In E-Sports, Video Gamers Draw

Real Crowds and Big Money

By NICK WINGFIELDAUG. 30, 2014
Photo

A video game tournament in Seattle in July. Pro gaming, called e-sports, is becoming
a lucrative worldwide spectator sport.
Advertisement

The video game Dota 2, like so many across the Internet, transports teams of players
from their bedrooms to a verdant virtual world where they smite each other through
keyboard and mouse clicks. Except on this sunny day in July, every attack and
counterattack by a five-person team set off an eruption of cheers — from the more
than 11,000 spectators crammed into this city’s basketball arena.

The contestants were gunning for a big piece of the $11 million in total prize
money, the most ever at a games tournament. And the game’s developer, the Valve
Corporation, moved another step closer to securing gaming’s legitimacy as a major-
league spectator sport.

Having already upended the entertainment world — global revenue for games is $20
billion higher than the music industry’s and is chasing that of the movie business —
the games industry has turned its ambitions toward the lucrative world of
professional video game competition, widely known as e-sports.

The signs of success already mirror the achievements of major sports. Game
tournaments sell out giant arenas, and some attract at-home audiences larger than
those of top traditional sporting events. Madison Avenue’s highest fliers, like Coca-
Cola and American Express, have lined up as sponsors. Prize money has soared to
the millions of dollars, and top players earn six- or seven-figure incomes and attract
big and passionate followings, luring a generation of younger players to seek fame
and fortune as gamers.

Last year, the State Department began granting visas to professional gamers, under
the same program used by traditional athletes. This fall, Robert Morris University in
Chicago will dole out over $500,000 in athletic scholarships to gamers, the first of
their kind in the United States, and Ivy League universities have intercollegiate
gaming. Last week, the web giant Amazon announced it was buying Twitch, a hugely
popular video streaming service used by gamers, for $970 million in cash.

“This stuff is expanding out of control,” said James Lampkin, a product manager for
ESL (for Electronic Sports League), one of the biggest e-sports leagues, which had
73,000 attendees at a four-day tournament in Katowice, Poland, in March. “We have
no idea what the limits are.”

Game competitions have been around for decades, but what was happening at that
arena in July would have been unthinkable, even laughable, only a few years ago. As
broadband Internet access and free-to-play games have spread, gaming competitions
have multiplied in size and frequency around the world, going beyond early
strongholds like South Korea.

At the Seattle event, cheering fans, many dressed in costumes to look like game
characters, hoisted national flags to show support for their favorite teams.
Commentators, known as casters, offered play-by-play. Confetti rocketed into the
crowd when the winners were crowned.

More than 70 million people worldwide watch e-sports over the Internet or on TVs,
according to estimates by SuperData Research. South Korea even has a TV channel
devoted largely to e-sports. A championship tournament last October for League of
Legends, an arena battle game, streamed around the world, attracting 8.5 million
simultaneous online viewers at its peak — the same as the peak viewership for the
deciding game of professional hockey’s Stanley Cup finals in June. This year, the
League of Legends championship is expected to attract 40,000 to 50,000 attendees
to a soccer stadium in Seoul.

Photo
Photo
The arena at the International, a tournament for the video game Dota 2 organized at
Seattle’s Key Arena in July by Valve, the game’s publisher. The pool of prize money
was almost $11 million. Photographs by Stuart Isett for The New York Times
As the fan base and money in e-sports have ballooned, multiple independent game
leagues have emerged, including ESL and Major League Gaming, that collectively put
on dozens of competitions a year. Game publishers host events, too, seeing
irresistible opportunities to promote their games.

One of the most ambitious publisher-led efforts is from the creator of League of
Legends, Riot Games, which operates leagues around the world. For the last two
years, another publisher, Activision Blizzard, has put up $1 million in prize money
for a championship in Los Angeles for its combat shooting game Call of Duty.

“I don’t think we’ve ever seen the opportunities for e-sports as promising as they are
today,” said Robert A. Kotick, chief executive of Activision Blizzard.

Big Money, Deep Access

The roots of e-sports trace to the 1990s with the advent of fighting and shooter games
like Street Fighter and Doom. Tournaments in those days were humble affairs, held
in crowded hotel ballrooms in front of a few hundred people. Even the winning
players often lost money after travel and hotel bills.

