Super Nerd Sunday Presents: Going Pro!

Mechwarrior: Online recently announced a fully fleshed out formal team tournament compiled from a list of competitive units  that engaged in placement matches before the tournament as a sort of shorthand vetting process for a game with no existent effective tournament structure.  The incentive for all this rigamarole (beyond the bragging rights reward native to gaming tournaments) is a Hero mech of your choice from the game (valued at around $30 to $60 depending on the mass of the mech), 30 days of premium time (which I honestly don't know the cost of), a t-shirt (priceless, obviously), and an exclusive in-game skin (adjacent to bragging rights).  Second place team members get everything except the Hero mech and the skin - instead they just receive a Champion mech (usually about half the cost of a Hero mech of equal weight) and nothing else.

This tournament is occurring in the shadow of the ramp up to DotA 2's upcoming International tournament.  DotA 2 has done something unprecedented, and somewhat brilliant, by allowing the player base to actively contribute to the tournament payout, with the promise of in-game rewards for this layer of "participation" in the tournament.  The end result?  A 6.5 million dollar prize pool, still growing with nearly two months until The International takes place in Seattle (a surprisingly bold move on Valve's part, given their game's predominantly Asian audience) and, to the best of my knowledge, will augment its prize pool with payouts from normal sponsors, the way tournaments usually do, which means that 6.5 million dollar prize pool is likely to grow substantially, even after DotA 2's player base has saturated it.  This marks a substantial increase from already impressive 1.6 million dollars the 2011 International Tournament's put up as a pot.

There's a pretty stark difference between those two prize pools, a stark difference illustrative of a greater trend within the world of video game tournaments. 

In days of yore, the long long ago, the beforetimes, pre-Starcraft, I knew a young man who was invited to play Quake professionally.  He would've made decent money doing so, more than he would've made at a summer job, but there simply wasn't that much money in first person shooter e-sports in North America.  The most successful FPS gamers, celebutards like F4tal1ty and the like, made their mint merchandising themselves and developing brands that served a previously non-existent market (gamers looking for high precision input peripherals with minimal self-respect) not by actually playing games.  In fact, as their communities began to expand and a more global player base began to participate in FPS tournament play, we found out that the professional gamers we thought were great were, in fact, just quite good.  Likewise, games like Starcraft started to rise to prominence and, with them an Asian influenced global marketplace for e-sports focused primarily on strategy games emerged and, in short order, proved considerably more lucrative than existent North American and European markets for e-sport FPS games.

This led to a professional gaming environment that largely favored Asian markets and engaged with North American markets adjacently at best.  Starcraft and its relationship with Korea is probably the most prominent example, featuring teams sponsored by a variety of corporations and, in one case, the Korean air force, even during its infancy.  Let me reiterate that: in the era of North American video game tournament purses in the mid ten-thousands, one of Korea's military branches sponsored a Starcraft team.  While a handful of tech companies paid kids minimal amounts of money to play CS:S to a largely invisible audience, major Korean corporations and, via proxy the Korean government, paid young men to play Starcraft in massive stadiums.  While the purses for Starcraft were comparable to those handed out by the Cyberathlete Professional League, when considered over the length of both the history of both the CPL and the South Korean Starleagues, the visbility of Korean sponsors, athletes and competitions, dramatically overshadowed the visibility of its American FPS based counterparts hinting at a potentially unexpected phenomena: that most people seem to enjoy watching real time strategy games more than they like watching first person shooter games.

There's some reasoning to back all this up, to be sure.  A solid RTS player will, from out the gate, be performing at least one action per second, probably closer to two or three for an overall APM of around 140.  A professional will be throwing out around two or three hundred per minute, which means that during every second of every game, something interesting is probably going to be happening.  Compare this to an FPS, where the action comes in spurts, often with long pauses between each bit of tangible, watchable action (for the purpose of this discussion, movement from place to place is not really action, so much as it is an interstitial activity that drives players from spurt of action to spurt of action - it's just not that interesting to watch in most FPS games, with noteworthy exceptions).  Starcraft, and RTSes in general, are actually kind of fun to watch, depending on how you package them.  South Korea figured this out fast, and western audiences have slowly been catching up, developing a rogue's gallery of announcers ranging in likeability from Day-9 to that guy that compared playing Starcraft to raping a woman that one time.  Still, the infiltration of Starcraft, even Starcraft 2, into America's entertainment psyche has been slow: while there's more interest now than ever before, and a dedicated number of streams are appearing to meet a surging demand for e-sports visibility, there's no real broadcasting of these events via conventional channels like television, even on television channels ostensibly geared towards video game enthusiasts.

DotA 2, in a sense, solved this problem by piggybacking on a cross-cultural phenomena: DotA had a reliable, enthusiastic player base everywhere, and while the various schisms brought on by the influx of MOBA titles over the last few years have divided audiences somewhat, DotA 2 has managed to bring a great number of them back together, uniting Asian, European, and North American audiences into a single mass ready to compete on a global scale.  Given the appeal of DotA 2 in Europe and North America, and the native enthusiasm for the game in places like China, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, and Hong Kong, it's no surprise that such a watchable game would find a sort of niche as the most watchable of games and, in doing so, would accrue one of the most massive prize purses in gaming history before it even acquired sponsors.  DotA 2 might not be bringing competitive gaming to the mainstream, but it's certainly bringing it to a position of cultural prominence or, at the very least, financial clout.

Which makes MW:O's stuttering attempt to simply sustain itself that much more frustrating.  With a considerably more aggressive revenue model, a much smaller player base, and a game that the "meta" of media and crowd attention has largely taken to ignoring, there's something tragic about MW:O's in-house tournament prizes, all the more bittersweet considering MW:O's predecessor, Mechwarrior 2, was actually one of the first games to prominently feature online multiplayer, through the Netmech expansion which allowed players to fight one another over TCP/IP connections in the early days of Teh Netz.  Sure, Battle.net came out just a year later, but for a long while TCP/IP shooter connections were the apex predator of online gaming, and during those halcyon days Mechwarrior represented a crucial property.

Now it sits at the bottom of the bottom of the barrel, struggling to release content months after it was promised, with community managers quitting, development team members jumping ship, and players losing enthusiasm as updates slow down and edge away from favoring general interest players and closer and closer to the fiscal whales that MW:O (unfortunately) needs to survive.  As DotA 2's International erects a sort of beacon of hope for gamers the world over, MW:O's tourney feels like a bittersweet reminder of days gone by, a gesture towards the potential greatness of a largely unloved object, one that, without a reinvigorated player base, might soon be unable to sustain itself.  Perhaps it'll work; perhaps people will watch the MW:O tournament and decide to try their hand at giant robot piloting.  At this point, it is unclear if this will change anything.  But if DotA 2 can spare one thing, it is hope, and The International demonstrates that an interested body of viewers exists, even if they only need to be shown the thing they're looking for, often years after it was created.