Jaxel
Administrator
If you were watching my Salty Battles #08 stream yesterday, you may have witnessed that sometime during the event I was informed of a new "hot topic" within the fighting game community (FGC). Admittedly, I have done zero research on this topic; but the facts on the issue are not nearly as important as the public perception and what they believe to be true.
My knowledge of the topic in question is directly related to discussions (or should I say, arguments) with the stream monsters on the twitch.tv/8wayrun channel. Readers may say "but thats not true", or "he/she never said that"; but as stated before, its all about perception. This article is my entry into the ongoing and current debate known as "eSports VS FGC"... Don't want to hear what I have to say? Well I have a website, so I have a voice.
[EDITORS NOTE: The opinions of Jaxel in this article in no way represent the opinion Soulcalibur community as a whole. He is just one person, who happens to have a napoleon complex and delusions of grandeur. The community appreciates what EVO/SRK does for us.]
Before I get started, let me point out that the "FGC" we're talking about is not our community; it is strictly the EVO community, the SRK community, the Capcom community. I don't consider myself a part of that community; they have traditionally treated us like garbage and I know for a fact they don't respect us. In the past, when I've posted Soulcalibur events on their forums, they quickly responded with "Get that shit off of here!". Its the main reason why the Soulcalibur community has always done things our own way; we have our own tournaments, our own website, our own streams and our own community.
So why do we continue dealing with them? Because like it or not, they are a stepping stone for us to get more recognition. And this, case in point, is the entire premise of this article. More recognition leads to higher turnouts. Higher turnouts lead to larger pots. Larger pots lead to better competition. And better competition leads to more recognition. Ah, the circle of life. As long as we keep improving, the chances of us getting more recognition, professional gaming league status or corporate sponsorship increases as well.
The FGC has reached this level. Much larger professional leagues such as NASL, WCG, MLG and others have begun to show increasing interest in fighting games. They have reached the next step, where they can start working with the "big boys", with large corporate backing and full scale sponsorships. Games like Starcraft and Halo have blown up in the competetive circuit thanks to these eSport professional gaming leagues. So what's the problem? I mean, this is a good thing right?
Well, yes and... yes, absolutely. Its absolutely a good thing. So why the detractors? Why does the majority of the FGC abhor the idea; to the point where the public impression is that the "leaders" of the FGC have been subverting the efforts of mergers with eSports leagues. Well that has to do with history; and as Albert Einstein once said, "Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results". So if eSports leagues have historically treated the FGC like shit, why should they expect any different looking towards the future?
Well thats simple, the FGC we have now is far different than the FGC from 3 years ago and older. Back then, the eSports leagues treated the FGC like shit, because they were shit, they were a sideshow. 4 years ago, if you asked any member of the FGC what they thought about the future of fighting games, they probably would have told you that there wasn't one. Fighting games were dead, they didn't matter anymore; and back then even Soulcalibur IV was expected to be the final game in the series.
So what happened? What changed in the past 3 years that suddenly makes fighting games relevant again? Seth Killian... and Street Fighter 4. We can thank Capcom for many things, and for me, thats Soulcalibur V. Yes, Soulcalibur V would not be happening if not for Capcom single-handedly reviving the fighting game genre. Suddenly, not only do we matter again, but we are bigger than ever. So big, that eSports leagues are bidding for our attention. They can no longer treat the FGC like shit.
But still, the FGC is as xenophobic as usual. The same basic xenophobic nature that lead to the expected death of the genre a few years back. How do you expect to grow if you shun away outsiders? Its one of the many reasons I founded 8wayrun in the first place; to help get away of the existing prejudices within the community. People are afraid that by working with eSports, eSports will take over fighting games, destroy our rulesets, limit our chances for corporate sponsorships, favor only the "best" players, and destroy any chances for "grass roots" tournaments. And frankly, none of these fears make sense.
