Upsetting the establishment: What is the next big eSport?

Many have debated over the years whether gamers could ever reasonable be considered athletes. The motherly wisdom of a decade ago was something to the tune of ‘get off your couch and do something with your life.’

Fair enough.

But in an age where very young men and women are earning collossal salaries to ply their parentally-maligned trade in front of crowds of thousands in a studio or stadium, and hundreds of thousands online.

Yes, the eSports phenomenon is very much an established presence in the world we live in. Its main carriers, Twitch and Youtube, owe their success either in entirety or in part to people watching other people click a mouse, bash a keyboard, and competitively own noobs.

That part of eSports is still up for debate, but really, what’s the point?

The real debate for a movement of this nature is figuring out its essence. In an industry just like sports news, where today’s #BREAKING scoop is something you eat battered fish out of tomorrow, game developers rely on a huge transient population of grassroots participants to want to buy their game, actually buy their game, play their game, hopefully buy some downloadable additional content, then move onto the next thing.

Few video games have stood out from this cycle. They are the titans of eSports as we know it today. League of Legends has been the mainstay for the better part of a decade. Dota 2 is the perennial challenger for the crown. Counter-Strike rose, then fell, then rose right back up again. Aside from that triad of success stories, the rest of the games that have looked to achieve multi-year, scaleable success have largely failed.

Starcraft (both of them) is big in Korea. World of Warcraft, Call of Duty, Halo and various fighting games haven’t really nailed down competitive play. Other Johnny-come-latelys struggle for traction over the powerhouses.

But there is one thing that binds the Dota/LoL/CSGO eSports success stories: player base.

And the Mecca for playing video games, and eSports is South Korea. It has the most developed scene; a place where Starcraft: Brood War is seen as the national past-time. Not baseball. Not cricket. A video game.

Korea has long been considered to be an indicator of the long-term success of a game, and the subsequent success as an eSport. The player-base is loyal, the competition fierce. They have coaches and teams and clans and money, all supporting people getting extraordinarily good at a single game. Careers have been made on the back of the success of a title, and they’ve waned as the game’s player and viewer-base diminished.

I’m no expert, but I know a little bit about a phenomenon called PC Bangs. Think back to the days of school computer labs, then imagine up to a hundred PCs in a room, with everyone wearing headphones playing games.

There are a few similar outlets in Australia, but in Korea they are very widespread, Wikipedia reckons 25,000 of them in a country of 50 million people. And for four years League of Legends has been the most played game in PC Bangs across Korea. Bar none, and barely any challengers have presented themselves.

Until recently, when a game called Overwatch, a shooting game, overtook it as the most played.

Overwatch has not only overtaken the most popular game for the last four years, but considering it was only released a month ago, it has done is in a remarkably short time.

So when I saw a sign that the balance was being upset, albeit a very small sign for a very newly-released game, it caught my attention.

It could be nothing – an anomaly. Overwatch’s decline could be as fast as its rise was meteoric. And there’s also the issue that what’s played in PC Bangs doesn’t necessarily hold the sway in the eSports scene that it once did.

Counter-Strike remains higher than it on Twitch at least some of the time in terms of viewership, and whether a game builds its numbers over time is purely a matter of the market. If people love a game, and I mean really love a game, they will keep playing. But there have only been about ten of those in the young history of eSports so far.

But it’s unlikely the games that are the most popular now will still be the most popular in ten years, and with eSports on an absolutely insane growth trajectory, we have to look for the canaries in the shaft that could tip us off as to what could upset the balance.

To people who follow my usual work: rugby league. cricket, football, rugby and a few other bits here and there, this will probably make you want to scream nerd. But there is a big world of eSports out there that’s becoming more and more complex. It’s frontier industry creation, with a lot of young people not really knowing what they’re doing but doing a compelling job of making it up as they go along.

It’s fascinating, it really is. The next big eSport is coming. I’m in no place to tell you whether it’s Overwatch, but it certainly ticks a lot of the boxes that make players play, then viewers tune in.