A Drop in the Bucket

Something that frequently gets overlooked is that --relatively speaking-- non-mobile video games are still something that not a lot of people play. 

Sure, video games may make more money than movies and music do combined*, but when you look at sales of the games themselves, you realize that a lot of money globally comes from not that many people. 

I was curious about how many copies of Madden 2024 were sold, and I discovered that it was around 5 million or so. To put that in perspective, EA sold Madden 2024 to roughly the entire population of Alabama. That may seem like a lot, but when you remember the population of the US --the prime target of Madden, given it's American Football-- is 333 million, you realize that's kind of a drop in the bucket. And when you realize that the average viewership of CBS' comedy Young Sheldon is 8 million viewers, you get a better comparison between passive viewing and active playing. 

MMOs are even more of a niche market, given that the largest MMO out there, World of Warcraft, pulls in somewhere between 4 to 8 million or so subscribers** globally. Yes, only at best 0.1% of the world's population play WoW. 

So, when people talk about how WoW was a phenomenon, it's all relative. More than twice as many people bought the Spice Girls' Spice than the best numbers World of Warcraft posted in the last 8 years.

And we don't want to compare WoW to the number of people who have cable and/or satellite television subscriptions, do we?

***

So why bring this up?

I was reminded of this because I frequently interact with people at work and at other places who aren't gamers of any sort, and they have --at best-- only the vaguest idea about what might be going on in the gaming industry. They may know that game companies are making a ton of money because it improves their retirement accounts, but beyond that they are left in the dark.

When people find out I'm a gamer, I usually get a "Oh, like Madden?" question directed my way.*** 

If I respond with an "Actually, I play WoW," I get "those" looks. 

The "you're a weirdo" looks. The ones that I used to get when people found out I play Dungeons and Dragons.**** I have no idea what it'd be like if I said League of Legends or Fortnite --since I play neither of those-- but I'd imagine there'd be similar reactions. 

The irony is that people in my WoW friend group aren't all aware of the industry beyond WoW itself. When I mentioned Baldur's Gate 3, only one person in the chat said "Yeah, I play that too!" There were a couple "can't afford that right now" and a few "Huh? What game is that?" reactions.

Usually right about now someone will point out those profit numbers and how many people tend to watch the League championships. That's nice and all, but League still has a ways to go to match the viewership of the 2023 Major League Baseball World Series, and that World Series was the least watched Series in television history.

By comparison, 300 million people
worldwide watched Joe Frazier beat
Muhammad Ali in 1971.
From Sports Illustrated.

It's kind of strange how boxing doesn't have the cultural cachet that it used to have, but I honestly believe that the pursuit of profit and moving boxing from something you could see on television to a strictly pay-per-view environment hurt the long term health of the sport. If you don't have eyeballs watching your product, it'll fade from public consciousness.*****

So, video games are this financial juggernaut, but that's largely on the backs of mobile games and live service games, where you constantly feed money to the beast.

But the long term cultural impact? Well, that remains to be seen.

My perspective as a gamer is that gaming is having a large cultural impact, but that's because I'm inside the ecosystem. However, my work and life take me outside the ecosystem, and for that reason alone I remain skeptical. We may no longer be in a world where a single cultural event dominates over all others --such as the final episode of M*A*S*H or the release of Michael Jackson's Thriller-- but that doesn't mean that gaming is lost in the noise.

I think that we gamers just need to realize that we're not as culturally important as we think we are.

*As of 2022 via a Forbes article which I won't link to because it's behind a "stop using your adblocker" wall.

**Courtesy of the leaked graphic about WoW subscriptions.

***If they don't at first think that I go out to gambling casinos, that is.

****That's gotten better over the years, but you still have to read the room before you declare your full frontal nerdity to people.

*****And before somebody pipes up with the violence inherent in boxing, the popularity of MMA and UFC belies that. Those latter two can be easily found on television without pay-per-view.

