Force is to say that while esports have been growing exponentially in all kinds of ways in recent years, the data we collected from Twitch says they almost didn’t grow in what I would consider to be some of the most important KPI’s for their future:

the number of games with very strong esports potential

the number of people interested in watching tournaments

Don’t get me wrong, esports did grow during that time. What I mean is that these 2 KPI’s simply didn’t go through the roof or grow nearly as fast as the hype and investments.

With all the esports fuss going on and wealthy publishers now in the mix for years, this has to sound like a very disapointing result, at best… And it is. But how is that possible? How come esports didn’t grow that much in terms of high potential games and viewers?

It turns out making esports games is incredibly hard and almost no one in the industry understood how hard it was… up until now maybe. These games are rarer than a Legendary card in Clash Royale’s Arena 1. Mind you. Across the past 20 years, there was less than 1 truly impactful esports game released each year around the world. I’m not even sure that was 1 every other year... That’s way less than AAA blockbusters for example.

Also, the first and by far most successful esports platforms were all born out of accidents. By that I mean they either came out as budget-less fan projects (Counter-Strike, DotA), or they just weren’t intended to be played as « esports » by professionals practicing daily and competing for money (Starcraft, League of Legends). Or both.

One has to stop here and take notice of how crazy that is in the first place: Counter-Strike was created by an 18 year-old who started with 0 development and promotional budget. And yet, in these conditions, it was all the rage, the game everyone was playing and talking about. It’s only with little additional help that CS went on to become the #1 esports platform in the West.

The same more or less goes for DotA.

This means these games generated very very very powerful momentum by themselves, just because of how interested people were in playing them, sharing them and later on competing with them. From my own experience, when professional game makers hear about these stories, they simply deny them… and never fail to make me think of Salieri facing Mozart.

From Shootmania to Overwatch, it’s that kind of amazing spontaneous momentum I couldn’t see in the new games that have come out this decade so far.

To be clear regarding Overwatch, in my view, it still hasn’t to this point taken off like it should have to become really major. And that’s after spending how many hundreds of millions to market it?… Maybe the game will do super well in esports in the end but by my book this has been a pretty rough start, to say the least.

Esports need so much hardcore passion burning for so many years in the hearts of so many people that absolutely no one is rich enough to fuel it with money.

I believe we’re very far from having reached the golden age of esports. That means we should expect a lot of amazing new things, amazing new games pleasing more gamers and bigger audiences than ever.

So for all these reasons my main idea was that if CS and DotA could burst spontaneously the way they did in a time when there weren’t either Twitch, Twitter or Youtube to support their communities, nowadays games with the same kind of momentum should litterally explode to our faces, catalyzed by all the social media and video sharing.

And yet, instead of having more powerful phenomenons than before, we only ended up with weaker ones… all the while investments to make that kind of games happen had never been that high, by an outrageous margin.

To cut it short, a few years after publishers finally started paying attention and investing to build more esports platforms, we surprisingly ended up with no truly powerful new title to grow esports in big chunks from.

I consider the drought finally came to an end with the release of Clash Royale in March 2016. Before that it had been almost 7 years since a new groundbreaking game (not a “remake”, not an improved version of an older game) had hit the shores of the esports world, back when League of Legends was released in October 2009.

I won’t list all the games that didn’t make it, or made it halfway, or 1/4 of the way… Let’s just say there have been quite a few projects which led to disapointment, one way or the other.