Over the past five years, the phenomenon of eSports has exploded, becoming a multi-million pound industry and transforming the gaming spectrum. Rick Lane investigates
On 18 June 2015, Wembley Arena was packed out. Originally built for the 1934 Olympics, and host of the 1948 and 2012 Olympic swimming competitions, the Arena was now centre stage for an entirely new kind of sporting event. Tens of thousands of fans gathered to watch the quarter final of the League of Legends (LoL) World Championships, while millions more watched the showdown online via Twitch. Even the BBC streamed the event for UK audiences, the first time a mainstream broadcaster has done so for an eSports competition.
In total, 36 million people watched 16 teams compete for a combined prize purse of over $2 million US. Alongside Wembley, the championship packed out arenas in France, Belgium and Germany. The winners of the tournament, the South Korean team SK Telecom T1, took home a grand prize of $1 million.
It’s only the fifth year the LoL world championship, known as the LCS, has been running, and it isn’t even the largest prize in eSports. At the Dota 2 International championship last year, the US team Evil Geniuses took home $6.5 million, roughly twice as much as a Wimbledon champion.
The phenomenon of eSports – where games are played competitively for prestige and increasingly lucrative prizes, has been growing steadily since the late 1990s. Around 2010, however, that growth exploded, and hasn’t stopped exploding. Games such as League of Legends, Dota 2, Counter-Strike and Mortal Kombat X have their own official leagues and tournaments, matches can attract online audiences of millions, while major live events see attendances that pack out arenas and even stadiums.
Once an enthusiast subsection of gaming, eSports is now well and truly an established industry and it’s set to grow further. ‘This year is the birth of eSports,’ says Michael O’Dell, managing director of Team Dignitas, one of the UK’s oldest eSports teams. ‘The past 16 years have been laying the foundations.’ With this newfound power, however, comes increased responsibility. The eSports arena may be a mighty force in the gaming world, but it’s currently largely unregulated, and its complex, amorphous structure means it isn’t always clear who exactly is holding the reins.
THE BEGINNING
O’Dell, who goes by the nickname Odee, has been with Team Dignitas since its formation in September 2003, and was an avid eSports player for several years prior. O’Dell originally got into eSports by playing Quake, and between 1999 and 2001, was playing the highest division of Quake’s main eSports league. Then, in 2002, Battlefield 1942 was released, a game with large islands that combined vehicular and infantry combat. ‘I still remember playing it and flying around in a Japanese plane trying to loop under a bridge,’ O’Dell says. ‘It was just amazing.’
Having become hooked on Battlefield, O’Dell decided he wasn’t making enough money playing Quake, so he started his own Battlefield team. After a while, he and his two best British players approached a German team called Legion Condor, and were allowed to join. Then, due to a shortage of professional players, Legion Condor merged with a Swedish team called Sweden Kompanix, forming Team Dignitas. O’Dell was eventually appointed head of Dignitas after the company acquired its first sponsorship deal of $10,000 US. ‘I wanted to be in the best team in the world at this game, because I just knew I had the drive, potential and skill, that arrogance to be the best. That’s what the top players have – they know they’re good,’ O’Dell says.
The world of eSports in the early 2000s was very different to now. Even in Korea, which many consider the spiritual home of eSports, the first official StarCraft tournaments were only held in 2002. In the West, the vast majority of the early eSports community was online. The main league for shooters such as Quake and Half-Life was run by a website called Barrysworld, which O’Dell describes as ‘the Sunday league of eSports’. There was a smattering of live tournaments, such as those held at QuakeCon in Dallas. ‘I helped to get some Quake players to QuakeCon, because they couldn’t afford it, and I had a job, so I was lending them money to just get them to QuakeCon,’ O’Dell explains. ‘I don’t think it was even called eSports then, to be honest.’
BIG MONEY
For its first few years eSports was a hobby. Individuals such as O’Dell competed for prestige more than prizes, and there was little support or organisation from sponsors or other external sources. ‘Everybody dreamed of earning money in a tournament,’ O’Dell says. ‘I didn’t leave my full-time job until 2006, and that was only when we’d picked up more sponsors.’
Now, Team Dignitas is a much larger and more complex beast, to the point where the very word ‘team’ is a little misleading.