These leagues taking over fighting games? How is this possible? By an eSports league picking up fighting games, does that make every event outside of the league irrelevant? Well how is that any different than it is now? Is a random tournament at a random cyber cafe irrelevant in comparison to a major? Absolutely. But will a NASL event (for example) suddenly make EVO irrelevant? For that matter, does NASL make Dreamhack, WCG or MLG irrelevant? Of course not.
Will they destroy our rulesets? Chances are, yes they will. All these leagues have their own rulesets and their own methods. But that doesn't force us to follow them. Each league has their own rules, and events from outside each league aren't required to follow the rules of the others. For that matter, right now the FGC is forced to follow EVO rules; because they are our only choice. We must conform to them, because we have nowhere else to go. This will give us an oppurtunity for choice.
Limited corporate sponsorship? I haven't seen any evidence of this being true. There are half a dozen major leagues for Starcraft 2, and they have no issues finding sponsors. Will joining with eSports suddenly make it impossible for us to get our own sponsors? Well we weren't getting the sponsors in the first place! If you are big enough, the sponsors will sign; and eSports is one of the best ways to prove that we're big enough. In fact, it will probably make it easier to find sponsors!
Professional gaming leagues only help the absolute highest tiers of players? Fracturing the community into "pros" and "everyone else"? This is one of the most assanine arguments I've heard someone pull out of thin air in the need to hate on eSports. It makes no sense. Sure, in Starcaft, the tournaments have a very limited number of players. Do you know why? Because matches take over an hour! But they do in fact have a larger pool of players, and they are weeded out in qualifiers throughout the year.
But going back to the FGC, why is this a bad argument? Because its no different than how it is now. Our so called "grass roots" events only support the highest tiers of players. Only the top ranking players make any money playing in tournaments, and the rest lose money in entry fees and travel expenses. The only difference is that it doesn't take us a season to weed out the "pot-monsters", we can do it in a day.
And of course the so called "destruction of grass roots events" brings us full circle back to the fear of eSports leagues "taking over" fighting games. The fear is that with eSports in the picture, events like SweetJohnnyCage's ECT or Alex Jebailey's CEO suddenly can't happen. These large grass roots events simply can't survive in the fierce competition of corporate sponsorship and marketting. This I have to admit, is a definite possibility. But in response to that, I have a question... Does it matter?
These grass roots events are only important because we don't currently have any large eSports leagues to latch onto. We only need these events as it stands, because they fill a vacuum due to the lack of majors. Once fighting games permeate the eSports leagues more fully and there is a glut of events (with large cash prizes, mind you), the need for grass roots will quickly evaporate. The point of "grass roots" is to grow; you shouldn't want to stay grass roots forever.
Which brings me back to Einstein. Historically, in the FGC, unless you have a way to atract new blood you will get the majority of players in your community within the first month of the game's release. What determines the longevity of your game is dependant on how well you can stave off the exodus to other games. From what I've seen, the FGC only has 2 ways to attract new blood. The most obvious is a game refresh, such as a new release, or a major patch; but the FGC has no control of this. The other? Herculean events such as EVO; which the FGC can control. Tournament attendance has traditionally spiked in the weeks prior to EVO.
Unfortunately, this brings me back to what I said before about choice. Right now we have EVO, and thats it. EVO is the life-blood of FGC, and we are stuck with them. The lively-hood of our games are largely dependant on the whims of a few people and whether or not they like and/or respect us. In 2004, the top two players in Soulcalibur 2, Mick and RTD (teammates) decided to not play seriously in grand finals as they were splitting their winnings after the event anyways. Except for grand finals, SC2 was a success, but because of the whims of the EVO staff, Soulcalibur did not return to EVO for 5 years.
In 2009, EVO brought Soulcalibur IV into the fold. Another succesful event, with lots of hype and great enthusiasm from both the players and the audience. As soon as EVO was over, many considered SC4 dead. Why? Because the game would not be at EVO 2010. Had EVO 2010 featured SC4, many players would have stuck with the game, strictly because it had the EVO card. DOA4 was one of the biggest games of it's time strictly due to it's membership into both the WCG and CGL. Entrance into eSports gaming leagues mean that SC5 could not only stay alive long after EVO has shunned it (and they will), but it could actually grow even larger as it becomes more ubiquitous in eSports events.
