Amen to what he says. A lot of us would be better off if we spent less time worrying about the popularity of the game and more time playing it.

I checked the AMA video's comment section. It's from Mustardoverlord so yeah, from TFTV.

i feel ripped off

https://i.gyazo.com/c5fb9509cbf67053cfe9453c5dd38d65.png

He explained this in his original ama video, saying he did it as he was getting to around 500, due to private videos etc so was gonna do it as roughly the 500th video as he couldn't be bothered to try and make it exact.

my original post:

"Hi, I wanted to ask you about your feelings on smaller competitive gaming communities in light of the continual growth of esports. Some background- I come from the competitive Team Fortress 2 scene, a game with a small but dedicated community of enthusiasts that is still tenuously hosted by ESEA in North America, but appears to be shrinking where it was once stagnant. It turns out that the skill set of TF2 translates extremely well to Overwatch, and so by my estimation about 2/3 of the top OW teams have one or more TF2 players on them. This is in spite of the fact that many of those same players find the game to be much more watered down, with a lower mechanical skill ceiling, simply because it's the profitable hot commodity right now.

In light of that, and your appreciation for the grassroots Quake community, I was wondering if you could touch on the potential negatives of the growth of esports bottlenecking the amount/nature of games that can be successful. Can we reach a balance where games are slightly more casual, yet still afford enough room for the best players to display their talent (I would argue that CSGO, Dota 2, and perhaps LoL fit in here), or will games of the future focus so hard on appealing to a wide player base that the competitive scene is naturally handicapped (I would argue that OW falls into that category, League is moving continually towards that place, and newer games are likely to follow)?

Further, as the expectations for the minimum size and money flow of a competitive game grow, will grassroots communities continue to become less prevalent, as the incentive to put in the effort becomes less rewarding, with no exposure available whatsoever? I think this relates somewhat, in a roundabout way, to your journalism video, for the record- with the advent of only 3-4 games at a time truly qualifying as 'esports', perhaps people with more diverse interests are fading away, and it's harder to find new people capable of building the network of connections and sources required to thrive in a giant esport.

Finally, a completely unrelated question, but one I'm interested in: we all talk about how the next big thing in esports will be the arrival of the non-endemic sponsors. However, won't that necessarily lead to a bursting of the bubble that is gaming orgs (fnatic, EG, TSM, Liquid and so forth), as they are exposed more and more as middlemen, with these new sponsors folding teams directly into them? Obviously, this is what we see in, for instance, the LCK in Korea."

I thought Thorin, out of anyone, might appreciate the long-winded nature of my post, but he tried super hard to tl;dr it

as soon as I heard him try to tldr it I knew it was a mustard post