E-Sports

Before I start, I just want to quickly address something that I forgot to do in my introduction post. As you all know by now my blog is titled "The Gaming Dinosaur". The story behind that is, ever since I started my university life I really got interested in competitive debating. Funny enough even debating has their own terms and one of them is "dinosaur". What that means is, someone, just like how in the gaming world the normal retirement age from professional gaming is around 25. The same goes for competitive debating so someone who used to be in competitive debating and still takes an active role in competitive debate is what we call a, dinosaur.

Now back to today's post, what does it take for a game to be successful in the world of e-sports? Well for one, it has to be a multiplayer game, obviously. Let's take a look at DoTA for a moment, how can such a game, that is at least a decade year old still maintain more than 20 million viewers and even streamed through ESPN on their most recent international championships which was in 2014, with a boasting $10 million in prize-pool.

1. Developer Support
Every once in awhile, something very new will definitely be added whether it be a new hero in DoTA or a new map in Counter Strike. This will keep the game interesting and refreshing for the veterans of the game so that there will be no point in the game's life where anything will be stagnant.

The one main reason for games being able to thrive in e-sports for the long-term is definitely because of the unending developer support and patches to the game. With new things being released there will always be bugs and or anything to be competitive the game has to be free of bugs and balanced. So in short, the developers have to take a very active role in the community to accept feedback and periodically release bug & balance patches.

Not only do the developers have to play an active role for in-game development they also play a very huge role in out of game experiences like sponsoring tournaments, improving viewership, managing the community, and etc.

2. High skill ceiling & Clutch Moments
Have you seen any professional pong players? I don't, that's because everyone can simply master the game in the matter of minutes. In e-Sports, games like DoTA, LoL, CS:GO, these are the kind of games you can't simply hop on and immediately sign a contract with some organization for sponsorship. It takes a long time to get in the right mindset and to acquire the proper skills to do well in professional gaming.

In games like DoTA the game can very easily go in-depth all the way to basic knowledge of your role to the mastery of literally the game itself. You see, eSports is the game of seconds, if you lose your focus for even half-a-second you may literally face defeat, which is what makes eSports so entertaining. Here in the video below, shows one of the best comebacks in LoL where the team OMG literally were one hit away on their nexus for losing that game.




So to conclude making a game successful in e-Sports is crazily hard. Although I barely scratch the surface of what a game needs to be successful in the competitive circuit and I do realize some of them are quite bias but I hope you found this rather informative.

Do tell me in the comments what more you would like to see in the world of competitive gaming, and I hope you're looking forward to my next post on DoTA as requested by one of you. Thanks for reading. :)