The fanatical anti-eSports sentiment I see in the FGC seems to be about territorialism. "It's our community, stop treading on our turf!" People are so afraid of getting their toes stepped on that they will go out of their way to sabotage the chances of their constituents to get larger prizes and corporate sponsorships. In a way, they are doing a disservice to their own community members because they are afraid of losing their power. It's not that they are shooting themselves in the foot, they are shooting their community members in the foot!
The sadder part is that the leaders of the FGC have convinced the masses that boycotting eSports is a good idea! As if they are protecting the "purity" of the fighting game community; a community that has traditionally be very mean to newer players. As if "professionalism" is a bad thing! Professionalism will not get rid of the hype or excitement from matches. eSports can not only increase the prize pools for top players, but make it easier for people to find events and competition.
Overall, the many benefits of joining eSports leagues to players, far outweighs the disadvantages posed to the few leaders in power. In fact, the biggest concern we should have now, is that the damage being done by certain individuals in the FGC, doesn't hurt the chances for us, the Soulcalibur community. Many of these eSports leagues may think that the FGC represent the entirety of the fighting game community as a whole. Hell, if they don't want in, we'll take their place!
* ADDENDUM * (added December 18, 2011)
I took this article off the front page of 8WR because I got a lot of outrage from people saying that this article would sour our chances of being at EVO. Honestly, if you guys think that SC5 won't be at EVO, simply because of this article; then you have a pretty low opinion on the integrity of the EVO committee.
Nowhere in the article do I say "Fuck EVO!". What I do say is that right now EVO holds the keys to our car; they are the deciders of our destiny; the future of our game rests in their hands. EVO holds the reigns for many fighting games, whether they know about it or not. I go on to say that joining in with eSports will help solve the issue of this monopoly. They say, "Don't put all your eggs in one basket".
The dissenters against eSports basically say that if an eSports league crumbles, then it essentially pulls the rug out from under whatever games they are hosting. Really? If MLG dies, does Starcraft 2 go down with the ship? Yes, when CGL crashed, DOA4 died... but thats because DOA4 should have died years earlier! The help of CGL was able to prop up DOA4 and support those players long after they would have been able to do on their own.
However, right now if EVO crumbles, what happens to the fighting game community? As long as there is interest left in a game, no league drama can kill it. As long as people keep wanting to support and play a game, new tournaments will fill the void. However, if the leaders of the FGC burn their bridges with eSports, the only tournaments we will have to fill the void are "grass roots"... in which case, all of our efforts to go mainstream will be for naught.
* ADDENDUM 2 * (added December 19, 2011)
Okay... I'm going to give you guys a scenario, but first, lets try to agree on something: eSports leagues WILL have fighting games in them. This is an unavoidable fact. It's not something that we can control. Can we agree on this? Okay, we are agreed.
Now, lets say we reject all support from the eSports leagues. What happens? MLG runs the tournaments their way, with their rules, likely pissing a lot of people off. This leads to many different possible outcomes. The obvious one, being that eSports leagues say "fuck it" to fighting games, and everything returns back to how it is now.
However, there is another possibility which people are forgetting. Since the FGC is not working with eSports, we end up having EVO majors and MLG majors on the same weekend. People may not like the way MLG is run, but the prizes are bigger. Sooner or later top players have to make a choice and decide to go with MLG because of the bigger pots. EVO events get smaller and smaller, and the FGC's control of the situation diminishes because they aren't working with MLG to rectify any issues. We all lose.
Now, lets say we try to work with eSports instead. Now we at least have some connection with them, and we can offer our advice and try to fix the many issues they've had in the past (although, who knows if they will listen; but I've heard their recent Tekken events have been run very well). We can help to try to fix issues, as well as make sure events don't compete with each other. Worst case? eSports leagues say "fuck it" and everything returns back to how it is now. Best case? We all win.
