The Numbers Game
Esports is now relying on monetised streaming to create sustainable businesses. Unfortunately there's nothing sustainable about the digital advertising model to begin with.
“Just because your ratings are bigger doesn't mean you're better.”
– Ted Turner
It’s not often that anything close to “wisdom” will come tumbling out of Ted Turner’s mouth. A classic idiot form the Southern gentry who inherited the means to power at just 24 when his father committed suicide, he had the resources to throw enough shit at a wall and watch some of it stick. Yet, when he uttered the above line, in the childlike language typical of the man, he expressed the dichotomy between quality and quantity.
Most sane people agree that just because a lot of people like something doesn’t mean it is inherently good. Indeed it is often mediocrity and banality that are embraced because, other societal explanations not withstanding, most people are mediocre and banal. Without going into a Terence McKenna-esque diatribe about how television is used as an electronic opiate in the Western world, we can see one consistent thing that TV ratings teach us. Quality and excellence are never reflected in ratings. What else can be gleaned from the depressing knowledge that over 16 million Americans will watch American Idol nightly, while the last episode of The Wire didn’t even secure 1.7 million viewers?
The ratings system has pretty much destroyed television as an art-form. For every series that plays out like a complex visual novel, with believable character arcs, hard hitting subject matter and relevant commentary on both the issues facing society and the human condition, such as Breaking Bad, there are twenty or thirty “Big Bang Theory”s. They ooze out of the screen like the bad dreams of terminally ill comedians and they almost always find a crowd, even if you yourself wonder who the fuck it could possibly be.
There is no balance if the vast majority of something is rotten, like a terrible band who accidentally write a great song but can never repeat the task. The truth about TV ratings is they are the validation required to justify not only investing in the terrible but also to stop directing money at the things that stand out as truly great pieces of work. Grey’s Anatomy has been running for eight years, DeadWood was cancelled after just two and a half.
Now while the American TV system isn’t entirely an accurate reflection of what is happening within e-sports I want you to cling to the central premise behind it. That is choices are made based on numbers, because those numbers equate to revenue and revenue is the be all and end all. The process in the television industry is a lot more complex, in e-sports less so. Streaming has seen to that. Every person watching a 30 second advert is generating money for the person bringing you there to watch the advertisement in the first place.
It’s been hailed as a good thing, a means to monetise popularity directly, where in the past that had always been something intangible. Popular players generated profile, maybe web traffic, maybe merchandise sales but there was no guaranteed to turn it into revenue, especially if the player didn’t perform as expected. Yet when something is reduced to simply being about numbers then it stands to reason that popularity becomes the only trait worth talking about and it encourages shortcuts to success rather than building something with a long term goal in mind.
E-sports has never really been about anything other than numbers. While fans and ability generally go hand in hand, there is no better industry for the has-been than e-sports. In real sports when you’re a fading star you have to reinvent yourself or simply retire to spend your millions. This can be in the commentary booth, on the coaching field, in the hosts chair… Wherever they end up they have to provide evidence of a broader skill-set than simple excellence in their chosen pursuit.
E-sports is a place where a name will get you further than it ought to, where past reputation means more than a faded memory of better days ever should. Organisations will flock to them, desperate for some sort of tenuous association to a piece of bygone history they had nothing to do with, the psychology of the panty-sniffer. And this isn’t too strange in itself because often the fans, in a bid to show they were there in the “good old days” – a period of time that has no discernable start date, nor clear end – constantly extend support to them, their loyalty flying in the face of logic.
It leads to a number of ridiculous situations, organisations paying over the odds for past its prime talent hoping to see some sort of return from the associated viewing figures and brand awareness. This leads to a lack of sensible debate among the enthusiasts, anyone trying to suggest someone is better being virtually slapped down by fanboys. The past and the present have no clear definitions in e –sports. It doesn’t even necessarily apply to games, or sometimes genres. If you WERE great, you ARE great. So fervent is this manner within e-sports it would shame even a Liverpool fan.
The Streaming “revolution” could have shook this to the core. It didn’t. It merely reinforced it. What I had hoped to see was players and teams taking a stand against the organisation system and looking to operate independently, which would be entirely possible. That, or it would see an influx of innovative e-sports content that took us away from the standard bedroom broadcasting webshow OR here’s a player playing that is already at saturation point. All that happened was the self fulfilling prophecy of the “top” players getting more streaming viewers as they were the most high profile, which in turn leads to them remaining in the top positions because they have the numbers to justify the expense and outlay from organisations. It wasn’t a revolution at all. Revolutions by their nature imply change.
That isn’t to say there isn’t any value in entertainers. Absolutely not. However you wouldn’t see a professional athlete having his services retained on the grounds that he’s good on camera, or signs a mean autograph, or that he can talk articulately about his profession. Streaming should be safety-net for those that can’t cut it, not a bargaining chip used to push away genuine criticisms of failure, nor should it line the pockets of second-tier players to a greater excess than success should. That model is all out of whack and isn’t a good thing for any industry. It actively encourages mediocrity rather than promotes moving away from it.
