rural areas, is really a bill designed to give the big four telephone companies back their monopolies on the telecom business. All these companies have big plans to deliver video to your home through the net (and charge you for it too). Think they’re going allow third party broadcasting to steal their revenues away from them?

It won’t be long before 98% of the high-speed broadband services begin blocking streaming video delivery to the home from anyone except approved providers. Bank on it. So your friendly League isn’t going to be sending you or anyone else video feeds of that cool championship match in a year or two, without cutting some sort of agreement with these huge mega corporations. And why would we expect that to be any easier than getting competitive gaming on TV right now? They have the resources to do it themselves, if there’s an audience.

Those are pretty basic issues, but by no means the only issues. There’s a little problem with audience and legality here as well. You see, the average “pro” gamer is somewhere between the age of 15-22 as a general rule. As players get much older, either their reaction times slow down, or real life intrudes and time that could be spent practicing has to go towards getting the bills paid, children fed, etc. So pro gaming is mostly a sport for younger folks. Problematically, such younger folks can’t legally sign contracts, and where professional career gaming is concerned, contracts are an absolute requirement. There are just too many rights, for both the players, and the leagues, that have to be protected. There are trademarks, conduct rules, payout amounts, indemnity, severability, etc etc. All must be sanctified with contract documents in a professional environment. That’s going to be a real problem with a 16-year-old guy. How many parents will sign a contract that will likely require their 16 year old to quit school and practice gaming full time?

And then there’s the whole image thing. While we may know differently, a lot of the world’s political establishment thinks these games are twisting our fragile little minds and turning us into Columbine killers looking for a place to happen. While we may deride the ignorance that fosters this sort of thinking, we can’t ignore it. The fact remains that a great many Congressmen still see “Violent Video Games” as a simple means of getting lots of news coverage from sympathetic and equally ignorant reporters. There remains the distinct possibility that laws may one day be passed restricting the content of these games, or the people that play them. We’ve already seen some of this with the ESRB ratings, and the trend towards such activity is by no means blunted yet. It’s dumb, it’s based in ignorance, but that doesn’t make it any less real.

Any professional league is going to have to deal with this problem and we’re already seeing the fallout from this need. Rules restricting ages of players are a very real possibility in the future and have already been talked about on esports sites. Sponsors must be sensitive to the impression their product’s association with our favorite games may bring, and we as gamers, must respect that need or lose our sponsors in the process. The fear of being stigmatized for supporting the corruption of our precious youthful darlings already chases some potential sponsors away.

Add to that the actions of some of the gamers themselves, and you have a two-headed monster. We’ve all seen some “pro” gamer wannabe unleashing a torrent of immature vitriol in a forum thread somewhere, or criticizing all and sundry on a web page usually in the colorful invective unique to our sub-culture. If the pro players are unable to control such outbursts, it risks embarrassing the sponsors, the leagues, or advertisers through association with such fools. They don’t like that and it’s hard to blame them. All professional leagues are extremely diligent in enforcing conduct rules, but the world of computer gaming makes the potential for such problems so much larger. Pro football players don’t hang out in forums on the Internet flaming each other after all.

Lastly, I can hear someone out there saying “but Tapper, isn’t gaming a XX billion dollar a year industry? The money is there!”

Well, that’s true. But gaming is a billion dollar industry for those who write and sell games and gaming hardware. For the rest of us, it’s pretty much a “no dollar a year” industry, sorry to say.

The Future is now

So what does the future hold? That’s a good question and I have yet to see a model for professional gaming that made any sort of business sense to me. Rather than pursue a long-term revenue stream through the vehicle of LAN parties, I think pro gaming will need a different venue in order to have any chance of developing a revenue stream that can ultimately develop a salary structure, or the necessary facilities to provide the spectator experience. And that venue just doesn’t currently exist.

Of the existing professional sports, perhaps Golf, or NASCAR present the most likely business model for a pro gaming enterprise to get rolling. But both of those sports were brought to the masses only after hundreds of golf courses and racetracks proved, that a substantial spectator audience existed. Both sports are primarily supported by companies wanting to sell enthusiasts gear. I guess watching Tiger Woods makes some people want to run out and buy those new Ping wedges. Golf Tournaments are always sponsored by golf companies, so there’s a similarity there to gaming. However, there are millions and millions of golfers and thousands of golf courses, and golf was around a long time before a pro tour finally emerged that fed anybody’s family. It’s silly to assume we can emulate that model and gain parity in a few years.

I should also point out that the leagues formed in both golf and car racing, were outgrowths of associations of facility owners, not players or speculative businessmen. They had the foundation revenues coming in from their courses and tracks and they leveraged their association to build tours of those facilities. Those tours eventually generated enough prize money to allow professional golfers and drivers to emerge. But gaming has no comparable facilities. 99% of gaming occurs in the home. What gaming centers there are, are typically shops in a strip mall somewhere and hardly suitable for hosting competitions that draw more than a few hundred people at most.

Regardless, given the existing technology, software, and infrastructure existent in the current gaming world, the opportunity just isn’t here for much more than we have. So what we’re left with is waiting for some sort of breakthrough moment, where software and technology and the wind combine to provide a venue in which an audience can really see matches, understand the action, and develop enough interest in the outcome to be willing to pay an admission price to be able to see it. Once those people arrive and begin buying tickets, then, and only then, will we have a situation such that players may begin to earn amounts of money sufficient to create careers, pay bills, and become, truly, professional gamers.

Now I know, that there are going to be a number of people out there that view this article as heresy. I expect them to denounce me in whatever terms they can muster, as the harbinger of bad news, the pessimist, the naysayer, and the all-around wet-blanket kind of guy.

But I don’t see it that way. In fact, I don’t see professional gaming as something critical to the health of gaming in general, nor even necessarily a good thing for gamers.

Rather, I sincerely enjoy what we have today and find a great deal of interest, fascination, and even satisfaction in this unusual phenomenon of the gaming sub-culture. We are, all of us, stickball players on an electronic sandlot. We fuss, we fight, we form friendships and alliances, and we do battle daily, and never shed a drop of blood. We are free from the chains of corporations and their never-ending rules, contracts, and fees, and we speak our minds for good or ill.

We have created our own sub-culture, a place uniquely us. Free of the constraints of the almighty dollar we are, by and large, having a blast. Is that a bad thing? Why do we need to make a living doing this? Do we really want to become a slave to the game, dependant on it for our daily bread? A bondsman to some league, possessed by some contract, in which we will never be the primary beneficiaries? Will payment increase our enjoyment of what we have? What happy endeavor of man, was ever improved by the introduction of profit as the primary motivation?

Don’t Worry, Be Happy. Like the song says, “you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.” Between you and me, I’m not ready to see them pave paradise. I think I’ll enjoy it just as it is, play these cool games, hang out with my buds, have pitched battles with other clans, play in tournaments mostly for the glory, and generally have a good time. Take a good look around you. It really can’t get much better than this, imho.

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The opinions in this column are those of the author only, and may not represent the views or policies of Cached.Net