Now, Tocool asked in the 8wayrun chat room yesterday, "Why do we even need eSports? We've been fine for 15 years without them. Why do people suddenly think we'll die without them?" (paraphrased; yes, I do read the chat room, even if I don't always talk) This is an excellent question, which I don't feel has been properly answered yet in all the discussions in the FGC. Well to put it simply, its because of "escalation".
Fighting games are getting bigger, and people's times are limited. The number of fighting games coming out are increasing, and the amount of money being thrown around at major events is skyrocketing. We've been seeing a growing trend that players tend to flock to the bigger events and leave the less profitable games behind. A lot of players I know play Marvel and/or Street Fighter right now because thats where the players are, and thats where the money is... it doesn't matter whether they like the game or not.
Now, as stated before, eSports WILL have fighting games. The games featured in eSports leagues will naturally have the larger community because of the amount of money involved. We see this in the MOBA community. League of Legends, while having a huge advantage due to it being free to play from the start, has the majority of the community. And as other games come out, or go free to play; whether or not they are better is irrelevant unless they have some major promished cash in tournaments such as DOTA2.
So why do we suddenly need eSports, when we never needed it before? Because of limited time. If Soulcalibur V doesn't have any eSports leagues behind it (and I do consider EVO an eSports league, even though its "unique" in it's own right), we'll quickly be hearing the same things after the first 6 months: "I like SC5, but I see no reason to spend my limited time playing it, instead of practicing these other games which actually have huge tournaments". And sooner or later that common sentement becomes a downward spiral which turns into: "I like SC5, but no one else plays it, so why bother?".
In the past, a $200 payout tournament, and a $400 payout tournament for a lot of players wasn't enough to convince them to give up the game they preferred for the higher profit. But because of escalation, the margin of difference in payouts between the less popular games and the crowd-pleasers have become so large that they can't be ignored. Stick with a smaller game with a $500 payout, or switch to the less fun game, and try for that $5,000 payout.
My knowledge of the topic in question is directly related to discussions (or should I say, arguments) with the stream monsters on the twitch.tv/8wayrun channel. Readers may say "but thats not true", or "he/she never said that"; but as stated before, its all about perception. This article is my entry into the ongoing and current debate known as "eSports VS FGC"... Don't want to hear what I have to say? Well I have a website, so I have a voice.
[EDITORS NOTE: The opinions of Jaxel in this article in no way represent the opinion Soulcalibur community as a whole. He is just one person, who happens to have a napoleon complex and delusions of grandeur. The community appreciates what EVO/SRK does for us.]
Don't cut off your nose to spite your face... Which I'll do right now!
Before I get started, let me point out that the "FGC" we're talking about is not our community; it is strictly the EVO community, the SRK community, the Capcom community. I don't consider myself a part of that community; they have traditionally treated us like garbage and I know for a fact they don't respect us. In the past, when I've posted Soulcalibur events on their forums, they quickly responded with "Get that shit off of here!". Its the main reason why the Soulcalibur community has always done things our own way; we have our own tournaments, our own website, our own streams and our own community.
So why do we continue dealing with them? Because like it or not, they are a stepping stone for us to get more recognition. And this, case in point, is the entire premise of this article. More recognition leads to higher turnouts. Higher turnouts lead to larger pots. Larger pots lead to better competition. And better competition leads to more recognition. Ah, the circle of life. As long as we keep improving, the chances of us getting more recognition, professional gaming league status or corporate sponsorship increases as well.
The circle of resting on the laurels of other people's work.
The FGC has reached this level. Much larger professional leagues such as NASL, WCG, MLG and others have begun to show increasing interest in fighting games. They have reached the next step, where they can start working with the "big boys", with large corporate backing and full scale sponsorships. Games like Starcraft and Halo have blown up in the competetive circuit thanks to these eSport professional gaming leagues. So what's the problem? I mean, this is a good thing right?
