<story><title>Shady Numbers and Bad Business: Inside the Esports Bubble</title><url>https://kotaku.com/as-esports-grows-experts-fear-its-a-bubble-ready-to-po-1834982843</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>toofy</author><text>I think esports will take off once a modern popular game allows local communities and neighborhoods to host what we used to do with lanparties.&lt;p&gt;Part of what helped propel traditional sports into ubiquity was the ability to have a ball and play anywhere with anyone you choose which allowed schools to build teams with practice fields and community leagues etc...&lt;p&gt;Modern games, at least as far as I can tell require you to connect to the IP holders company’s servers and often don’t allow you to pick and choose specifically who you play against which in turn makes it nearly impossible to build leagues and do team scrimmages, team practices, local community leagues, etc...&lt;p&gt;And the other major issue I see is the lack of quality spectator features in games.&lt;p&gt;My friends had a LAN party a few months ago and we played some older game, quake3osp(?) Its definitely old, but it seemed to have the kind of setup I imagine it would take for a modern game to really become as prolific as traditional sports. It had amazing spectator functions where you could jump from player to player at will, it had the ability to host the server yourself, you could trade players from the sideline onto your team at anytime, you could pause the match, you could practice on any map you wanted, you could pick a map and run around for an unlimited amount of time practicing, etc.. etc...&lt;p&gt;Modern games require too much interaction directly with the companies who control the IP for them to ever really take off.&lt;p&gt;Could you imagine if neighborhood kids playing football didn’t have the freedom to just run around the same field for hours and play against the same other team for hours? And were required to only play when everything is controlled by the Professional league who controls the nfl or mls branding? It never would have flourished.</text></comment>
<story><title>Shady Numbers and Bad Business: Inside the Esports Bubble</title><url>https://kotaku.com/as-esports-grows-experts-fear-its-a-bubble-ready-to-po-1834982843</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>kibwen</author><text>The article ends up burying several important ledes: that whole companies are built around inflating livestream viewership numbers, and that popular streamers are threatening to slowly gut the competitive esports scene. For the latter, note the perverse incentives: Twitch streamers famously lose so many subscribers to even a day away from their stream (or, heaven forbid, a whole weekend) that the amount of money needed to entice them to spend days at a time traveling to attend tournaments leads to either ludicrous and unsustainable prize pots or a competitive scene where, ironically, all the best players decide not to compete because they would lose money by doing so (especially ironic considering that they likely became popular by competing in the first place).</text></comment>