Mentioned in this article Teams: Flipsid3 Tactics Games: Rocket League

Rocket League‘s growth as both a game and an esport has been phenomenal. Psyonix announced this week that the game has over 25 million players, making it easy to understand why Sony said it was the most downloaded PSN Store game in 2016. But that’s not all—Valve put Rocket League in the platinum tier of it’s top 100 grossing games of 2016. And, since the game’s release in 2015, over 1 billion matches have been played with 50% of those being ranked competitive games.

[perfectpullquote align=”full” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]It’s time to start taking Rocket League seriously.[/perfectpullquote]

2016 was massive for the “carball simulator.” We saw the first two seasons of the Rocket League Championship Series, with season one in the summer culminating in a LAN at Avalon Hollywood. The prize pool came to $75,000, the biggest that Rocket League had seen up to that point. And just eleven days after the prize was taken by a surprise bracket sweep from iBuyPower Cosmic—Kronovi, Lachinio, and OverZero—Psyonix announced a second season.

[perfectpullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]The production of the event, the enthusiasm of the crowd, the fantastic matches, and the upsets all came together to make an unforgettable experience.[/perfectpullquote]

The second season brought a format change that simplified the RLCS to a single qualifier event. Fans and players were happily surprised by the prize pool increasing to $250,000 as well—and while it did lead to some cutthroat roster changes for the more notable players, it also led to more organizations paying attention to Rocket League. Over the course of season two, NRG picked up the formerly-named Kings of Urban, Orbit contracted Exodus, G2 eSports took on the season one victors iBP, and so on.

The RLCS is a completely open tournament, and Psyonix had over 6,000 teams—18,000 players, not counting substitutes—sign up in season two, just about doubling the number of teams that went into season one. Ultimately, the field was narrowed down to 8 teams from Europe, and 8 teams from North America. A few upsets later and we saw four from each region head to Amsterdam in the fight for the $50,000 1st place LAN prize. Flipsid3 Tactics were the team that won out in the end, earning more than $60,000 over the course of season two.

[perfectpullquote align=”left” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Most people agree that the number one advantage that Rocket League has over other games is a fantastic community.[/perfectpullquote]

What was LANsterdam like if you were there? In a word, incredible. The production of the event, the enthusiasm of the crowd, the fantastic matches, and the upsets all came together to make an unforgettable experience. After all, most people agree that the number one advantage that Rocket League has over other games is a fantastic community.

With Rocket League being such a new game (released July 7, 2015), the majority of the community uses Discord and Twitter to communicate, rather than a tangled web of Facebook groups, forums, and TeamSpeak servers that can make it harder to bounce around when you are looking for someone to group with. Throw in a couple of subreddits full of gifs of the classic “Calculated” shots and team builder threads, and you’ll find that it can be easy to connect with people who enjoy driving cars into balls as much as you do.

Rocket League also has something that very few other games have with support for cross-network play. PC players can play with either PlayStation or Xbox players, though PlayStation and Xbox players can’t play with one another at this time. Psyonix has said that once they get the go ahead from Sony, they will have that feature up and running in less than a business day. Sadly, there’s still no news on that front, but the fact that you can play against people on other platforms means that there is less segregation of the player base, and it also keeps the queue times low—always important when a game lasts just over five minutes.

Outside of the RLCS, the majority of competitive Rocket League is based around community-organized tournaments, many of which are largely crowdfunded by the viewers. The biggest exceptions to this are the Gfinity cups—the Friday night 3v3 cup is the premier spot to compete in the European region—that consistently has top team participation. On the North American side of things, there are a variety of tournaments to compete in, but no one tournament pulls all the top tier teams in the way Gfinity does on a Friday in Europe.

[perfectpullquote align=”left” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]The next step for RL as a competitive esport is to have mid-tier tournaments start popping up.[/perfectpullquote]

“EU better than NA” is a favorite battle cry of fans, and it’s clear that NA teams need a place to compete against each other. The next step for RL as a competitive esport is to have mid-tier tournaments start popping up. There needs to be a bridge between all the smaller tournaments—$300 prizepools or less—and the comparatively-mammoth $250,000 RLCS. What’s good news is that Psyonix definitely has the means to step this up, having introduced a very popular crate and trading system in September last year. To quote the patch notes for that update:

“Note: A portion of the proceeds from all ‘Champions Crates’ opened goes directly to Rocket League eSports prize pools.”

As yet, no announcement has been made regarding how that money will be distributed into the competitive environment, but it is assumed by most that there will be some going outside of the RLCS. Should it head towards shortening this competitive gap in the current structure, Rocket League could soon become a powerhouse esport—combining a dedicated fanbase with talented teams and very understandable gameplay.