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The only game I really see viable as a true nationally broadcast e-sport is counter-strike. Dead simple concept, intuitive mechanics even to laypeople, and the

The only game I really see viable as a true nationally broadcast e-sport is counter-strike. Dead simple concept, intuitive mechanics even to laypeople, and the meta game can be explained in 10 minutes. Maybe besides COD, everything else is too complex and requires to much prerequisite knowledge to really get into. I could probably get my dad to watch counter-strike. He would probably wouldn't go for valorent. Almost certainly not something like overwatch. And definitely would never watch something like league or dota. Sure, there is money in e-sports catering to the communities that form around the games, but I think for most games they'll never reach outside their player community.

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boringg 4y ago
E-sports is essentially advertising for computer games. More people that sub to that the more sales a company can get for computer games/hardware etc. Same goes for Twitch - yes there is community that is build aruond that but it is for the underlying reason of making more sales for the businesses.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  I only got a small glimpse into this world (specifically, esports betting), but the thing that makes the most sense to me is that esports is driven by gambling. That's the economic engine under the hood. Might be wrong, but it kinda looked like that was what was going on, just from some of the numbers floating around, and seeing that was the first time esports-as-an-industry made any sense to me at all, as far as how the economics might work out.
- banannaise 4y ago
  > E-sports is essentially advertising for computer games. No more than live sports are advertising for sports equipment. The real money in sporting events is in the events themselves: advertising dollars, gate receipts, and merchandise. Esports isn't terribly different, except that the gate receipts and merch sales are much lower. The revenue of the game itself is secondary, especially since the publisher rarely plays a major role.
  - HDThoreaun 4y ago
    Esports and sports have extremely different revenue models. The differentiator is that no one ‘owns’ traditional sport games. Anyone can make and sell a basketball, but blizzard has a monopoly on over watch. Sport leagues only indirectly make money when people play their game, but for esports it’s extremely direct and also easier to measure. League of Legends makes multiple billions of dollars a year, not from esport receipts, but from people buying content in the game. The NFL doesn't make a dime when you play football in your backyard.
nerdponx 4y ago
Dota is kind of fun to watch even if you're not that well-educated, but the announcing/casting style needs a serious overhaul, and general popularity needs a lot of "support" from good production: information overlays, slow-motion replays, giving casters the ability to zoom out to a full-map view and draw arrows, etc. Look at hockey, American football, and road cycling for examples of complicated sports that are somewhat hard to understand without prior knowledge, and people really enjoy watching those, too.
- TheAceOfHearts 4y ago
  At one time DotA2 had a noob friendly stream that would explain what was going on in greater detail, but it's a hard balancing act. DotA2 allows in game spectating which actually means you can click in items to figure out what they do. It would be cool if streaming platforms had embedded item and hero information for users to be able to expand on demand. Complexity is something that affects League and DotA2. It's hard to know what all the things on screen even mean, and why they're important.
  - nerdponx 4y ago
    > It would be cool if streaming platforms had embedded item and hero information for users to be able to expand on demand. Twitch actually has this for Dota now! On bigger streams, you can click on the spells and items to see the tooltip.
MentallyRetired 4y ago
Not Rocket League? The inverse may be true... I became a rocket league player after watching esports. So while I was outside the player base, I'm in it now. :)
- Workaccount2 4y ago
  Yeah, rocket league too. I didn't think of it. Although I'm iffy on anything with non-reality physics, since people have to learn a new intuition.
scythe 4y ago
>Maybe besides COD, everything else is too complex and requires to much prerequisite knowledge to really get into. I think the FGC would strongly object. It's not always easy to know what options a player has at a particular position, but it's always pretty obvious whether someone is doing well. And it's not like the theory of football is that simple either.
- rspeele 4y ago
  > It's not always easy to know what options a player has at a particular position, but it's always pretty obvious whether someone is doing well. I really need to have at least a basic intuition for "the options a player has" to enjoy watching. As somebody who has never gotten into fighting games, watching one is about as fun as watching election results come in for Dog Catcher of Backwater County. Bars move until somebody wins, but hell if I know why or what was so great about what the winner did. It might as well have been random. Same goes for a MOBA with 150+ playable champions. Every fight is just a mess of colorful abilities that mean nothing to an outsider. You could watch a 40 minute game and maybe by the end of it understand what the champions do, but then the next one will use new champions. These games can be great fun to play, but they will never have spectator appeal broader than the player community. Which is fine.
  - Klonoar 4y ago
