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Pro Gaming Getting Big?
by Chris Remo, Jan 31, 2006 3:00pm PSTTo a lot of gamers who have been playing multiplayer PC games for some time now, professional competitive gaming seems like a phenomenon whose time has passed. It doesn't really get the same coverage amongst the online gaming community that it once did, and beyond that the gaming audience has been changing radically over the last few years. Johnathan "Fatal1ty" Wendel seems to be doing alright, though. He's got an officially licensed mouse and a sound card now, he's made a whole ton of money, and 60 Minutes just did a show about him.
Wendel has been a pro for six years. When we first interviewed him last summer, he said he had won over $300,000 in tournament prize money. There are parents all over the country that are telling their kids, "Shut off the video game. You're wasting your time." Wendel says he got that, too. At age 24, he has won 41 tournaments, playing the same shoot-em-up video games that you can buy in most stores and living a life most young men his age can only dream of. He has traveled, all-expenses paid, to every continent except Antarctica. He has played in Moscow's Red Square, and on the Great Wall of China. And everywhere he goes, he is besieged by fans.The whole segment is available for viewing at the article page. Maybe what competitive gaming needs for a resurgence is this kind of figure that gets trotted out to the media (and it's been a while since Thresh was around).
Comments
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They need the ability to film the action from a perspective other than first person. Moving the camera strategically so as to show what's going on at a glance will really help people understand exactly what's going on. Big showdown going to take place in the tunnels on de_dust? move the camera to a vantage point that shows the defensive positions each side is taking, cut to a different angle showing when a team moves to the offensive and so on.
in short, what it needs is to be edited and shown in a way that's exciting for viewers. Showing what's on the monitor is going to confuse and nauseate people.
The technology exists to change camera angles in CS demos right? I'd like to see someone take a recorded demo and recut it, add an announcer/commentator and show it to regular people and see what they say.
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It has nothing to do with the quality or type or genre of games available today. There are plenty of entertaining, exciting, and great games to play competitively. That's not the issue.
I do agree with one of my fellow Shackers who mentioned that finding a good way to showcase the matches would go a long way towards making competitive gaming more interesting to the masses and thus more popular. He's right. Presentation is everything. If someone can tap into this idea and showcase the matches in a more intriguing and easy-to-view way, they'd have a hit with competitive gaming, imho.
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When will someone make a mouse that's as good and wide as an Intellimouse Explorer 3.0? All the mice people make today are dinky little things.
There needs to be a game, with more widespread viewing appeal, made for the spectators and not just the players to break the bank open.
Sports games won't cut it, people would rather watch the real thing. FPS probably won't either, Mom and Dad and Grandma are never going to get into watching something like Doom the movie that.
So I don't know what, since I don't think the right type of game even exists right now, but it will simply take an entirely different genre of game to make competitive play last...
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No more Quake, starcraft, UT =(
I doubt Guild Wars will get anything fancy, but I would love to.
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So back then I was a bit of a potty-mouth, esp. when I was playing an FPS. Besides John and his [NV] clannies, Airdave and *519 were in the house as well. I kind of suck in the first place, so with all these high-calibur guys running around I was more or less getting my ass totally kicked.
Toward the end of the party, everyone was jumping on a Q2 server running Q2DM1, and I was really getting foul at this point. Then I feel a tap on my sholder, and I turn around and Fatility's all like "Dude, we're in a church, chill out."
EPILOUGE: Just in case being scolded by the future's most famous gamer wasn't enough, God aranged for a bird to literally attack my head as I was carrying out my monitor. Luckily I dodged it in the nick of time and it smacked into one of my clannies.
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Yeah, I'm getting too old for videogames.
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will it continue to be dm/duel? if so what needs to happen to get newer gamers interested in that format? as it is it's so much easier to jump into a battlefield game and have success since it's less skill-based, so i think the increasing numbers of gamers (and thus lowering common denominator) is driving the popularity in that direction.
unless dm/duel regains some of the percentage it used to have i can't see the whole pro gaming thing working for anything other than team based games. i would imagine things like Madden tournaments could be bigger than anything else because of the general public's ability to follow what is happening.
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That said, competitive gaming is doing pretty well in terms of participation and purse size. If you think it's not getting any coverage it's because you aren't reading gotfrag + forums everywhere =(