I also have no issue with people monetising streaming. However, in the same way that the entire E-sports business model was about begging businesses to part with a chunk of their marketing budget to fund their endeavours, the new business model can’t have streaming revenue at its core. If it does then it is inviting a disaster much like the one we saw when the global recession snapped shut the marketing coffers of every major company, even those who relied on the niche of e-sports for a sizeable share of their business.
It disheartens me to hear e-sports luminaries talking about how Ad-blocker is “killing the industry” and that it’s a disrespectful thing to use. While these people are beating their chests and howling at the injustice of it all, as if they were being robbed of something that was legitimately theirs in the first place, what we’re not talking about is how E-sports is potentially heading towards another crash. Why? Well, the over-reliance on the streaming model to generate revenue creates an absence of looking at other methods. Organisations still don’t want to grow up and become businesses, to find genuine sustainable partnerships and to actually find smarter ways to generate revenue that they have control over. We’ve already seen one recently, a former WCG winner, in the form of mTw go under due to fiscal mismanagement and what happens when a streaming partner reneges on their deal due to their own problems.
Not only that but in the same way that the term “e-sports” was interchangeable with “Starcraft 2” in the eyes of almost everyone, especially the mainstream media, we are now seeing that happen with League of Legends. Back when Starcraft 2 came out we saw the usual serial careerists within e-sports suddenly disassociate themselves from the games that had made them and move across to only working within Starcraft 2. They professed “a great love of the game” that had always been there, just they’d never mentioned it before. With the talent leaving lesser titles in droves, those games got weaker. There was no-one to champion them any more, to make them entertaining. Even now they continue to whither and die, neglected and ignored.
Yet the perception is now that Starcraft 2 is in trouble, that people will make that move across to LoL, that RIOT’s game will become the only show in town and that’s before we even see how DotA 2 will seriously flex its muscles this year. Is Starcraft 2 less of an e-sports prospect when it first arrived? No, not really. However you can feel the palpable panic among that community that unless something big happens with the arrival of Heart of The Swarm the game could indeed be “dying”. It’s a ridiculous notion but the trouble is the more people who think it and say it, while in a culture of “the numbers don’t lie”, means that more people might be inclined to act on it. Whether you’re a fan of LoL or not, and indeed I am, you’d have to agree there is a terrible sadness at the prospect of other titles being crushed by the weight of its financial and numerical clout. The only problem I have is the people who often make the argument about the wrongness of it all tried the exact same model with their game and failed.
Streaming figures have become the e-sports yardstick for success. Every tournament doesn’t announce the things we should be judged on as an industry, the qualitative experience of those involved, the rapid payment of prize money, the future business it generated thus ensuring its own security for the future. No, we’re given the stream numbers, a constant game of one-upmanship. It’s great that more and more people are watching, no doubt about it. But the key to legitimacy does not lie within the viewers. It lies within hooking more people in at the playing level, creating that desire to compete, showing them that it’s not a waste of time nor a pipe dream.
You do that by creating an environment where a salary is something that arrives in your bank on a set date without question and lasts until you do something to justify being fired, not some vague promise of money. You do that by paying out prize money in a timely fashion. You do that by nurturing business partnerships rather than killing the goose that laid the golden egg at the first promise of a cheque. You do that by understanding the free to play / microtransaction model is the way ALL e-sports titles need to go. You do that by creating multiple ways for players to monetise their status, so even the scene’s dirty little secrets can find some form of financial parity with the big hitters.
Put it this way, think how broad the catchment of League players actually is, how many active accounts there are, how many then watch a stream and how many make it as a competitive player who people want to watch. That model isn’t “successful” – a game with 32.5 million active players only convincing 200k to watch finals for major events is actually failing. But e-sports is blind to the numbers and five years ago 200k seemed like a fantasy, monetising it directly even more so.
But while we’re hypnotised by the figures we’re not looking at the negative impact of being so, nor are we even thinking about a future where those numbers aren’t there, or can’t be converted into cold, hard cash. And all the while we create a disparity between the haves and have-nots, fostering a culture where you’re not as strong as your talents but your fan base. It’s getting worse and worse with each passing day and we get closer to the point of unbearable saturation, where every piece of e-sports content runs into one long nauseating blur, each part indistinguishable from the last. It begs the question, if it did come all crashing down again tomorrow, who would in a position to rebuild it? Would anyone know how? And would want anyone who did to do so? It’s already at the stage where people are looking at everyone who interacts with e-sports as a virtual dollar sign and not a fan with input in shaping the future. Where do we go from that?
If there was as much commitment to making e-sports better as there was to making it “bigger” we’d not have to worry so much about the latter. Instead people are treating it like an edition of Supermarket Sweep – grab what you can, while you can, before the buzzer sounds and you realise the opportunity for something more has gone for good