Published June 2, 2020 1:15 PM , by Ozzie Mejia
A few weeks ago, we had the pleasure of speaking with esports luminary Paul 'Redeye' Chaloner. He's been one of the most recognizable voices for competitive gaming for many years. And he recently wrote a book where he dives fully into the topic of esports, what it entails, and its greater place in the world.
This is esports (and How to Spell it): An Insider's Guide to the World of Pro Gaming offers a window into competitive gaming from the perspective of one of its biggest voices. Many recognize him as one of the faces of The International, Dota 2's premier tournament. So for today, we'd like to focus on one of Redeye's own TI experiences.
Redeye (left) on the TI8 analyst desk (Dota2ti Flickr)
Courtesy of publisher Bloomsbury Sport, here's an excerpt from the opening pages of This is esports (and How to Spell it): An Insider's Guide to the World of Pro Gaming , where we take a look at Redeye's experience at The International 8 in 2018, his first behind the analyst desk, and one of the biggest moments where esports started to become a phenomenon.
Jump forward a decade to The International 2018 (or TI8 for short), the premiere esports tournament for the team strategy game Dota 2 , and in some ways esports has grown and evolved beyond recognition.
We've graduated from a backlot to the Rogers Arena in Vancouver, normally the home of the Vancouver Canucks ice hockey team. There's no ice, no pucks, but two teams of five players doing battle over a virtual map instead. No goal mouths exactly, but an 'ancient' in each team's home base that has to be destroyed – or protected – at all costs.
I'm still there, presenting. I just about weathered the storm in the years that followed the collapse of CGS. But now I have a desk, co-presenters, analysts, roving reporters. And this time, the fans are here too; 17,000 through the doors, every day for a week, with costumes, foam gloves, even LED signs, from every corner of the globe. The entire floor of the main stage has been transformed into an LED screen.
The esports teams, too, are actually from all over the world this time – the cities given teams in the CGS were picked seemingly at random. No fewer than 24 countries are represented across the 16 competing teams. The grand final of TI8 sees Chinese heavyweights LGD (sponsored by French football team Paris Saint-Germain, no less) take on wild cards OG, comprised of a Dane, two Finns, an Australian and a Frenchman.
OG have won plenty of tournaments before, but here they're the underdogs. Unlike LGD, they weren't invited to TI8. They scrape through via European open qualifiers, and their coach, Sébastien 'Ceb' Debs, is standing in as a player for lack of any other signings. Ceb hasn't played at The International for six years. This is the esports equivalent of Ryan Giggs having retired for Wales and then six years later taking them to the World Cup final. OG really shouldn't be in form, and yet here they are, one match away from the world championship.
In Dota 2 , you win by selecting the right mix of characters, or 'heroes', from a pool of over a hundred, then having them compete for resources (like gold, to buy more powerful items) and fight each other; whichever team takes the others' base (or 'ancient' ) first wins, to put it simply. It's a best of five, and on paper it looks like LGD should have won four of these, based on the lead they built up. But nope. OG snatch back wins to keep them in it, and suddenly it's 2-2. It all comes down to the final game.
Then in the draft, or hero selection phase, Ceb makes a questionable pick out of nowhere, Magnus, a walking rhino that packs a powerful punch but only up close, and can be all too readily manoeuvred around – the hero is seldom seen in big finals for good reason. I'm not on air when it happens so I can scoff and swear: What the fuck is he doing? He's thrown it all away. He's looked a gift horse in the mouth and then kicked it in the teeth.
LGD, meanwhile, can't believe their luck. The final game kicks off, and sure enough, LGD are ahead in gold at 20 minutes, usually a good indicator of which side is stronger. But OG dive into a huge team fight and in an instant there he is: Ceb's Magnus comes wading in to devastating effect. It's a slaughterhouse. LGD lose valuable time and gold reviving their dead heroes. Suddenly OG snowball and at 36 minutes they lay waste to LGD's ancient. They've done it. They lift the Aegis of Champions.
The next year they return, no longer the underdogs, and win the whole thing again, an astonishing, unparalleled feat in professional Dota.
***
Why do I single out these two events? On one level, a decade's a nice round number. It's how long the Odyssey took, and esports has certainly been on a journey in that time. So have I. I thought we'd arrived in 2008. I thought I was made for life, I thought we'd be on live TV every week. It turned out I was hopelessly wrong about all of those things, blinded by faith, passion, ambition. But here we are now, and it's finally happened. We don't need to pay fans to show up any more. We are worldwide, we are global, we do have big-name sponsors, we do go out to millions of homes, and – crucially – fans in those homes are actually tuning in now. We're not looking for the ESPN of online coverage for esports, that's just ESPN now.
And this time, we've done it without bending the knee. We've done it without having to change the games and the format and how they're played, to cater to the needs of TV (and TV advertisers). We've stayed authentic, and it's finally working.
Just look at the numbers. The League of Legends World Championship tournament in 2018 brought in 76 million unique viewers across the globe. There were 3,446 paying esports tournaments held in 2018 alone, and $694 million was spent by brands looking to cash in on esports' exposure, including Amazon, Audi, Coca-Cola, Mercedes-Benz, DHL, McDonald's, American Express and Gillette. (I call this the dad factor: Has my dad heard of these names? Then it must be big news.)
More than 300 sports teams have invested in esports so far, and in 2019 there was an estimated esports audience of 456 million people. Esports will even be featured at the 2022 Asian Games. And get this: as of the start of 2020, 83 esports athletes have made more than a million dollars in prize money alone across their careers. We've made 83 millionaires already.
Speaking of which, I was backstage when Ceb walked back in after winning TI8. He was shaking. He just kept saying the same words to me: 'This isn't real, this isn't happening.' He was a ringer for his own team, and now he's a world champion – and a multimillionaire.
You see, that's another thing that's changed: the prize money. The Championship Gaming Series gave away $500,000 to the winning team in 2008. That in itself was unimaginable even 18 months earlier, but The International 8 prize pot still dwarfs it – a staggering $25 million, with over $10 million for the five winning OG players alone, more than the entire FA Cup winning football team gets for its efforts each year (oh, and at The International 9 in 2019, it was $34.3 million).
I'll admit that in some other ways we're still chasing that CGS dream. I still don't have a stylist, and that LA penthouse is a distant memory – I live so close to the airport I can hear the planes landing. We do have those television production values now, but there's no big TV contract, and we definitely don't have 200 people working on every show yet.
But you know what? That prime-time TV dream was just an illusion. It turns out esports didn't need the couch potatoes, the casual viewers who only want to watch for 12 minutes at a time before flicking over. We could turn watching other people play video games into a spectacle, something as exciting as any sports final, without them.
There was an audience of gamers out there who didn't just love to play, but to compete, and to celebrate that by watching and learning from the very best. And not just create those magic moments, but the games themselves. We just needed the internet to connect them all.
This is esports (and How to Spell it): An Insider's Guide to the World of Pro Gaming by Paul Chaloner is published by Bloomsbury Sport (9781472977762; $18 USD; on sale 5/26/20). It is available to order in paperback, eBook and audiobook now!
And for more with Redeye, be sure to read through our exclusive interview .