Well, yes and... yes, absolutely. Its absolutely a good thing. So why the detractors? Why does the majority of the FGC abhor the idea; to the point where the public impression is that the "leaders" of the FGC have been subverting the efforts of mergers with eSports leagues. Well that has to do with history; and as Albert Einstein once said, "Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results". So if eSports leagues have historically treated the FGC like shit, why should they expect any different looking towards the future?
Well thats simple, the FGC we have now is far different than the FGC from 3 years ago and older. Back then, the eSports leagues treated the FGC like shit, because they were shit, they were a sideshow. 4 years ago, if you asked any member of the FGC what they thought about the future of fighting games, they probably would have told you that there wasn't one. Fighting games were dead, they didn't matter anymore; and back then even Soulcalibur IV was expected to be the final game in the series.
So what happened? What changed in the past 3 years that suddenly makes fighting games relevant again? Seth Killian... and Street Fighter 4. We can thank Capcom for many things, and for me, thats Soulcalibur V. Yes, Soulcalibur V would not be happening if not for Capcom single-handedly reviving the fighting game genre. Suddenly, not only do we matter again, but we are bigger than ever. So big, that eSports leagues are bidding for our attention. They can no longer treat the FGC like shit.
But still, the FGC is as xenophobic as usual. The same basic xenophobic nature that lead to the expected death of the genre a few years back. How do you expect to grow if you shun away outsiders? Its one of the many reasons I founded 8wayrun in the first place; to help get away of the existing prejudices within the community. People are afraid that by working with eSports, eSports will take over fighting games, destroy our rulesets, limit our chances for corporate sponsorships, favor only the "best" players, and destroy any chances for "grass roots" tournaments. And frankly, none of these fears make sense.
Why would you want to be a part of The Grass Roots?
These leagues taking over fighting games? How is this possible? By an eSports league picking up fighting games, does that make every event outside of the league irrelevant? Well how is that any different than it is now? Is a random tournament at a random cyber cafe irrelevant in comparison to a major? Absolutely. But will a NASL event (for example) suddenly make EVO irrelevant? For that matter, does NASL make Dreamhack, WCG or MLG irrelevant? Of course not.
Will they destroy our rulesets? Chances are, yes they will. All these leagues have their own rulesets and their own methods. But that doesn't force us to follow them. Each league has their own rules, and events from outside each league aren't required to follow the rules of the others. For that matter, right now the FGC is forced to follow EVO rules; because they are our only choice. We must conform to them, because we have nowhere else to go. This will give us an oppurtunity for choice.
Limited corporate sponsorship? I haven't seen any evidence of this being true. There are half a dozen major leagues for Starcraft 2, and they have no issues finding sponsors. Will joining with eSports suddenly make it impossible for us to get our own sponsors? Well we weren't getting the sponsors in the first place! If you are big enough, the sponsors will sign; and eSports is one of the best ways to prove that we're big enough. In fact, it will probably make it easier to find sponsors!
Professional gaming leagues only help the absolute highest tiers of players? Fracturing the community into "pros" and "everyone else"? This is one of the most assanine arguments I've heard someone pull out of thin air in the need to hate on eSports. It makes no sense. Sure, in Starcaft, the tournaments have a very limited number of players. Do you know why? Because matches take over an hour! But they do in fact have a larger pool of players, and they are weeded out in qualifiers throughout the year.
But going back to the FGC, why is this a bad argument? Because its no different than how it is now. Our so called "grass roots" events only support the highest tiers of players. Only the top ranking players make any money playing in tournaments, and the rest lose money in entry fees and travel expenses. The only difference is that it doesn't take us a season to weed out the "pot-monsters", we can do it in a day.
Not that kind of pot monster!
And of course the so called "destruction of grass roots events" brings us full circle back to the fear of eSports leagues "taking over" fighting games. The fear is that with eSports in the picture, events like SweetJohnnyCage's ECT or Alex Jebailey's CEO suddenly can't happen. These large grass roots events simply can't survive in the fierce competition of corporate sponsorship and marketting. This I have to admit, is a definite possibility. But in response to that, I have a question... Does it matter?
