14 ms·

The core problem of competitive games is that they're "owned" by someone. Imagine if "soccer" or "tennis" was owned by a corporation. This is what's happening

• marcelluspye 4y ago
  The closest thing to this at the moment, I think, is online Chess.
• intrasight 4y ago
  From a business practical standpoint, FIFA does own football/soccer. But you make a good point about open source. It would have the added advantage of being open to code review to find flaws that allow cheating.
  • aflag 4y ago
    Anyone can play football (even if maybe they can't use the name?) using FIFA rules and even incorporate their own. However, you cannot legally play starcraft 2 without blizzard's permission.
    • KptMarchewa 4y ago
      It's not a big problem given that SC2 is free right now. Unless you mean that ToS (not toss) is somehow a big barrier that keeps StarCraft from getting bigger.
    • CyanBird 4y ago
      Soccer's history is very interesting, there used to be several competing international or local bodies fighting each other for control over soccer rules and therefore how people "ought" play soccer and therefore power Blizzard vs Kespa is very much that situation happening again. Now days in soccer the field is the way it is exactly because of fifa's ever present hand
• Reubachi 4y ago
  Not sure the case for "older" sport like soccer/football, But in US, MLB owns baseball. NFL owns American football. What I mean is, they literally own the mechanism of play for these two sports and allow the individual teams to compete in the leagues, which they must make many concessions to be a part of. aA "copy" of MLB can't pop up and play the same exact game, MLB owns every part of it. IE; your "problem" with competitive gaming infrastructure is exactly how competitive sport is and has succeded. Apples to oranges of course tho
  • bbanyc 4y ago
    The USFL exists. It doesn’t really compete with the NFL but that’s more due to NFL teams having much more money with which to buy nearly all the top talent.
  • s_dev 4y ago
    That's not a good example. Here's why: How many kids play baseball in the US and don't pay royalties to MLB? How many kids play football and don't pay royalties to NFL? All these same kids -- when playing Starcraft have already in someway paid Blizzard money. You cannot play Starcraft legally without paying them money. You can play football in your backyard whenever you want.
    • Tenoke 4y ago
      SC2 is f2p so you can. You also typically will pay some manufacturer for basketball equipment before you play.
      • TulliusCicero 4y ago
        Yeah, instead of price it'd make more sense to talk about centralized control.
      • bena 4y ago
        That money doesn't go to the leagues however. You don't have to pay the NBA. Hell, you don't even have to pay Wilson, the official basketball manufacturer of basketballs for the NBA. You could buy a Spalding, or any random brand.
• helen___keller 4y ago
  It might be interesting to note that during Starcraft Brood War's heyday as a major esport in Korea, it wasn't really touched by Blizzard. They weren't pushing out updates or expansions, or leveraging control of the IP e.g. involving themselves in managing the competitive scene. Blizzard basically treated the game as "done" and the competitive scene turned into a major esport organically.
  • thih9 4y ago
    Thanks. I don’t follow esports or multiplayer/online games; before reading your comment I assumed that this is the usual scenario.
    • CyanBird 4y ago
      Starcraft 1 in Korea was defacto managed by Kespa not blizzard, you can look them up, they are a Korean association, they both Kespa and blizz actually had strong spats and disagreements on it, Kespa would run sc1 not exactly like an sport, but somewhat similar to a "teenager's reality TV show" with the backdrop that the teens were playing video games competitively rather than doing wherever competitive reality TV shows do these days Running esports like actual sports is not really how esports came to be, which is why I very much believe this to be the wrong way to go about it. These days tournament organizers care more of storylines of players battling each other than the actual sport, because that's what's relatable to viewers, humans are hardwired to like stories so now they try to leverage that more than it was done back on 2016 or so
  • rvba 4y ago
    That is not exactly true. When StarCraft 2 came out there was a big push by Blizzard to kill StarCraft 1 (Brood War). Blizzard tried to force the leagues and players to play both games at the same time. I remember very well how SC2 fans on websites like teamliquid wanted to "kill" Brood War too, so SC2 would somehow get more viewers. Blizzard didnt really know what to do with Brood War's popularity.
    • Too 4y ago
• pier25 4y ago
  I don't know. There are many racing competitions but F1 is owned by the FIA.
