Project 3 Task 2 : E-Sports

Evolution of E-Sports

E-Sports is a mass “sport” involving playing video games competitively for large pools of money, which can be crowd-sourced. It has been the subject of controversy since the beginning because sports are often physical activities and gaming is considered the opposite. E-sports started off with games such as Counter Strike 1.6 but was in very infant stages. Since the release of Counter Strike Global Offensive the E-Sports scene picked up pace and attracted hundreds of thousands of viewers and inspired many other games to implement E-Sports features, including Rainbow Six Siege. Another key game in E-Sports is Dota 2 and League Of Legends. The prize pools for the Dota 2 tournament is crowd sourced whereas CS and LOL uses sponsorship money. Prize pools have also grown exponential amounts with the winning teams now earning millions. Recently games such as Overwatch have introduced a whole new type of game to e-sports as the easy to play but hard to master gameplay and art style combined with very smooth and professional spectator tools mean that it is more optimised for E-Sports streaming which has encouraged other games to follow suit and develop features exclusively for E-Sports.

How are games affecting the games development industry

With the rapid growth of E-Sports in video games many game developers are trying to tailor their games so that they can be used in the E-Sports scene which obviously means rapid growth and attention for these smaller games, the e-sports scene is giving smaller developers an opportunity for their games to be exposed to the masses purely because of E-sports.

With this there are always going to be the positives and negatives of the effects of E-sports on these games.

One major positive is that there will be many more breakthroughs in game play features purely because everyone is trying to top each over and create the best E-sport game that they can, a prime example of this is PLAYERUNKNOWNS Battlegrounds and its competitor, Fortnite. Both games are constantly trying to top eachover which is a nice thing to see as it shows the developers care about their game and gives the player new features to play with in both games, everybody wins!

The negatives is that the market is flooded with clones of these games which are just plain boring or a blatant cash grab, we see this with games such as CSGO and rainbow six siege. Both games are superior to all of their competitors.

Social, Cultural and Ethical perspectives on E-sports

For a long time gaming was seen as a waste of the players time and it wouldn’t get them anywhere but over time with the popularity of E-sports these views have changed because people are making literal millions by competing in these video game tournaments such as CS-GO majors which have prize pools of multi millions which is split between the 5 players teams and their managers. The growth of video games inspires the growth of E-Sports which is a nice incentive for an improved stream of video game quality and competitive similar to the likes of football and basketball.

I feel that in a few years E-Sports could be seen as an actual sport with even larger tournaments and public appeal.

My Game as an E-Sport

My game will work as an E-Sport because of the competitive and strategic thinking required behind it. I feel that it will be interesting for viewers to watch as it will be constantly tense and when the big climactic fights happen it will bring excitement. This is why games like CSGO succeed so well because it starts of slow but gets interesting as soon as that first bullet is fired. The first person aspect works well for this because when the viewer is in spectator mode and can see anyone, they know that the players are locked to first person meaning that when two players are extremely close together the tension builds intensely.

Another reason it might work well is because killing the ai rewards players with drops adding a RNG element where a player could get health or more ammo but has to take the risk of giving away their position by firing their gun.