These grass roots events are only important because we don't currently have any large eSports leagues to latch onto. We only need these events as it stands, because they fill a vacuum due to the lack of majors. Once fighting games permeate the eSports leagues more fully and there is a glut of events (with large cash prizes, mind you), the need for grass roots will quickly evaporate. The point of "grass roots" is to grow; you shouldn't want to stay grass roots forever.
Which brings me back to Einstein. Historically, in the FGC, unless you have a way to atract new blood you will get the majority of players in your community within the first month of the game's release. What determines the longevity of your game is dependant on how well you can stave off the exodus to other games. From what I've seen, the FGC only has 2 ways to attract new blood. The most obvious is a game refresh, such as a new release, or a major patch; but the FGC has no control of this. The other? Herculean events such as EVO; which the FGC can control. Tournament attendance has traditionally spiked in the weeks prior to EVO.
Unfortunately, this brings me back to what I said before about choice. Right now we have EVO, and thats it. EVO is the life-blood of FGC, and we are stuck with them. The lively-hood of our games are largely dependant on the whims of a few people and whether or not they like and/or respect us. In 2004, the top two players in Soulcalibur 2, Mick and RTD (teammates) decided to not play seriously in grand finals as they were splitting their winnings after the event anyways. Except for grand finals, SC2 was a success, but because of the whims of the EVO staff, Soulcalibur did not return to EVO for 5 years.
In 2009, EVO brought Soulcalibur IV into the fold. Another succesful event, with lots of hype and great enthusiasm from both the players and the audience. As soon as EVO was over, many considered SC4 dead. Why? Because the game would not be at EVO 2010. Had EVO 2010 featured SC4, many players would have stuck with the game, strictly because it had the EVO card. DOA4 was one of the biggest games of it's time strictly due to it's membership into both the WCG and CGL. Entrance into eSports gaming leagues mean that SC5 could not only stay alive long after EVO has shunned it (and they will), but it could actually grow even larger as it becomes more ubiquitous in eSports events.
The fanatical anti-eSports sentiment I see in the FGC seems to be about territorialism. "It's our community, stop treading on our turf!" People are so afraid of getting their toes stepped on that they will go out of their way to sabotage the chances of their constituents to get larger prizes and corporate sponsorships. In a way, they are doing a disservice to their own community members because they are afraid of losing their power. It's not that they are shooting themselves in the foot, they are shooting their community members in the foot!
The sadder part is that the leaders of the FGC have convinced the masses that boycotting eSports is a good idea! As if they are protecting the "purity" of the fighting game community; a community that has traditionally be very mean to newer players. As if "professionalism" is a bad thing! Professionalism will not get rid of the hype or excitement from matches. eSports can not only increase the prize pools for top players, but make it easier for people to find events and competition.
Overall, the many benefits of joining eSports leagues to players, far outweighs the disadvantages posed to the few leaders in power. In fact, the biggest concern we should have now, is that the damage being done by certain individuals in the FGC, doesn't hurt the chances for us, the Soulcalibur community. Many of these eSports leagues may think that the FGC represent the entirety of the fighting game community as a whole. Hell, if they don't want in, we'll take their place!
Support Soulcalibur V for eSports!
* ADDENDUM * (added December 18, 2011)
I took this article off the front page of 8WR because I got a lot of outrage from people saying that this article would sour our chances of being at EVO. Honestly, if you guys think that SC5 won't be at EVO, simply because of this article; then you have a pretty low opinion on the integrity of the EVO committee.
Nowhere in the article do I say "Fuck EVO!". What I do say is that right now EVO holds the keys to our car; they are the deciders of our destiny; the future of our game rests in their hands. EVO holds the reigns for many fighting games, whether they know about it or not. I go on to say that joining in with eSports will help solve the issue of this monopoly. They say, "Don't put all your eggs in one basket".