Unlike, for example, a football team, Team Dignitas comprises multiple teams and individuals from all over the world, all of whom compete in different games. Team Dignitas has signed professional players for games including Counter-Strike, League of Legends, Hearthstone, StarCraft II, FIFA and Trackmania. ‘There are careers now,’ O’Dell says. ‘You join Dignitas now as a player, you’re going to get paid a fee. And some of the teams get paid really well.’ Indeed, O’Dell believes it won’t be long before he signs his first player on a milliondollar contract.
TEAMS AND TOURNAMENTS
The way Team Dignitas is structured gives you an insight into the convoluted organisation of the eSports world. In some ways, it isn’t altogether different from regular sports. Each game is a different eSport in its own right. FIFA is to football what League of Legends is to rugby, Counter-Strike is to archery, Hearthstone to professional poker and so on. However, the delineation between who organises and who competes in these eSports is less clearcut. Some companies such as Valve will administrate and organise tournaments, such as The International, entirely in-house. The International is Dota 2’s official tournament, and it currently has one of the largest prize pools in eSports. For others, the organisation occurs between multiple organisations, including the game developers or publishers, broadcasters and the players themselves.
One of the largest such organisations is the eSports League Gaming Network (ESL). Founded in 2006, The ESL organises eSports leagues and tournaments on behalf of developers and publishers, including the Intel Extreme Masters, which is the highest-level of eSports tournaments for games such as League of Legends, Counter-Strike
and StarCraft II.
Joshua Gray is a producer at ESL, whose job involves organising these leagues and tournaments. ‘If a publisher or developer wants to partner with us and create a league surrounding their game, and we feel that it’s appropriate enough to create a league around it, we work together to accomplish that,’ he says.
The ESL organises its leagues using several general tiers. At the top is the ESL One, the eSports equivalent of a champions league. ‘These are events that fill stadiums, primarily in Europe,’ Gray explains. Below ESL One are the ESL Pro leagues, which comprise regular weekly matches that are broadcast online in seasons that last around eight weeks for most games, although major eSports such as Call of Duty can have considerably longer seasons. Then, at the bottom is what the ESL calls the Go4 system, which is akin to a Sunday league structure, with small prize pools and no barrier to entry.
‘In each of these different tiers, we’ll find what’s appropriate for the game itself. If the game is just starting out, if it doesn’t have a big eSports footprint in the world, if they’re just trying to gauge interest and see if people are ready to play at a competitive level, then we can enter the game into one of our Go4 systems,’ Gray says. ‘If the game is definitely viable, definitely has eSports potential and the community is clamouring for it, then we can create a Pro league around the game and create a system where competitors play every week, at the same time.’
Both the Go4 and Pro leagues have their matches played online, but the Pro league has an additional element. At the close of a season, the top four or five players in that league are then entered into the finals, a tournamentstyle setup used to conclude the season. ‘We fly the players to the finals at one of our studios, or to an off-site
location, or one of the big trade shows around the world,’ Gray says. ‘They’ll usually win thousands of dollars if they win first place. It depends on the game, the prize breakdown and the format.’
Finally, there are the major annual tournaments, such as the Intel Extreme Masters. These events are the closest eSports has to a World Cup, although some of the larger developers, such as Riot Games and Valve, run tournaments for their own games. Either way, these huge live events are a particularly intriguing aspect of eSports due to their physical element, with an atmosphere equivalent to a major sports match or rock concert.
BROADBAND OF BROTHERS
In many ways, these events are organised in a similar fashion to any other large, public event, although there are a few extra considerations, the primary one being broadband. ‘Even when you’re playing somebody sitting right next you, you have to connect to the Internet,’ Gray says. ‘With the technology and expectations we have today, and with publishers trying to fight against piracy, it’s always connected and always on, so we have to make sure that venues can accommodate that at speeds that will have next to no latency for players. That’s always something that we have to be very concerned about.’
The importance of fibre-optic broadband to eSports can’t be underestimated. Not only does it make these fast-paced games that are exciting to watch possible, but it also makes broadcasting them possible via live-streaming services such as Twitch. The advent of live streaming was a huge boon for the Sports world, as it didn’t have to rely on the grace of conventional media networks in order to thrive. ‘Almost every major media company, almost every major player in the space of entertainment, is coming to us, and asking “how can we work with you?”’ Gray says.
REFEREEING
While the Internet is undoubtedly the lifeblood of eSports, the fact that the bulk of eSports are still played remotely online also creates some unique problems. One of these problems is ‘refereeing’ matches, although with eSports it’s more like ‘administrating’ matches. Like any competitive event, eSports will encounter some players who try to cheat or game the system and, unlike a tennis match or a chess game, there usually isn’t a referee physically present to mediate. The ESL approaches this problem using a unique system that resembles the solution to both a technical support query and a legal dispute, which Gray describes in relation to the fighting game Mortal Kombat X.