  • rad_gruchalski 4y ago
    No. Formula 1 is owned by Liberty Media. FIA does not own any racing series. FIA is a governing body. > The FIA is the governing body for world motor sport and the federation of the world’s leading motoring organisations. Founded in 1904, with headquarters in Paris, the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA) is a non-profit making association. It brings together 244 international motoring and sporting organisations from 146 countries on five continents. Its member clubs represent millions of motorists and their families. https://www.fia.com/fia https://www.fia.com/fia
    • pier25 4y ago
      Yes, the commercial rights, but who decides on the regulations of the sport? Who determines the penalizations when teams/drivers do not follow the rules? But anyway my point was that F1 is not "open source" and it's quite successful.
      • rad_gruchalski 4y ago
        > but who decides on the regulations of the sport? The FIA. But not because the sport is owned by the FIA. Formula 1 has selected the FIA as its governing body, not the other way around.
  • oarsinsync 4y ago
    I’m a huge F1 fan, but I’m also confident that the total annual viewer hours of F1 pales in comparison to any other major sport. F1 was a sport born by the rich for the rich. Unlike every? other mainstream sport, you cannot and will not “play F1” in schools. There is no “amateur” F1. You can go to track days in different cars. You can go karting. The gulf between that and F1 is huge. Unlike football, or basketball, or cricket, or rugby, or volleyball, or…
• nonethewiser 4y ago
  Competitive Counter strike isnt really owned by Valve. League of Legends is owned by Riot, and seems to be doing fine. Honestly I dont see a problem with it.
• robertlagrant 4y ago
  > The core problem of competitive games is that they're "owned" by someone. Imagine if "soccer" or "tennis" was owned by a corporation E.g. MMA. It's going pretty well.
  • akiselev 4y ago
    Are you saying that MMA is a counter example? I'm not an MMA fan but I've seen far more Bellator matches than UFC ones despite working with a UFC team while they were on The Ultimate Fighter. That doesn't track with UFC owning the sport.
• vultour 4y ago
  You’ll have to expand on that because your comment makes absolutely no case for why an open source game would do any better.
  • aflag 4y ago
    I share the same feeling as OP. Open source games can essentially live forever and others can pick up where the previous entity left off. For instance, starcraft 2 still has big mass of players, even though it's on life support (servers die sometimes, bugs go unfixed for years/forever, maps are not updated as frequently anymore, etc). That's one aspect, the other aspect is that the opensource base can end up becoming the reference implementation of a genre. It can become a more sustainable environment, where people are trying to improve the game (and get paid through the organisations that run tournaments and such) rather than create a competitor.
    • DangitBobby 4y ago
      That's all well and good, but you'd have to make the case that players' adoption would be significantly affected by whether the game is open source, and I can't think of any plausible causal mechanism, let alone evidence, of that.
      • aflag 4y ago
        Very few games are open sourced, specially AAA games. So, it won't be easy to find evidence. I think the point is more that it's more sustainable and it can keep up indefinitely.
      • CyanBird 4y ago
        Open sourcing the game opens the possibility of different groups changing the game in different ways and directions to optimize it for viewership and entertainment, the fact that it is open sourced would lead to different groups optimizing it in different ways and creating competition in these niches Mentioned elsewhere is the case of Kespa vs Blizzard. Kespa would run starcraft Broodwar like a reality TV show where the entertainment of thhe viewer would come first to demerit of the competition (think added randomness into the game state), whereas Blizzard would strip the reality tv angle and randomness and focus near soly on the actual sport/competition angle rather than optimize viewer entertainment
• DangitBobby 4y ago
  In what way does the game being "owned" by someone prevent a competetive scene from being successful?
  • ilyt 4y ago
    It doesn't in the slightest. But it does tie how healthy competitive scene is to their competence.
• ilyt 4y ago
  It's funny that you mention that but pretty much "the MOBAs" genre came from the fact WC3 engine shipped with editor. And big part of SC staying power was because of community made maps and stuff. CS (which gave birth to Valorant in turn) and TF2 (which Overwatch traces lineage to) also came from mods. So it's not really the license just sheer fact community can take it and start modifying if it doesn't work, or evolve if it gets stale.