The dissenters against eSports basically say that if an eSports league crumbles, then it essentially pulls the rug out from under whatever games they are hosting. Really? If MLG dies, does Starcraft 2 go down with the ship? Yes, when CGL crashed, DOA4 died... but thats because DOA4 should have died years earlier! The help of CGL was able to prop up DOA4 and support those players long after they would have been able to do on their own.
However, right now if EVO crumbles, what happens to the fighting game community? As long as there is interest left in a game, no league drama can kill it. As long as people keep wanting to support and play a game, new tournaments will fill the void. However, if the leaders of the FGC burn their bridges with eSports, the only tournaments we will have to fill the void are "grass roots"... in which case, all of our efforts to go mainstream will be for naught.
* ADDENDUM 2 * (added December 19, 2011)
Okay... I'm going to give you guys a scenario, but first, lets try to agree on something: eSports leagues WILL have fighting games in them. This is an unavoidable fact. It's not something that we can control. Can we agree on this? Okay, we are agreed.
Now, lets say we reject all support from the eSports leagues. What happens? MLG runs the tournaments their way, with their rules, likely pissing a lot of people off. This leads to many different possible outcomes. The obvious one, being that eSports leagues say "fuck it" to fighting games, and everything returns back to how it is now.
However, there is another possibility which people are forgetting. Since the FGC is not working with eSports, we end up having EVO majors and MLG majors on the same weekend. People may not like the way MLG is run, but the prizes are bigger. Sooner or later top players have to make a choice and decide to go with MLG because of the bigger pots. EVO events get smaller and smaller, and the FGC's control of the situation diminishes because they aren't working with MLG to rectify any issues. We all lose.
Now, lets say we try to work with eSports instead. Now we at least have some connection with them, and we can offer our advice and try to fix the many issues they've had in the past (although, who knows if they will listen; but I've heard their recent Tekken events have been run very well). We can help to try to fix issues, as well as make sure events don't compete with each other. Worst case? eSports leagues say "fuck it" and everything returns back to how it is now. Best case? We all win.
Now, Tocool asked in the 8wayrun chat room yesterday, "Why do we even need eSports? We've been fine for 15 years without them. Why do people suddenly think we'll die without them?" (paraphrased; yes, I do read the chat room, even if I don't always talk) This is an excellent question, which I don't feel has been properly answered yet in all the discussions in the FGC. Well to put it simply, its because of "escalation".
Fighting games are getting bigger, and people's times are limited. The number of fighting games coming out are increasing, and the amount of money being thrown around at major events is skyrocketing. We've been seeing a growing trend that players tend to flock to the bigger events and leave the less profitable games behind. A lot of players I know play Marvel and/or Street Fighter right now because thats where the players are, and thats where the money is... it doesn't matter whether they like the game or not.
Now, as stated before, eSports WILL have fighting games. The games featured in eSports leagues will naturally have the larger community because of the amount of money involved. We see this in the MOBA community. League of Legends, while having a huge advantage due to it being free to play from the start, has the majority of the community. And as other games come out, or go free to play; whether or not they are better is irrelevant unless they have some major promished cash in tournaments such as DOTA2.
So why do we suddenly need eSports, when we never needed it before? Because of limited time. If Soulcalibur V doesn't have any eSports leagues behind it (and I do consider EVO an eSports league, even though its "unique" in it's own right), we'll quickly be hearing the same things after the first 6 months: "I like SC5, but I see no reason to spend my limited time playing it, instead of practicing these other games which actually have huge tournaments". And sooner or later that common sentement becomes a downward spiral which turns into: "I like SC5, but no one else plays it, so why bother?".
In the past, a $200 payout tournament, and a $400 payout tournament for a lot of players wasn't enough to convince them to give up the game they preferred for the higher profit. But because of escalation, the margin of difference in payouts between the less popular games and the crowd-pleasers have become so large that they can't be ignored. Stick with a smaller game with a $500 payout, or switch to the less fun game, and try for that $5,000 payout.