    You might need those options explained to you, but plenty of people are fine watching in ignorance. You could liken it to Boxing or MMA, which people will watch without understanding the intricacies of the sport. Similar to Football, it’s easy to tell overall who’s winning or if theres a big swing. Fighting games definitely have this factor.
Narew 4y ago
Maybe I'm too conservative but I don't think Counter-strike or fps in general could make on a wide broadcast. (It still people killing other people) We would have more chance on politically acceptable game like (Trackmania, Rocket League, ...) but they have smaller audience in general.
- starky 4y ago
  It is a real shame that Ubisoft Nadeo hasn't really marketed Trackmania outside of Europe (they mostly focus on just France). Streamers have been driving a ton of growth in the game (particularly in the US) because it is so intuitive and enjoyable to watch. Unfortunately the competitive scene has quite a bit of catching up to do as it is still very France and Germany centric. They are making strides to do that with the new world tour but it is going to take awhile before some new players get up to the level of the primarily European professional base.
jedberg 4y ago
> Dead simple concept, intuitive mechanics even to laypeople, and the meta game can be explained in 10 minutes. Do you feel like this applies to American Football? I don't, but yet it's the most popular sport on TV in America. What I'm saying is that I don't think your requirements are necessary for a sport to be a popular spectator sport.
- abfan1127 4y ago
  American Football is extremely simple game relative to other games. It also is piece-wise fast paced. The game goes really fast, then gets a small break. it lends it self easily to television broadcast with its timeouts, changing of sides, etc. I am not of fan of american football, but I can see how it became popular.
- spillguard 4y ago
  Not to entirely disagree with you, but comparing football to Counter Strike is kind of an apples-to-oranges comparison - you're comparing an introduction to something new with something that most American viewers have probably known for their entire lives, so that factor of "explainability" doesn't exactly apply to it.
  - cruano 4y ago
    Eh, I'm not American and I found American football pretty straightforward, at least until you start looking at the play-calling and formations and all of that. And you could say the same about CS, your market is probably "anyone who has played a first-person shooter"
  - tarentel 4y ago
    As someone who has worked for several European companies try explaining american football scoring to a non-american and let me know how easy that is. That's basically just scratching the surface of it. Saying you can boil it down to one side moves a ball the other side tries to stop them is pretty disingenuous. You can boil down basically any game to that. Counter strike you just kill the other team, mobas you just destroy the other teams base, etc. I know you didn't make that point but that's what most of the arguments in this thread are.
banannaise 4y ago
It's important to note that Counter-Strike's massive popularity (and funding) comes largely from the skin betting industry, which is entirely built around underage gambling. I'm not sure their viewership would survive a proper reckoning with that.
- pattrn 4y ago
  Do you have any source for this? I've been playing Counter-Strike since the original beta, and it's been popular since its creation, far before skins existed. As far as the funding goes, I have no idea, but would love to see some numbers.
  - winkeltripel 4y ago
    I don't belive that there are public numbers disclosing the funding sources for tournaments. Valve throws in a bit, and betting sites are often sponsors. CS was totally popular before skin's. I recall the riot shield being particularly fun for me.
- Workaccount2 4y ago
  Counter-strike was massively popular even a decade before it had skins.
kentonv 4y ago
I don't know, plenty of "normal" sports have complexity that most people don't understand. Like, how many people really understand the batter-pitcher duel in baseball? That's the very core of the game but most people just see "pitcher throw ball, batter swing, random result".
ChicagoBoy11 4y ago
During the pandemic real reacecar drivers turned to the e-version of their sports and there was even some coverage of mainstream racing channels of those virtual races given they couldn't do the real thing. For anyone who has tried virtual racing (especially with high-end setups), the level of authenticity of the experience is actually incredibly high, and racing simulation is even actively used as part of real life driver training and car development. I think there's a healthy community in virtual racing as is and I can easily see continued and growing investment in it... its an incredibly compelling way to bring people into the sport and can easily be a revenue generator in its own right.
- yummypaint 4y ago
  I still think drivers should remotely pilot cars with about half the mass of the current ones that wouldn't be designed around protecting an occupant. They could go 300+ mph and show us a new frontier in human driving skill. All the "too dangerous" racing technologies would be allowed, and the track would have loops and crazy features like a video game. There would be no restrictions on car design aside from size, weight, a 360 3d camera array, and a standard telemetry interface.
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  - crooked-v 4y ago
    In all seriousness, Hot Wheels would probably offer some premium sponsorships there.
oreally 4y ago
Unfortunately it's boring as hell to watch over the long term. In a game like CS there is little setup and watching someone getting instagibbed in short engagements is no fun. But maybe the players around it can initiate some drama that keeps people talking, similar to wrestling, but then it's no longer about the game and more about the drama.
