I may be totally wrong here, but the only game worth considering as an eSport is basically Starcraft. It is so for two reasons: 1) It's top-down perspective makes it a better spectator experience and 2) the level i Korea is so high, due to the professional league. It can be interesting to cover the local Stacraft scene as well, but mostly because of the Korean level it aspires to.
Speaking of eSport coverage. I have been around for ages and remember surfing the net on NCSA Mosaic around 1993. And I remember all the sites that sprung up while Blizzard and Wacraft II fans were eagerly awaiting Starcraft i 1997 and 98. Especially Station17 which were the first fan-site I became addicted to.
Now while we are waiting for Starcraft II I see the same thing over again. Maybe a bit different since the time and technology change, but in spirit it is just the same. I absolutely love the enthusiasm that people display and do understand why people want to contribute to the community, but I really wish that people would create more original content - think independent thoughts. There is too much copying going on.
If you follow Starcraft on twitter (which I do) then you probably follow all the big sites and celebrities as well. Retweeting any of the major sites should be punishable ;-).
I also tried to check out Husky's newest show. "eSports Report" I think it is called. So far I am not convinced. I like Artosis's show better for the sole reason that he offers more insight. I think that is what we are missing - not better production quality.
But some of all the new sites, video shows etc. that have sprung up will develop into something cool over time and others will perish. That is probably the natural order of these kind of things.
You know what would be cool, if everyone could watch pro matches live AS AN OBSERVER. I don't know how it would work but there could be live commentary at the same time, that would be amazing! Am I a dreamer... or an idiot?
ReplyDeleteYeah, that would be very cool. I don't think it is likely to happen, but technically I don't think it is impossible.
ReplyDeleteBasically what they have to do is to drop synchronization between the spectators and the players. If one spectator lags a bit it should not affect the game play. But that would also lead to a need for data packets to be resend so a spectator could catch up.
Not much more difficult that doing streaming live video I would say. I don't, however, expect Blizzard to put the effort into doing a feature like this.
Hey Fafner.. I've been rolling around the idea of starting a news column on our site for a while now and this finally spurred me to action. I'd really love to get any feedback from you on it as it's my first endeavor into writing news for something like esports and I'm expecting to need improvement :)
ReplyDeleteUsed the link as the "Lumi" name