Can eSports survive too much eSports?

Questions on regional teams, faux regional teams, watching behavior and game type’s role in the maturing industry

I remember a simpler time (like… one whole year ago). As a hobbyist consumer of multiple eSports properties (and a designer for an eSports product), I knew what it took to keep up with my games and their communities. It played out something like this…

If League is in season, spend a big chunk of my weekend downtime with the games on in the background while relaxing, doing housework or prepping for the next work week. In my case, priority was given to NALCS, then EULCS if I was having a particularly chill, stay at home weekend.

If it’s EVO weekend, or Combo Breaker or CEO — then give priority to watching the tournament, as a good fighting game tournament with reasonable production value is a nice respite from just how much League there is to watch.

If it’s the International, try to remember how the hell Dota works and watch that. Unless it’s one of the aforementioned FGC tournaments or League playoffs, then meh… maybe next year.

Otherwise, during weekday evenings or random downtime, catch up on what’s happening in the Hearthstone circuits and special events.

I don’t watch CS:GO. I have only lightly dabbled in a smattering of Rocket League. I watch speedruns during those charity marathons, but with about as much interest as one musters for the show that’s on right after their favorite show, and they’re merely too lazy to change the channel.

Some of you are probably thinking… that’s already way too much man. When do you even play all those games? And I think, that’s an old, old opinion. Do you really think that the fanbases of these properties are made only from players?

You see… I don’t really play much of any game, these days. I’ve played likely no more than 10 matches of League of Legends in my life. Maybe one of Dota. I buy every major fighting game that gets released, but probably cap out around 10–20 hours of play time on each. Hearthstone, I’ll admit, gets a fair amount of play — but I’ll prescribe that to how easy it is to play with 60–70% focus. As with much of my cohort, I imagine — I’m hardly a gamer these days. I’m an eSports fan. We’re basically fully converted.

Except we’re not. Up until right about now, I’d argue that the way that many consumed eSports was not, traditionally, the same as the way one consumed sports-sports. And the pending shift, or the need of the pending shift, and whether it will work or not, is the whole purpose of this post.

The Sports-Sports Model: Regional Commitment

Let’s use football as a model, as I’m writing this on the night of the Super Bowl and I’m a native Pittsburgher, so the comparison is easy. In Pittsburgh, when the weekend rolls around, you have a single game to give a damn about. The Steelers game. You may toss another game on if you’re a die-hard, but honestly most aren’t and don’t. Your time commitment to keep up with your sport is just about 4 hours a week, and it dances up and down depending on your interest level in who your team’s opponent might be in the playoff season and so on. You may know a couple guys with NFL Season Pass glued to football all day err’ day, but that’s the exception and not the rule.

The eSports Model: League Commitment

Then take eSports, in which you might have a team — your team (miss you, NALCS Immortals), but often you’re tuning in to see what has happened across the league in a given weekend. The time commitment is of course, much greater. Even in the single-game 2018 NALCS season you’re watching 10 hour long games a weekend (plus caster/analysis time)f, if you’re aiming to keep up with the league. We know that this watching behavior is common, because it’s why the VOD channels and VOD ecosystem, as well as spoiler-free game calendars are so popular. When we were working on designing Stage.gg (since acquired by Mobalytics) the majority of our feature requests indicated that the worst thing we could do was disrupt this viewing pattern with spoilers or making it difficult to find and access a given week’s games.

So, why the shift now to (Faux) Regional eSports?

Something’s happened in the last year to eSports, with all the growth and maturation of the NALCS and the entrance of the Overwatch League (more on that in a second), that has triggered what I would call ‘Faux Regional’ eSports. In order to pick up some of the benefits of the traditional sports models, eSports leagues are now adopting home cities. There are obviously a lot of benefits to this, a clear one of which is that as the overall quantity of high-production value eSports properties increase, linking a team to a region could have the effect of mirroring the traditional sports model. That is to say, there’s too much eSports to watch to sit down and watch everything, so now I’ll sit down and watch MY team’s games.