- symlinkk 4y ago
  It’s similar with F1, it’s extremely boring to watch long term, most of the time it just looks like the cars are following each other, and it’s even worse live where you can only see a sliver of the multi mile long track. Yet it’s still a global phenomenon somehow.
  - Apocryphon 4y ago
    Watching the Netflix series (Formula 1: Drive to Survive), the drama between the racers and the corporate teams that sponsor them do add that personal connection, that keeps all sports going. I am amused to learn from it that Red Bull is somehow allowed to sponsor multiple racing teams (Red Bull Racing and AlphaTauri).
    - anomaly_ 4y ago
      Minor correction, not sponsor, own. Interestingly the tobacco company British American owned a team until 2005 (the team is now the Mercedes team).
rspeele 4y ago
As a longtime FPS player one area of complexity that is easy to forget is the maps. When I play the game, I can learn a new map pretty quickly. When I watch a game played on a map I'm not familiar with, it takes me much, much longer to develop the same understanding. It doesn't load into memory the same way. Similar to remembering the route to a new location as a passenger vs a driver. The broadcast might flip back and forth between two players, hunting for each other in different parts of the map, and unless I know it pretty well I could be totally lost until they actually meet. The broadcaster can help by using third person / freecam. But at the same time, an FPS loses a lot of the tension and visible skill when combat is viewed from freecam. So finding the right balance of camera time between individual players' views and an overhead view is challenging for a broadcaster, far more so than in traditional sports where we're accustomed to seeing a wide open field and perhaps some tracking of the ball. Edit: To give a practical example, I used to dabble in Quake Live. I was never any good, but there are some maps I know well: dm6, ztn, dm13, t7. Even though I'm not a big eSports fan, I don't watch streamers or whatever, I've seen some VODs played on those maps that really held my attention with suspense. I've been surprised at how entertaining it was watching top players duel. At some point I watched a Quake Champions duel match between Rapha and Cooller and while the gameplay was quite familiar, not knowing the maps made it far less entertaining. I just couldn't follow the significance of the player's positioning nearly as well. Before that I totally underrated how much my familiarity with the maps was adding to my enjoyment of the Quake Live tournaments.
- avisser 4y ago
  I've never gotten into FPS eSports for this reason. To me, Starcraft is the perfect eSport - imperfect knowledge for the players. Perfect knowledge for the casters and viewers. It's a great moment when someone tries to hide something on the map, and it _almost_ gets scouted. Or to see a reaction in the player-cam when they discover what their opponent is doing. I've played thousands of hours of Overwatch in the past few years, but have 0 interest in watching OWL.
- switz 4y ago
  This is genuinely the biggest barrier to a new viewer of CS. Until you physically play on a map, it is very hard to understand by watching alone, especially as the perspectives are largely first-person. It can take dozens of hours to build a proper mental model of a map so understanding the game as camera angles change in a flurry is very difficult. Traditional sports all have the same (or routinely similar) "map", and they're mostly made up of a simple geometric shape that can generally fit in a single overhead frame.
sheepybloke 4y ago
To me, the round structure of CS is what makes it most engaging. I watch a lot of League and CS, and having many more rounds to play in CS makes comebacks a lot easier, and so, it makes crafting a game narrative and excitement a lot easier. League is exciting, but a lot harder to get out of a hole than with CS, so barring some crazy plays, it's a harder to make a comeback.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  Also many of the rounds in game are miniarcs themselves. First the lull waiting for new round, then the setup, next build up maybe one or two players dying. Then it entering the crescendo and that is either it or we have post plant scenario with an other build up potentially coming to save by single player.
ericmcer 4y ago
Do they have good camera angles for Counter-Strike? Showing the game through a series of first person perspectives seems like a waste vs some kind of isometric or even interactive camera. I also don't really know of a game that has been designed to look good from the perspective of a spectator instead of just for the players.
- whack24 4y ago
  They do. Just as they have professional casters, there are some talented folks who specialize in smoothly transitioning to camera angles above, as well as switching first person views so that you don't miss key kills, etc.
markandrewj 4y ago
The thing is these player communities are huge, more people have watched worlds in the past then the Super Bowl. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/14/league-of-legends-gets-more-viewers-than-super-bowlwhats-coming-next.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/14/league-of-legends-gets-more-... It doesn't make sense to focus on a game with a declining player base like CS:GO, when you have games like Fortnite, that on average have between 2.9 - 4 million people playing at any given time.
charrondev 4y ago
What about a game like rocket league? It seems to have a pretty strong competitive and streaming scene and it’s mechanics are pretty straightforward to understand (most people can understand “football with rocket cars” pretty well).

