I like CSGO its better than TF2 before they made CS2 now my pc cant run it but its probably still better than TF2 if u can play that game u should try it out and there's less weird and nasty ppl cause it's a paid game as long as u play prime

Personally I think CS looks really boring. My friend took me to one of the tournaments in London a few years back, and it was dreadful. Lol

Valorant looks like same shite but it looks even easier. Idk if thats actually the case with Valorant but I'm just assuming because it has the abilities.

I think one of the major factors as to why I think those games are boring is that its kind of the same shite every time. If I'm watching a player with their name covered, I could never tell the difference although if I'm watching MGE Mike or Banny, I'd know without the names.

CS has always had that recognition and high skill ceiling but it's just plain boring. Maybe if I gave it more of a shot, I'd enjoy it, but I never mustered the will.

I think one of my main purposes of this thread is to see if developers have moved away from making the games easier. The point of competitive gaming as we all know is for them to be difficult, but they are actually most of the time incredibly dumbed down. I was just wondering if they made something that could actually be taken seriously with eSports in mind.

Maybe Fortnite is just the best game? Being a third person shooter is a bit strange, but maybe this is the only one that is impressive, with high skill, recognition/money and not boring?

Any non-tactical, non-battle royale FPS esport are basically dead at the moment - QPL isn't going to be returning for next year and quake pros will be jumping ship from quake champions to any arena FPS that has a prize pool (e.g. quake live with project velocity, then back to quake champions for keencon 2). Maybe something will get revealed at next quakecon?

OWL has died and OW2 is looking like a worse game by the day as Blizzard seeks to milk as much money from the playerbase using skins, battlepasses and campaigns.

DOTA, League, Starcraft and AOE2 are still very "esportable" and will likely be for the foreseeable future. Though RTS games are a little worse for wear than the MOBAs just popularity wise.

Games I'd watch out for right now would be THE FINALS, Tribes 3 beta for FPS fans and Stormgate for RTS fans. I reckon that they will have at least a few decent tournaments.

You ever played tarkov
It has a lot of random bullshit and shit networking but its fun and takes skill they dont dumb anything down with it
They just made a deathmatch version of it they're forcing to be an e-sport so maybe something will come out of it if they do it right

I think developers nowadays are focused on making their games fun/easy to stream and make content for, which means dumbing them down so any average person is able to feel like they can hop in and not have to worry about committing very much to be able to play and have fun. I also remember seeing Hiko on stream around the time of CS2's release talking about how for a while now there's just been very little money available in the NA esports gaming scene.

FPS esports kinda blows if i were to be entirely honest. Valorant and CS are pretty fun to watch if you like strats and micro stuff but just feels like watching the same round over and over most of the time. Overwatch in it's hayday was incredibly fun to watch but died out pretty quick because of bad meta shifts and Blizzard being dogshit.

Any Battle Royal esport always devolves into waiting for 40 minutes for circle 5 to finally push teams close enough to have to interact with each other and I cannot fucking stand it. TF2 is the only one I really find any joy in watching. Devs really need to learn that making a fun ass game means more then being a competitive game, so make it fun and support and nurture it from a distance.

FGC stuff goes crazy though if you ask me that's where all the real fun is. Any other side of the scene I either don't know enough about or don't care about (MOBA, ROCKET LEAGUE, ECT)

i find it really hard to take the argument that "games are getting dumbed down" seriously in the world where games/series like counter-strike, league of legends, apex and dota completely dominate the pvp multiplayer market worldwide

Stop the cs slander here

As a whole esports is downsizing in the Western markets. Dota, CS, and Valorant esports scenes are all roughly plateauing in the Western markets at the moment, which is why Valorant/Counter-Strike are trying to establish themselves in the Chinese market in 2024. Latin America (mainly Brazil) and Asia still have growing markets, so this is where a lot of focus will be moved to for esports.

Esports is mainly MOBA games and mobile gaming MOBAs at the moment, apart from CS/Valorant the top FPS games are Fortnite and Apex Legends, which has a sizable Japanese market.

edit: on the topic of Western vs Asian markets, League of Legends set an esports world record with 6.4M Peak Viewers in 2023, while also trying to buy teams out of their North American franchised league

I'm not so interested in the money side of things because I don't think making money should be anyone's ambition when it comes to playing a videogame, even the professionals. Streamers are understandble because they are entertainners though.

Mostly interested in the recognition side of things, like its very easy to underatand that this is sort of shit https://youtu.be/rr3QXuldX4Y?si=csGqjcCwNMk9mtRu is difficult, and its recgonised by the fact that there is money associated with it. The amount of money doesn't really matter

Valve events are going for Saudi & UAE money. DOTA2 in China is dying out due to poor quality matchmaking which is why a lot of Chinese pros now play on the SEA server (obviously outside of the rules the Chinese government set).

In general I feel a lot of "e-sport" titles suffer heavily from the GAAS model. The pressure of every developer having to add more and more to the game to keep player retention up and revenue growing. It's also a factor as why CS is a bit of an anomaly for most games as their employees can move to different projects depending on the current focus. E.g. more employees working on CS2, then moving to other areas once released, same with dota2 events.

For me I think a good example of this is possibly Apex Legends, where the foundation of the game is actually really good. It has great feeling guns (for the most part) and heaps of potential for movement tech. It's just massively held back by partly the BR format and the GAAS model. The balancing cycle can really harm the game and at the moment it's pushed forward a lot more to a player retention angle, which results in poor quality matchmaking etc.