A quick way to get someone to adopt a team? Say that it’s the Boston whatever or the New York whatever. Of course, this regionality is only in spirit, because while the teams are owned by a venture group in New York or a set of angel investors headquartered in Houston, the actual physical foothold of these teams are all naturally at their respective league arenas. These are all, by and large, California teams playing a game in California.

But does it work?

So, here’s where I think things get interesting. If the intent of regional teams is to alleviate a tension regarding a viewer’s ability to watch a whole week’s of games, is it working? Or better said, where might it work and where might it not?

Take Overwatch League, as an example — first. In their case, having faux regional teams was, based on their weekly output of content, basically a hard requirement. There is, in a single week of Overwatch matches, a total viewing time of more than 24 hours of games. To watch all of the matches as a fan of the sport, i.e. the old, League Commitment model, is actually close to impossible. Have any collection of “Real Life” commitments going on (job, girlfriend, the gym) and climbing the mountain of Overwatch games footage in a week is nigh impossible.

However, the nature of the game (team-based FPS) does actually conveniently support viewers only watching their team. Just like a traditional sport, if one dives in and out of Overwatch matches, you’re missing game content, but its not substantive to your team’s performance. Maybe better said, the meta of a team-based FPS means that the experience of watching your team or the whole league isn’t especially different. But, that’s not always the case.

Now, take a look at League of Legends NALCS. In their case, the faux regionality honestly makes a lot less sense. The teams are generally tied to regional traditional sports franchises and properties, but they’re not literally called the New York CLG, for example. Regardless of the fact that Madison Square Garden, and subsequently the New York region, has an ownership interest in the CLG brand. The same could clearly be said for 100 Thieves (Cleveland), Clutch Gaming (Houston), FlyQuest (Milwaukee) and so on.

While it appears that regionality seems to have had some consideration in the teams that made the cut for the new franchised NALCS, Riot also seemed to take a step back from suggesting fans will ever sit down and watch just THEIR team, by actually admitting the nature of viewership for a game-type like League of Legends. Despite the regional teams, weekly games were dropped to single matches of one game, to drop the total viewing time to 14 hours. This change makes NALCS viewership week-over-week as a League Commitment much more manageable than the Overwatch League. And it’s deadly important that it is, because the nature of the game also dictates that.

While Overwatch team matches and the meta may not be substantively different (generally), League is actually decidedly the opposite. If I miss a match between the Seoul Dynasty and the London Spitfire in Overwatch, while I might miss a great match — I’ll be able to watch the next game of the NYXL without issue. Whereas, if I miss matches between CLG and 100 Thieves, the next match I watch with Optic Gaming has a League-wide meta and storyline that is evolving for which I would now be facing gaps. Not just in the caster commentary, but I’d start to understand champion picks and bans and the state of the league less overall. The NALCS obviously understands this somewhat, based on their careful consideration of total viewing time in a given week’s games.

Of course you might disagree with this personally, but the content consumption patterns of viewers indicates that this is actually pretty common. It’s hard to argue with the trends and the feature requests we received at Stage.gg.

And what happens now that both are necessary?

However, how do fans react and relate to the models — when both exist in the current ecosystem? If I want to participate in watching Overwatch, I’m literally time-capped to watch only MY team’s games, while if I want to watch League, I’m generally incentivized and have a desire to watch all or nearly all of a week’s games. Can viewers decipher the difference between the games, and manage it? Or is the growth of the industry ignoring that we’re basically promoting two distinctly different watching behaviors.

One, which is rooted in traditional sports. And one, which is rooted in the idea of game meta, and a league-commitment. I want to believe that both can succeed, but I’ll admit — I’m two weeks behind in Overwatch matches because I feel like I can’t sit down and watch them all, and call it a gamer’s nature (gotta catch ’em all) but that just bothers the Hell out of me. The last five years of watching eSports has trained me that just popping in for a game isn’t really how this works, and I wonder just how many others feel the same.