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boringg 4y ago

E-sports is essentially advertising for computer games. More people that sub to that the more sales a company can get for computer games/hardware etc. Same goes for Twitch - yes there is community that is build aruond that but it is for the underlying reason of making more sales for the businesses.

yamtaddle 4y ago
I only got a small glimpse into this world (specifically, esports betting), but the thing that makes the most sense to me is that esports is driven by gambling. That's the economic engine under the hood. Might be wrong, but it kinda looked like that was what was going on, just from some of the numbers floating around, and seeing that was the first time esports-as-an-industry made any sense to me at all, as far as how the economics might work out.
banannaise 4y ago
> E-sports is essentially advertising for computer games. No more than live sports are advertising for sports equipment. The real money in sporting events is in the events themselves: advertising dollars, gate receipts, and merchandise. Esports isn't terribly different, except that the gate receipts and merch sales are much lower. The revenue of the game itself is secondary, especially since the publisher rarely plays a major role.
- HDThoreaun 4y ago
  Esports and sports have extremely different revenue models. The differentiator is that no one ‘owns’ traditional sport games. Anyone can make and sell a basketball, but blizzard has a monopoly on over watch. Sport leagues only indirectly make money when people play their game, but for esports it’s extremely direct and also easier to measure. League of Legends makes multiple billions of dollars a year, not from esport receipts, but from people buying content in the game. The NFL doesn't make a dime when you play football in your backyard.

nerdponx 4y ago

Dota is kind of fun to watch even if you're not that well-educated, but the announcing/casting style needs a serious overhaul, and general popularity needs a lot of "support" from good production: information overlays, slow-motion replays, giving casters the ability to zoom out to a full-map view and draw arrows, etc. Look at hockey, American football, and road cycling for examples of complicated sports that are somewhat hard to understand without prior knowledge, and people really enjoy watching those, too.

TheAceOfHearts 4y ago
At one time DotA2 had a noob friendly stream that would explain what was going on in greater detail, but it's a hard balancing act. DotA2 allows in game spectating which actually means you can click in items to figure out what they do. It would be cool if streaming platforms had embedded item and hero information for users to be able to expand on demand. Complexity is something that affects League and DotA2. It's hard to know what all the things on screen even mean, and why they're important.
- nerdponx 4y ago
  > It would be cool if streaming platforms had embedded item and hero information for users to be able to expand on demand. Twitch actually has this for Dota now! On bigger streams, you can click on the spells and items to see the tooltip.

MentallyRetired 4y ago

Not Rocket League? The inverse may be true... I became a rocket league player after watching esports. So while I was outside the player base, I'm in it now. :)

Workaccount2 4y ago
Yeah, rocket league too. I didn't think of it. Although I'm iffy on anything with non-reality physics, since people have to learn a new intuition.

scythe 4y ago

>Maybe besides COD, everything else is too complex and requires to much prerequisite knowledge to really get into. I think the FGC would strongly object. It's not always easy to know what options a player has at a particular position, but it's always pretty obvious whether someone is doing well. And it's not like the theory of football is that simple either.

rspeele 4y ago
> It's not always easy to know what options a player has at a particular position, but it's always pretty obvious whether someone is doing well. I really need to have at least a basic intuition for "the options a player has" to enjoy watching. As somebody who has never gotten into fighting games, watching one is about as fun as watching election results come in for Dog Catcher of Backwater County. Bars move until somebody wins, but hell if I know why or what was so great about what the winner did. It might as well have been random. Same goes for a MOBA with 150+ playable champions. Every fight is just a mess of colorful abilities that mean nothing to an outsider. You could watch a 40 minute game and maybe by the end of it understand what the champions do, but then the next one will use new champions. These games can be great fun to play, but they will never have spectator appeal broader than the player community. Which is fine.
- Klonoar 4y ago
  You might need those options explained to you, but plenty of people are fine watching in ignorance. You could liken it to Boxing or MMA, which people will watch without understanding the intricacies of the sport. Similar to Football, it’s easy to tell overall who’s winning or if theres a big swing. Fighting games definitely have this factor.

