26/10/2014 - E-sports + My role in the group (my favourite blog)

As I have mentioned I have been taking a role I'm not used to in this development team, I am used to being an idea man who can ramble on for days about what he's about to come up with. However, this is my first time working in a group as large as 3 and I felt like fighting to include my ideas would make our group have "too many cooks in the kitchen" so I took more of a role of typing down my other 2 group members ideas and tweaking them appropriately, I still suggested ideas but I felt more like one of my group members had hired me to work on their dream job.

I am no fighting game connoisseur, my favourite game genre is  RPG but my favourite game for the last couple years has been league of legends which has had very big success as an esport, I enjoy watching the game just as much as playing it, the same as a chess player or football player would like watching their game to pick up strategies, judge the strength of the players or just be part of the community.

Here are some facts about E-Sports:

• Electronic sports (also known as esports or competitive gaming) is a term for organized video game competitions, especially between professionals. The most common video game genres associated with electronic sports are real-time strategy, fighting, first-person shooter, and multiplayer online battle arena.
• Although esports have long been a part of video game culture, competitions have seen a large surge in popularity in recent years. While competitions before around the year 2000 were largely between amateurs, the proliferation of professional competitions and growing viewership now supports a significant number of professional players and teams, and many video game developers now build features into their games designed to facilitate such competition.
• The increasing availability of online video streaming platforms, particularly Twitch, has become central to current esports competitions. In 2014, sports broadcaster ESPN broadcast the The International finals, marking the first time an esports event had been simultaneously broadcast on a mainstream channel.
• Historically, fighting games and arcade fighters like Mortal Kombat, Tekken and Super Smash Bros have been popular in amateur tournaments, although the fighting game community has often distanced themselves from the esports label. In 2012, the most popular titles featured in professional competition were real time strategy and multiplayer online battle arena games Dota 2, League of Legends, and StarCraft II. Shooting games like Counter Strike and Call of Duty have enjoyed some success as esports, although their viewer numbers have remained below those of their competitors.

I enjoy E-sports so much that I actually started tuning into lots of different talk shows about the high level competitive games, for league of legends they have different shows for all the regions in the world and get a lot of pro players or veterans in the industry on as guests.

I would like to promote our game as an E-sport by organising tournaments with prize funds, setting up a livestream of the tournaments and recording them for youtube, making advertisement deals with sponsors and making sure the players get a good wage if the economy we create can sustain itself like it does in other games.
It would even be cool if the characters could have alternate costumes that could be bought as DLC that are based on pro players or pro teams, a large percentage of these funds could be sent back to the pro players as wage.

Here is a picture of the 2014 League of Legends world championship final.

• The 2014 World Championship featured 16 teams competing for a $2.13 million prize pool, with 14 teams qualifying from the primary League of Legends regions (China, Europe, North America, Korea and Taiwan\SEA) and 2 international wildcard teams.
• The grand finals were hosted at the 45,000-seats Seoul World Cup Stadium
• The grand finals were watched cumulatively by 27 million people, with viewership peaking at over 11 million concurrent viewers.

On a more personal note I never imagined I would become the kind of person that really cares about sports, roots for teams or getting invested in dramas or rivalries between players, however if it's videogames it seems I become a "Jock", thankfully E-sports rivalries have never got out of hand and rivalries aren't too far like in normal sports and I hope it stays as friendly as is.