‘Let’s say one of your opponents faces you just in one game, then they leave, take off and you wait but they never come back. You submit a ticket saying, “Hey, I just won one round but they never came back,” and you submit it to the admin. However, your opponent submitted a different ticket, saying: “Well I beat the guy three zero.” So now you have a conflict,’ Gray says. In the rules set down by the ESL, players are strongly encouraged to screenshot or record their matches, especially when something goes awry. The player with the evidence will proceed to the next round, while the player without evidence will be knocked out of the tournament.
Another issue unique to eSports is the highly fluid nature of the games themselves. Developers are constantly tinkering with the systems that underpin their games, making particular units stronger or weaker, adding new mechanics and removing redundant ones. Rules can change in regular sports as well, but nothing like the extent to which eSports flow and alter and evolve. When asked about how, as an eSports player, you respond to these changes, Michael O’Dell’s response is straightforward. ‘Practice,’ he says. ‘All games have a slight change every now and then, and you practise with the new changes. You look at the knock-on effects.’
REGULATION
While the changeable nature of eSports games doesn’t bother O’Dell that much, he’s concerned about a broader problem that’s becoming more and more apparent – regulation. ‘There’s still no regulation in many of the games. We’re self-governing to a point, so a lot of the big teams work together on lots of issues but we still don’t have governing bodies or anything like that,’ he says.
Some companies, such as Riot Games, make a concerted effort to govern their own games, creating clear and strict rules, and enforcing them consistently. However, for many games, rules only apply to the game itself, and not to the wider issue of how the sport is conducted. One of the major issues that concerns O’Dell is player poaching, where one team will attempt to convince a player from another team to join them, sometimes during competitions.
In 2014, Counter Logic Gaming was fined $10,000 by Riot for attempting to poach William ‘Scarra’ Li from Dignitas’ League of Legends team. Last year, Riot actually banned the owner of US team Misfits from entering its annual championship until 2017, for repeated attempts to poach players from other teams.
An even more serious concern within eSports is doping. In the last couple of years, several pro-gamers have openly admitted to taking Adderall, a prescription amphetamine typically used to treat narcolepsy, to enhance reflexes and performance during matches. A handful of players have confessed, but its use is believed to be far more widespread. Last year, the ESL altered its rules and heralded the introduction of anti-doping tests after pro-gamer Kory Friesen admitted to taking Adderall during a competition. Thus far, however, no pro-gamers have been caught taking performance enhancers. Legislating against doping is one thing, enforcing it is another.
It’s perhaps unfair to overly criticise eSports in this regard. Its rise to prominence has been so rapid and meteoric that the medium is shifting and changing all the time. In addition, some conventional sports have a far greater problem with doping at the very highest levels, despite having much more rigid structures in place to deal with it. Nevertheless, it’s best to ensure the right safeguards exist before the problem becomes too endemic. Hence, in a way, it’s even more imperative that the eSports communities ensures proper antidoping regulations are in effect and enforceable.
The eSports world is only going to grow in terms of audience and revenue, so the need for appropriate regulatory bodies is only going to become more vital. O’Dell points out that acquiring a Dota 2 team for Dignitas would easily set the company back $250,000, and a League of Legends team, if he didn’t already have one, would set him back considerably more. The big entry fees and bigger prizes are even starting to attract conventional sports teams to the eSports sphere. ‘The Sacramento Kings bought a team. Rick Fox, who used to play for the LA Lakers, bought a team. There will be more this year for sure,’ O’Dell says.
eSPORTS IN THE UK
As for the UK eSports scene, O’Dell is concerned that the country is lagging behind a little, citing a lack of support from sponsors despite some pretty significant tournaments. ‘We’re still slightly seen as kids in their bedrooms playing games, he says. ‘There are lots of tournaments, such as ESL UK, Multiplay and so on, but the UK still isn’t looking at those tournaments as big-ticket items. I don’t get it, because lots of people watch those tournaments in this country. Seeing Wembley Arena sold out last year was amazing – the fans are there.’
O’Dell hopes to see more support from government bodies and sponsors in the future. He doubts the scene will see much verification from conventional sports bodies and organisations, but he doesn’t see this issue as important. ‘ESports is totally different, and it’s not going to get smaller – it’s just going to get bigger,’ he concludes.