Made The Big Time At Last

Watching the world go by
Surprising it goes so fast
Johnny looked around him
And said "Well I made the big time at last."
--Shooting Star by Bad Company

I was watching some college football yesterday* on ESPN. If you've ever seen a sporting event on ESPN, you'd know that a staple of ESPN's coverage is the ubiquitous ticker at the bottom of the screen that every other sportscast seems to have added to their own coverage. The ticker covers all sorts of sports, and a measure of a sport's popularity in the US is whether it gets a line on the ticker. For example, about 20 years ago you'd never have seen soccer on the ticker outside of MLS scores, but now there's coverage of the Premier League, La Liga, the Bundesliga, and Italy's Serie A.**

Even knowing this fact, I was surprised to see this on the ticker yesterday:

I know that eSports has been broadcast on ESPN and other channels in the past, but this took me by surprise. Oh, not that FNatic lost --I don't follow eSports enough to know whether FNatic had won any LoL Championships since xPeke left the team-- but that League of Legends was even on the ticker at all.

Well done, eSports. You've now made it to the big time.

And I'd love to have been in a bar somewhere watching a bunch of college football fans when THAT showed up on the ticker for the first time.





*Yes, American football. And "watch" is a relative term here, as I was cleaning and doing the laundry.

**As a measure of soccer's penetration into the US monolith, NBC broadcasts the Premier League, FOX Sports the Bundesliga, and ESPN will show the occasional Serie A and La Liga match. ESPN and FOX also share broadcast rights for MLS, and ESPN streams the second tier US league the USL over its ESPN+ service. Even the National Women's Soccer League gets airplay on ESPN, and anyone who says that the women's league doesn't have quality soccer hasn't watched a match. Quite a few players on the US, Canadian, Brazilian, and other national teams play in the NWSL. While I doubt that soccer will ever displace American football in the national consciousness, soccer is rapidly closing the gap in popularity between it and the other "big four" American sports leagues: baseball's MLB, basketball's NBA, football's NFL, and hockey's NHL.

The Curse of Success

I spent part of last night watching a documentary by the PBS show Frontline. If you've never watched a Frontline documentary, they're very much worth the time.* This particular time, however, the Frontline documentary was on daily fantasy sports. Called The Fantasy Sports Gamble, it talks about the explosion of daily fantasy sports into the popular consciousness, whether daily fantasy sports such as Draft Kings and Fanduel are gambling or "games of skill", and how "normal" online gambling subverts US law to cater to US players.

While I'm not exactly planning on playing any of those games**, I did note one almost throwaway comment toward the end of the episode. One of the people promoting a lesser known daily fantasy sports site was emphasizing the growth aspect of some of the "lesser" sports in the US, such as cricket and eSports.

That got me to wondering just how we truly know that eSports are legit.

My quick conclusion is we don't.

Unlike, say, other sports or "sporting activities", such as football (both varieties), basketball, auto racing, and even extreme sports, there's a physical gamespace that people have to compete in. While the space could be tampered with, that tampering affects all competitors equally. But with eSports, the gamespace is virtual, and controlled by a central system. That central system becomes more of a black box, where you have to assume everything is equal for both sides***.

But what if it isn't?

And, more importantly, how can you tell if it isn't?

You have to assume that the code compilation for eSport games didn't include any tweaks to the code designed to adversely favor a specific build at a specific time, but with growing amounts of money involved, you can bet that organized crime is trying to find a way to game the system in their favor.

I'm not talking about players being paid to throw matches, as can be found in this article from Den of Geek, but the employees at the company from being paid by organized crime to make very small code tweaks that will favor one style of play over another. Between two evenly matched teams, just a small tweak of a cooldown or a very slight manipulation of a crit size would be enough to influence the game. Or, to put it another way, if there was a code tweak in a Mario Kart Tourney that someone playing Rosalina would have a larger than normal chance of getting a lightning bolt or a Bullet Bill. It may not ensure victory, but it would certainly tilt the game in favor of someone who plays Rosalina.

And what organized crime would want is not exactly a sure thing, as that would cause speculation, but a decent chance at a sure thing.

***

If you follow auto racing, some leagues enforce more standards than others. Formula One racing is at the "let 'em play" end of the spectrum, while NASCAR is at the "rules lawyer" end. But that "rules lawyer" end of the spectrum means that NASCAR spends a lot of time measuring and testing the cars and other equipment of their participants to ensure there's no funny business going on.

The reason why I bring this up is obvious: without extensive testing, that black box is more mysterious than ever.

It's not as if gamblers will not stop sniffing around what they feel is a sure thing. The sheer chutzpah of some gambling sites to sponsor soccer teams (such as Stoke City having Bet365 as their primary sponsor the past few years) shows that other places around the world have a different view towards gambling than the US'. But still, as eSports will become more popular and more money flows in their direction, there will be more attempts to manipulate the system for profit.

