eSports: On Carmac

Michal Blicharz, aka Carmac, recently made an interesting post regarding eSports sustainability. To summarize, Carmac states that eSports in general are not sustainable because there's no incentive for the developer or publisher to support them. That's a great insight, and one worth digging into.

Carmac's thoughts are particularly valuable because he's primarily concerned with money. Most discussions of a game's eSports potential center on its competitiveness, depth, or broad appeal. That's only natural; those are the areas that matter to the gamers driving the discussion. Gamers often forget that money is a huge driving force behind sports, and therefore eSports.

Though that is the case, I believe Carmac makes three critical mistakes in his thought process:

1. He neglects sources of support outside of the developer or publisher.
2. He assumes that games which do not change will become boring.
3. He believes that an eSport must maintain its playerbase to survive.

While the developers and publishers are important, they are not the sole sources of support, financial or otherwise. Much of the history of eSports to date has occurred in spite of the developers and publishers rather than because of them. StarCraft didn't take off in South Korea because of any effort on Blizzard's part, but because of simple popularity and the subsequent establishment of KESPA and other organizations to support eSports. Ultimately demand is the most powerful force of support, and where it exists organizations will appear with supply.

Sports stand as a living rebuttal to the notion that an unchanging game will become boring. The rules of most popular sports have hardly changed in decades if not longer, yet they continue to pull in millions of viewers and fans. What keeps these games fresh are the efforts of the teams and players, not continual changes to the rules. Perhaps the continual state of flux that LoL exists in helps keep it from fading, but it's by no means a requirement.

Finally, more people watch sports than actively play them. While it's important for a sport to have a healthy base of players to draw new blood from, it's not necessary for its base of viewers to play. So long as the spectators can understand simply by watching they can be participants in the sport or eSport without having to actually play.

Carmac's insights are helpful, but in the end he's oversimplifying an incredibly complex and only partially understood phenomenon. We gamers could pay more attention to the money side of things when discussing eSports, but if becoming a sustainable eSport was as simple as choosing the right business model LoL wouldn't have been the first.