“I was the guy spending $1,000 to go win $800,” said Marcus Graham, an e-sports
commentator and former professional gamer who now works for Twitch.

Deeper public interest in competitive gaming materialized in the early 2000s,

especially in South Korea, where providing cheap and fast Internet access was a
national priority and locals were wild for StarCraft, a science fiction strategy game.
But the audience really started growing with the advent of free-to-play games like
League of Legends, which was released in 2009.

The most fanatical gamers can spend an almost limitless amount of moneyon virtual
goods in free-to-play games, buying special powers or tools, for example. But the vast
majority of players never spend a penny in them, and the games have developed huge
followings as a result. League of Legends has 67 million monthly players, about the
combined population of California and Texas.

Even with the number of participants mushrooming, the Internet has forged a tighter
link between fans and players than almost any other sport. Twitch, a website started
in 2011, lets players stream video of their playing sessions over the Internet from PCs
and consoles.

More than 55 million people visited Twitch in July to watch and interact with one
another. The site has also become a lucrative source of revenue for gamers, who can
make money through a mix of advertisements, subscription fees and donations from
viewers.

“Broadcasting to the Internet is our job, basically,” said Seth Abner, 19, a
professional Call of Duty player, who streams his matches over a service operated by
Major League Gaming.
Because professional gamers often practice on sites like Twitch, fans can get behind-
the-scenes peeks at practice sessions by their favorite players. The more generous
ones even invite fans to play a round with them.

“Imagine if LeBron James and Michael Jordan, in every practice and every live
N.B.A. game, had a GoPro camera strapped to their chest and they had an earbud
where they can hear people ask direct questions and occasionally answer it when
they’re playing,” said Dennis Fong, 37, an early professional gamer who is the new
chief executive of Raptr, a social network for gamers. “That level of access is
unprecedented.”

Prize money and slick producing have also added a dash of excitement to e-sports
matches. The Dota 2 tournament in Seattle in July took place in Key Arena, a
cavernous hall where Gary Payton and other basketball legends of the Seattle
SuperSonics, a franchise now in Oklahoma City, used to patrol the floorboards.

On a stage at the front of the hall, two teams of five players sat in soundproof booths
resembling greenhouses, a two-story screen projecting a view inside the game. Inside
the booths, which are designed to prevent the teams from hearing details about
enemy positions from the casters, players clicked their mice, barely moving in their
seats. Fans roared whenever a team achieved a triple kill, launched an ambush or
executed another deftly coordinated feat.

Over loudspeakers in the arena, two English-language casters described offensives by

the teams with the exuberance of Marv Albert during the N.B.A. finals.

The soundproof booths did not stand a chance against the roars from the crowd.

“You can still hear the ‘U.S.A.’ chants,” said Peter Dager, the captain of a Dota 2 team
called Evil Geniuses, which is based in the United States and finished third in the
tournament to a team from China, dividing up more than $1 million in prize money.
“For a 22-year-old kid who lives at home, it’s very surreal.”
Hours of Practice
Photo

Photo

Peter Dager, 22, of Fort Wayne, Ind., is captain of the team Evil Geniuses, which won
third place in a recent international tournament for the game Dota 2. He says he
expects to make more than $200,000 this year. Photographs by A.J. Mast for The
New York Times
When not competing in front of thousands of people, Mr. Dager works from his
childhood bedroom in Fort Wayne, Ind.

At the small desk in the corner sit the tools of his trade: a computer with two
displays, a webcam, a keyboard and a mouse. The bespectacled Mr. Dager is tall and
lean, looking about as he did when he was the place-kicker for his high school
football team. A poster of him in his football uniform hangs on a wall.

He is confident and analytical and, at 22, is about the median in age among his
teammates. There are not many professional gamers in their 30s.

Last Wednesday, as on most days, Mr. Dager’s workday started around 1 p.m.
Teammates from Northern California, Vancouver and Sweden joined him online,
ready to sharpen their skills at Dota 2 for the next four hours or more.

“At night, I dream about Dota,” he said. “Sometimes I dream I’m a Dota hero.”

The game — its name is an acronym for Defense of the Ancients — is played on a
square map with passages for players between enemy bases. Players pick game
avatars from a cast of more than 100 heroes, each with a different set of strengths
and weaknesses. To win the game, players must work as a team to destroy an enemy
structure called an Ancient, while dodging various defenses, marauding monsters
called creeps and other players.