It goes with the territory, I suppose, just as long as eSports doesn't have their own version of the 1919 Black Sox scandal.

"Yeah, I'm gonna play some 2x2s tonight. Wanna come?"
From the movie Eight Men Out. From moviefone.com

*You can watch Frontline shows online for free, and they're definitely worth it. One of the best ones from last year, League of Denial, talks about the concussion epidemic in the NFL, and inspired the Will Smith film Concussion.

**Full disclosure: I have played Fantasy Football in "leagues" when I was in college and upwards of 10 years ago, but I've not played in years. I no longer even fill out a bracket for the Men's and Women's NCAA Basketball Tournament, because I tend to be lousy at picking who will win.

***Not counting individual build and toon differences; there's a reason why Blizz and other PvP-centric companies are constantly tweaking class and racial abilities to prevent the "new hotness" from cleaning up on the Arena or Battleground for too long.

Explain to me again how watching sports gets you fitter

The broadcast of Heroes of the Dorm on ESPN2 has been generating a bit of controversy.

You'd think that eSports wouldn't generate that much heat, given that the finals were at 9:30 on a Sunday night on ESPN2. Most NBA games were over for the day --Sunday games tend to be shown earlier in the day than on Saturday-- and MLB was on regular ESPN. Without college basketball and the NBA regular season, there's a whole lot of "not much" on Sunday nights on ESPN2.*

But of course, some people had to bitch.

You don't have to watch to get the gist of it. ESPN Radio's Colin Cowherd doesn't like eSports, and he wants you to know that ESPN made a mistake (saying it mildly) by putting Heroes of the Dorm on ESPN2.  Sportsgrid and The Mary Sue both have their own take on Cowherd's rant, but both boil down to the same thing: ESPN also broadcasts the National Spelling Bee, poker games, and eating contests, so saying eSports have no place on ESPN is pretty silly.

Now, the question about whether eSports are "real sports" is quite another thing.

There are games that qualify as sports that make me raise my eyebrows. Bowling, for starters. Golf, for another.** While both are competitive, you don't see people get fit playing either sport. You could make an argument about golf, but the way most people play the game now (using carts) any fitness gained from walking 18 holes has pretty much evaporated.

And auto racing.... Let's not go there.

George Carlin's 1986 clip on sports.

I don't think I need to tell you that he's a bit profane,

and that he says a few things that are more offensive now than

back then.

All of the so-called sports I listed above are tests of skill, but they won't get you fit.

My personal definition of something that is a sport is that it is an athletic physical activity/game that will provide good exercise. Handball, tennis, running, and basketball are all sports. Golf, auto racing, bowling are not.

eSports are not sports by my definition.

That said, eSports are definitely tests of physical skill, just not enough to give you a good workout. If that were the case, my "work" of sitting around and typing at the keyboard all day would qualify as "exercise".*** eSports fall under those other so-called sports (golf, etc.) in that they are all tests of physical skill, but eSports also veer into mental skill territory found with other games (spelling bee, chess, poker, bridge, Scrabble, etc.) that have big championships.

eSports are at that intersection between physical and mental skill that, for some reason, make some people uneasy. Probably because they remember goofing around playing video games and saying "Wouldn't it be cool if you could make money PLAYING these things?" But the reality is, this sort of level of competition turns the game itself into work. LoL teams like Fnatic pretty much work at the game all day, almost every day, and the level of skill involved almost guarantees both burnout and a drop in skill level once pro eSports players hit their mid-late 20s. If you thought the burnout level at the progression raiding guilds was high, you ain't seen nothing yet.

But.

Playing a game (or a sport) isn't the same as watching it.

When you hear people gripe about eSports not belonging on ESPN  because "they're not real sports", my initial response is "What does it matter to you?" After all, does watching basketball make me fit?

Hell no.

It's just people's biases kicking in, and they don't like the fact that video games require a skill that they (likely) don't have. If Colin Cowherd was good enough at LoL, do you think that he'd turn down a boatload of cash to play the game in a pro league?

Again, hell no.

Would ESPN be silly to turn down a chance to get in on the ground floor of something that could become a huge entertainment franchise?

Hell yes.

I'm not a big fan of ESPN, but they've got the right of it this time.