Narew 4y ago

Maybe I'm too conservative but I don't think Counter-strike or fps in general could make on a wide broadcast. (It still people killing other people) We would have more chance on politically acceptable game like (Trackmania, Rocket League, ...) but they have smaller audience in general.

starky 4y ago
It is a real shame that Ubisoft Nadeo hasn't really marketed Trackmania outside of Europe (they mostly focus on just France). Streamers have been driving a ton of growth in the game (particularly in the US) because it is so intuitive and enjoyable to watch. Unfortunately the competitive scene has quite a bit of catching up to do as it is still very France and Germany centric. They are making strides to do that with the new world tour but it is going to take awhile before some new players get up to the level of the primarily European professional base.

jedberg 4y ago

> Dead simple concept, intuitive mechanics even to laypeople, and the meta game can be explained in 10 minutes. Do you feel like this applies to American Football? I don't, but yet it's the most popular sport on TV in America. What I'm saying is that I don't think your requirements are necessary for a sport to be a popular spectator sport.

abfan1127 4y ago
American Football is extremely simple game relative to other games. It also is piece-wise fast paced. The game goes really fast, then gets a small break. it lends it self easily to television broadcast with its timeouts, changing of sides, etc. I am not of fan of american football, but I can see how it became popular.
spillguard 4y ago
Not to entirely disagree with you, but comparing football to Counter Strike is kind of an apples-to-oranges comparison - you're comparing an introduction to something new with something that most American viewers have probably known for their entire lives, so that factor of "explainability" doesn't exactly apply to it.
- cruano 4y ago
  Eh, I'm not American and I found American football pretty straightforward, at least until you start looking at the play-calling and formations and all of that. And you could say the same about CS, your market is probably "anyone who has played a first-person shooter"
- tarentel 4y ago
  As someone who has worked for several European companies try explaining american football scoring to a non-american and let me know how easy that is. That's basically just scratching the surface of it. Saying you can boil it down to one side moves a ball the other side tries to stop them is pretty disingenuous. You can boil down basically any game to that. Counter strike you just kill the other team, mobas you just destroy the other teams base, etc. I know you didn't make that point but that's what most of the arguments in this thread are.

banannaise 4y ago

It's important to note that Counter-Strike's massive popularity (and funding) comes largely from the skin betting industry, which is entirely built around underage gambling. I'm not sure their viewership would survive a proper reckoning with that.

pattrn 4y ago
Do you have any source for this? I've been playing Counter-Strike since the original beta, and it's been popular since its creation, far before skins existed. As far as the funding goes, I have no idea, but would love to see some numbers.
- winkeltripel 4y ago
  I don't belive that there are public numbers disclosing the funding sources for tournaments. Valve throws in a bit, and betting sites are often sponsors. CS was totally popular before skin's. I recall the riot shield being particularly fun for me.
Workaccount2 4y ago
Counter-strike was massively popular even a decade before it had skins.

kentonv 4y ago

I don't know, plenty of "normal" sports have complexity that most people don't understand. Like, how many people really understand the batter-pitcher duel in baseball? That's the very core of the game but most people just see "pitcher throw ball, batter swing, random result".

ChicagoBoy11 4y ago

During the pandemic real reacecar drivers turned to the e-version of their sports and there was even some coverage of mainstream racing channels of those virtual races given they couldn't do the real thing. For anyone who has tried virtual racing (especially with high-end setups), the level of authenticity of the experience is actually incredibly high, and racing simulation is even actively used as part of real life driver training and car development. I think there's a healthy community in virtual racing as is and I can easily see continued and growing investment in it... its an incredibly compelling way to bring people into the sport and can easily be a revenue generator in its own right.

yummypaint 4y ago
I still think drivers should remotely pilot cars with about half the mass of the current ones that wouldn't be designed around protecting an occupant. They could go 300+ mph and show us a new frontier in human driving skill. All the "too dangerous" racing technologies would be allowed, and the track would have loops and crazy features like a video game. There would be no restrictions on car design aside from size, weight, a 360 3d camera array, and a standard telemetry interface.
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- crooked-v 4y ago
  In all seriousness, Hot Wheels would probably offer some premium sponsorships there.

oreally 4y ago

Unfortunately it's boring as hell to watch over the long term. In a game like CS there is little setup and watching someone getting instagibbed in short engagements is no fun. But maybe the players around it can initiate some drama that keeps people talking, similar to wrestling, but then it's no longer about the game and more about the drama.