Using a microphone connected to his computer, Mr. Dager spoke to teammates in a

quiet, steady voice, using an argot that would be incomprehensible to nongamers.
Evil Geniuses won its first two scrimmages of the day. During a third match, though,
one of his teammates seemed to lose focus and the other team began building up a
large lead. Mr. Dager lost patience.

“I can’t play Dota this way,” he said to the player. “What you’re doing makes no
sense. Just follow your teammates.”

Normally, when he finishes practicing, Mr. Dager streams hours of informal

matches with other players on Twitch, sometimes to as many as 9,000 viewers. He
spent less time on Twitch in recent days to rest up ahead of a trip to China this week
for a tournament, one of about 10 he will attend around the world this year.

In Mr. Dager’s view, the physical barriers to becoming an e-sports athlete are far
lower than for conventional sports. He lists fingers and a brain as the primary tools
people need to get started. What most people lack, he said, is a singular focus on
games, a willingness to clear away all other distractions.

His obsession with video games was a sore point with Mr. Dager’s parents during his
teenage years, as it was for the parents of many top gamers.
“I, and many players like me, sacrificed everything,” said Mr. Dager, who is almost a
senior in college but is not attending school now. “We gave up on sports and friends
and school just so we can play more.”

Mr. Dager’s income was meager last year, amounting to less than $20,000. But he
estimates his income so far this year at more than $200,000.

He recently looked at a condominium to buy in Fort Wayne. His father, Joe Dager,
said he was proud of his son’s success but uncertain about the longevity of his son’s
career.

“There’s hardly a week that goes by when we don’t reiterate the fact that that’s all fine
and good, but at some point you do have to make provisions to finish school,” his
father said. “We say that, but I don’t know if Bill Gates’s parents are still saying that
to him.”

Hopes for a Growth Cycle

For the companies with a stake in the video game industry, the hope is that the huge
audiences will attract more money from major marketers, which will in turn help
elevate the production values of events.

Some of that is already happening. T-Mobile USA, the wireless carrier, sponsored
Mr. Dager’s team at the Seattle tournament. Coca-Cola live-streamed a League of
Legends tournament to theaters in Europe and features the likenesses of game
characters on soda bottles in South Korea.

“Gaming isn’t the kind of platform it was when we were kids,” said Matt Wolf, 45, a
veteran of the games business who now leads Coca-Cola’s efforts to explore
investments in gaming. “It’s a major mass media platform that now has multiple
forms of consumption.”

The draw for marketers is the audience: mostly employed men, 18 to 35 years old, a
group that has become harder to reach with conventional TV advertisements. Major
video game competitions and online streaming sites offer companies new ways to
find them.

The idea among game companies is that the marketing dollars from outside
companies offer a virtuous cycle. More marketing money leads to better production
values, which in theory will lead to increased interest in gaming.

And the more people who become interested in gaming, the more money there will
be to spend on the games.

“Now, because games are run as continuous services where people can spend money
as they play along, the game companies have bigger incentives to engage and
entertain people continuously,” said Peter Warman, chief executive of Newzoo, a
research firm that has studied e-sports.

Still, for the cycle to continue, the industry will most likely need to overcome some
long-held opinions on games and gamers — in particular, that the skills involved are
inferior to conventional forms of athletic excellence. When ESPN2, the cable sports
channel, ran a show about the Dota 2 tournament in July, Twitter was flooded with
derogatory commentsabout e-sports being shown as a sport.

Mr. Lampkin of ESL said he wasn’t worried about such attitudes. The argument over
whether professional gaming is a sport in the traditional sense, he said, is beside the
point now.

“If you don’t want to call it athletics or sports, that doesn’t mean anything to me,” he
said. “That doesn’t change the reality of the massive growth we’re seeing.”

Every weekday, get the latest news and analysis about the technology industry delivered to
your inbox. Sign up for the Bits Tech Update here.

A version of this article appears in print on August 31, 2014, on page A1 of the New York
edition with the headline: Virtual Games Draw Real Crowds and Big Money. Order
ReprintsToday's PaperSubscribe

Source : http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/31/technology/esports-explosion-brings-
opportunity-riches-for-video-gamers.html

International New York Times