In my experience and I NEVER thought I'd say this. But the ALGS tournaments were actually really fucking good. The format they have is actually pretty great and creates a lot of high stakes excitement.

There's a lot of variables that I think heavily effects whether a game actually can become a potential e-sport which would take ages to go through.

You're funhaver, shouldn't you play games to... have fun?

Lmao

That's the sole objective here but I'm just using this info as a gauge of where to start. Doing things that are difficult is what I find most fun.

Quake Live and TF2 will always be a game that I play extemely casually and I want to take something seriously because that sounds enjoyable

War you are mainly playing Apex now?

imho one of the main problems with esports is that all of the revenue they generate goes straight to the developers instead of the orgs/franchises. In traditional sports teams make money through shirt and ticket sales/tv deals where as in almost every esport the equivalent skin sales and advertising revenue go straight to the devs. Teams that don't much win prize money are forced to scrounge for income through much less profitable irl merch and players have to become song and dance entertainers on twitch.

The hideous jerseys need to go. Since what you're wearing doesn't really matter for any functional reason, why don't esports players wear stuff that actually looks good? Players could get sponsored by those instagram companies that try to sell you those japanese joggers that make you look like a ninja. Imagine how lame magnus carlsen would look in a houston outlaws jersey.

ur tellin me that when u see porsche on a FaZe jersey u dont immediately want to purchase a 911?

imagining esports teams dripped out like ninjas is quite fun tho fr

Riot Games has been public multiple times that their massive scale tournaments like Worlds as well as all of the other major circuits for their flagship titles like Valorant and League including the VCT and LCK/LCS are loss-leaders that intentionally do not make money due to overspending to make them the most popular leading social media material that advertises the gameplay of their game directly. Riot eSports is literally designed on purpose to lose money and is only sustainable due to the exceedingly expensive and successful microtransaction systems for their respective games.

If the world's leading game developer in eSports is losing money on their productions, you can definitely bet anything else even close to that scale is losing money too.

you are an insane person

Think OW would've been fun to watch if you either didn't know TF2 existed or you enjoyed Tf2 highlander, but CS is really just the same shit over and over again.

so is football. so is competitive billiards. so is any sport with consistent rules like that. the refinement of the craft and the storylines of the teams and players are what makes them interesting. if you haven't taken the time to interface with those aspects (or are unfortunately born into a family that didnt care about them vis a vis football for me) it can be difficult to care otherwise

Yeah I agree. It's like the same appeal with football

Pretty much. Like I said though the GAAS model for it has put me off the last 3 months as playing ranked is just a metric of how long you can play for instead of a measurement of skill.

This is a point I was going to bring up, a big issue for organisations for a lot of games at the moment is that the players do the bare minimum for organisations.
A lot of press related stuff is done for specific tournaments. Or at the start when the player first signs for the organisation. For some traditional sports you really have to do quite a bit of sponsorship work that is required with your contract. And that can be throughout the season.
Not only that but the players also work out their own brand deals with other companies, you'll hardly see any of that in esports.

Sponsors aren't going to pay teams big money when the only marketing they get back is from good tournament placements.

In regards to CS being boring or w/e. It's successful because the competitive game mode is easy to understand, for the most part it's clear to see what's going on as well. There has also over time been different "eras" of CS where certain teams have come a long and made a mark with their unique play styles.

A lot of the overreliance that the esports industry as a whole has on venture capitalists, sponsors and other external investors could be easily solved if the PPV model had been used by these major companies earlier (or at all), when the industry was still in it's infancy. What esports needs above everything is tangible income streams that can be built and expanded upon, rather than securing just enough funding to operate with vastly overpriced salaries.

Even major esports orgs have to get bought out or sponsored by incredibly sketchy or unethical companies (G2 sponsored by csgoroll, Heroic bought out by russian betting company, ESL owned by Saudi) just to keep themselves from going bankrupt.

As a player that has a regular job to fall back on, it's probably great to make an insane ammount of money for a few years and then just go back to a normal life, but it's a very volatile industry that gets too glorified.

Overwatch League on Twitch had the season watch pass stuff where you could pay for alternative angles, dedicated player pov etc. That didn't stick around for too long, and them them moving to YouTube after having been offered a contract there also tanked their viewer numbers even more.

So PPV isn't necessarily the answer if there is still free content available. Most tournament & broadcast orgs go hard on the offline experience for live events, which then benefits the online viewers, instead of crippling their content to encourage more people to show up in person or actually pay for a viewer pass to get a better experience. Twitch forcing ads down your throat mid round is just annoying and makes me turn off a stream instead of subscribing to the channel or god forbid buying Turbo, which does not benefit the broadcaster at all.

FGC is one of the easiest esports to understand and easily most hype. FPS is crazy in it's own way, but it's very hard to explain to people who don't regularly play FPS the hype behind a airshot/flick. MOBA's I don't understand at all so it's incredibly hard for me to watch a friend's league clip and think it's impressive and vice versa. But FGC, you show any clip of almost any FGC and you can tell how impressive it is.

I think the early days of LAN events lead gamers to believe that the future of esports would be like those days but on a larger scale. Years down the line we all learned that all industries are the same and whatever makes the sponsor the most money is what you can expect more of. I do not know if there is a way for things to be better than they currently are, but I am sure you can tell that I personally am rather jaded when it comes to the current state of esports.

crossing my fingers that the new Tribes game turns into somewhat of a esport, it probably wont be anything super major, but at least its a fun game. I don't mind having more small comp scenes overall outside of tf2 to invest time in.