eSports

The whole "Electronic Sports" craze has blown up in the past ten years or so and has been proving time and time again how much money and how much interest there is in the business. I personally find it interesting how close this kind of media is to getting to a place where it can compete with actual sports, given that real sports has had quite a head start in the area over eSports.

The MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) genre is one of the main attractions of this type of media, including games like League of Legends, Heroes of Newerth and DOTA2. Real-Time Strategies are also huge in this area with games like StarCraft and StarCraft 2. I'm not very interested in either of these genres when it comes to "spectator eSports", as you need to know a lot about the game and the metagame to understand what is going on.

My favourite eSport type would be First-Person Shooters, and not Call of Duty with its low skill ceiling and people who "compete" with inferior equipment (console controllers in a first-person shooter? hah). Games like Quake, Unreal Tournmanet and Starsiege: Tribes were some of the originators of the entire eSports game genre and were popular for quite some time before dying down.

I think the competitive FPS genre peaked with Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament 2004 which were sadly followed by Quake 4 and Unreal Tournament 3 which were much slower paced. Quake Live, which is almost a port of Quake III to a browser format is a very good competitive FPS but thanks to how old it is and no real advancement in the genre it has also died down quite a lot.

One of the latest contenders that could have made it big in the FPS side of eSports would have been Tribes: Ascend, if not for horribly bad management by the developers HiRez Studios. They went as far as to advertise the game as an "eSport" without providing basic features that every competitive FPS let alone eSport have from the get-go such as a server browser, clan support and demo/replay features.

It was a huge failure on their part to not even bother to try and make it what it could have been, if they had done it correctly it could be massive but they chose to go for a cash-grab and stop supporting the game as soon as they could so they could move on to the next one. 

The game was released in an unfinished state and it took them an entire year to get to the point where they added an actual server browser and basic "clan tag" support (not even proper clan support). There are low prize tournaments being held every so often for the game however. The community-run North American and European Tribes Leagues have just finished (with prize pools of $2500 for each of them, $1400 for a team of 7 players for first place).

The game is still fun to play in a competitive format but it was a massive waste of potential by the developers over all. Other recent FPS eSports are FireFall, Shootmania and Natural Selection 2, which are all much better cared for by their developers than Tribes: Ascend but ultimately (in my opinion) less fun as spectator sports and have much less depth.