symlinkk 4y ago
It’s similar with F1, it’s extremely boring to watch long term, most of the time it just looks like the cars are following each other, and it’s even worse live where you can only see a sliver of the multi mile long track. Yet it’s still a global phenomenon somehow.
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  Watching the Netflix series (Formula 1: Drive to Survive), the drama between the racers and the corporate teams that sponsor them do add that personal connection, that keeps all sports going. I am amused to learn from it that Red Bull is somehow allowed to sponsor multiple racing teams (Red Bull Racing and AlphaTauri).
  - anomaly_ 4y ago
    Minor correction, not sponsor, own. Interestingly the tobacco company British American owned a team until 2005 (the team is now the Mercedes team).

rspeele 4y ago

As a longtime FPS player one area of complexity that is easy to forget is the maps. When I play the game, I can learn a new map pretty quickly. When I watch a game played on a map I'm not familiar with, it takes me much, much longer to develop the same understanding. It doesn't load into memory the same way. Similar to remembering the route to a new location as a passenger vs a driver. The broadcast might flip back and forth between two players, hunting for each other in different parts of the map, and unless I know it pretty well I could be totally lost until they actually meet. The broadcaster can help by using third person / freecam. But at the same time, an FPS loses a lot of the tension and visible skill when combat is viewed from freecam. So finding the right balance of camera time between individual players' views and an overhead view is challenging for a broadcaster, far more so than in traditional sports where we're accustomed to seeing a wide open field and perhaps some tracking of the ball. Edit: To give a practical example, I used to dabble in Quake Live. I was never any good, but there are some maps I know well: dm6, ztn, dm13, t7. Even though I'm not a big eSports fan, I don't watch streamers or whatever, I've seen some VODs played on those maps that really held my attention with suspense. I've been surprised at how entertaining it was watching top players duel. At some point I watched a Quake Champions duel match between Rapha and Cooller and while the gameplay was quite familiar, not knowing the maps made it far less entertaining. I just couldn't follow the significance of the player's positioning nearly as well. Before that I totally underrated how much my familiarity with the maps was adding to my enjoyment of the Quake Live tournaments.

avisser 4y ago
I've never gotten into FPS eSports for this reason. To me, Starcraft is the perfect eSport - imperfect knowledge for the players. Perfect knowledge for the casters and viewers. It's a great moment when someone tries to hide something on the map, and it _almost_ gets scouted. Or to see a reaction in the player-cam when they discover what their opponent is doing. I've played thousands of hours of Overwatch in the past few years, but have 0 interest in watching OWL.
switz 4y ago
This is genuinely the biggest barrier to a new viewer of CS. Until you physically play on a map, it is very hard to understand by watching alone, especially as the perspectives are largely first-person. It can take dozens of hours to build a proper mental model of a map so understanding the game as camera angles change in a flurry is very difficult. Traditional sports all have the same (or routinely similar) "map", and they're mostly made up of a simple geometric shape that can generally fit in a single overhead frame.

sheepybloke 4y ago

To me, the round structure of CS is what makes it most engaging. I watch a lot of League and CS, and having many more rounds to play in CS makes comebacks a lot easier, and so, it makes crafting a game narrative and excitement a lot easier. League is exciting, but a lot harder to get out of a hole than with CS, so barring some crazy plays, it's a harder to make a comeback.

Ekaros 4y ago
Also many of the rounds in game are miniarcs themselves. First the lull waiting for new round, then the setup, next build up maybe one or two players dying. Then it entering the crescendo and that is either it or we have post plant scenario with an other build up potentially coming to save by single player.

ericmcer 4y ago

Do they have good camera angles for Counter-Strike? Showing the game through a series of first person perspectives seems like a waste vs some kind of isometric or even interactive camera. I also don't really know of a game that has been designed to look good from the perspective of a spectator instead of just for the players.

whack24 4y ago
They do. Just as they have professional casters, there are some talented folks who specialize in smoothly transitioning to camera angles above, as well as switching first person views so that you don't miss key kills, etc.

markandrewj 4y ago

The thing is these player communities are huge, more people have watched worlds in the past then the Super Bowl. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/14/league-of-legends-gets-more-viewers-than-super-bowlwhats-coming-next.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/14/league-of-legends-gets-more-... It doesn't make sense to focus on a game with a declining player base like CS:GO, when you have games like Fortnite, that on average have between 2.9 - 4 million people playing at any given time.

charrondev 4y ago

What about a game like rocket league? It seems to have a pretty strong competitive and streaming scene and it’s mechanics are pretty straightforward to understand (most people can understand “football with rocket cars” pretty well).