*NHL Hockey is on NBC and NBCSN, the NFL (in the fall) has Sunday night games on NBC, and the European soccer/football league games are long over by the time US prime time rolls around.

**For the record: my grandparents were avid bowlers and loved-loved-loved watching PBA King of Bowling on television back in the 70s/80s/90s; my father is a true golf nut to the point where he used to hit the links with snow on the ground if the weather was warm enough. I grew up watching him putt on the family room in the evenings.

***On second thought, I'd rather not give somebody the idea that maybe I could get exercise by coding. That's kind of a depressing concept.


EtA: Clarified that my dad used to play golf while snow was on the ground.

Not Your Typical ESPN Fare

I'll come right out and admit it, I'm a college basketball junkie.

If there's a game on --men's or women's-- I'll likely be watching the game (or at least be familiar with it).*

I've also developed a minor addiction to Barclay's Premier League football (thanks to NBC Sports Network) and NCAA Women's softball, which means that I frequently scour the NCAA games on ESPN3 for something to have on in the background while I'm doing housework on the weekend.**

Well, there is a new thing available on ESPN3 that has gotten some writeups the past month or so but I've managed to avoid: Heroes of the Dorm, a college oriented Tourney for Heroes of the Storm.

ESPN likely looked at the number of people who a) pay money to watch streaming of BlizzCon online (or via DirecTV) and b) the exploding interest in eSports  (see their broadcasts of the League of Legends World Championships) and decided to throw some money Blizzard's way to get a HotS tourney going for broadcast.

Unlike a lot of the other ESPN sports, this one has the feel of a brand new broadcast searching for it's groove. If you want an apt sports broadcast comparison, I'd say it's similar to the FOX Sports One's Big East broadcasts, where the quality on the court is much better than the quality in the booth and in the TV trucks.***

Still, even though you have to have a cable/satellite subscription (or your ISP has an agreement to carry it) to watch Heroes of the Dorm, I'm sure that this is a win-win for both parties. ESPN locks up more of the eSports market, and Blizzard gets a partner that will (eventually) push a high level of professionalism and promotion into the eSports environment. For people like me who have little interest in eSports, ESPN provides legitimacy that you wouldn't have found elsewhere.

That legitimacy will inevitably cause a backlash from the "real sports" crowd. Even though these games are on ESPN3 or WatchESPN, I'm sure there will be gripes and jokes about how the nerdy "non-sports" masquerading as "real sports" are taking away from the "real sports" on television.

In a bizarro-world sense, it's the Jocks vs. the Geeks all over again, but this time for television viewing ratings.

Does the NCAA Basketball Tourney have to worry about ratings competition from eSports? Not likely, but what is likely is a resistance to an expansion of what exactly "sports" is. Never mind that Texas Hold 'em poker tournaments have been broadcast on ESPN for over a decade, that's a MAN'S game. Not these sissy eSports that nerdy guys in their basement play.

As for me, I'm not likely to watch the games --I'd rather play an MMO or MOBA myself rather than watch someone else play-- but I think this entire debate is silly. If you want to watch someone play eSports, more power to you. If ESPN wants to get in on the ground level with Blizzard for this HotS Tourney, great.**** There's plenty of bandwidth for everyone, so why bitch?





*Want to hear someone complain about how UCLA should never have been given an invite to the NCAA Tourney? I'm your guy. As soon as Baylor lost in the Second Round, I called my dad --an avid Xavier fan-- and told him that X is about to advance right through to the Sweet Sixteen. The one team in the Rounds of 64 and 32 that could beat X just got upset by Georgia State, and X would have an easy time of it until they'd run into the Arizona buzzsaw.

**It's kind of hard to play an MMO while doing housework; not to say that I haven't tried, just not had much success doing both that and getting cleaning done.

***For the record, I'm not a Big East fan. I'll watch the games --mainly to root against Xavier, I'm a Dayton fan-- but outside of when Bill Raftery and Gus Johnson are in the booth the other broadcast teams just aren't at the level of quality that you'd expect in an ESPN or even a CBS broadcast. Some of it is also due to FOX constantly insisting on being ultra "hip" and "edgy", when neither is necessary for broadcasting or reporting on games.

****I'm sure that ESPN will really amp up their League of Legends coverage this fall, based on their experience with both the Heroes of the Dorm tourney and last year's LoL World Championships. If nothing else, ESPN is a master at promotion.