If you don’t already spend a few hours each week peering over the shoulder of someone playing a video game, brace yourself. It’s about to get harder to hide from it, especially in metro Atlanta.
Pro gamers are coming to a prime-time national TV network and an arena near you. And more of your loved ones – maybe even you – might be sucked in as viewers to what’s being marketed as a big-money sport.
Go ahead: Laugh about how competing in “eSports” barely requires more full-body physical activity than, say, walking to the fridge. Or yawning.
But eSports already has a massive viewing audience. And, as odd as it sounds, it’s developing some of the same delights and ills that come with the more brawny versions of pro sports.
Sold out arenas? Check. Hardcore rivalries among teams? Of course. Gambling on the outcome of games? Got it. Inclusion in daily fantasy sports outlets like DraftKings and FanDuel? Sure.
Controversy over performance-enhancing drugs? Yes. A few players who can pocket millions of dollars in endorsements, sponsorships, prize money and ad dollars? Definitely.
Fans in body paint? I’m afraid so.
Atlanta-based Turner Broadcasting and WME/IMG are launching an eSports league with two 10-week-long pro tournaments annually, potentially starting as early as May. The action and player back-stories will be streamed online for hours each week from Turner's Midtown studios and aired on television – prime time, in fact – each Friday night on TBS, cable's second most-watched network in prime time.
And that’s just the beginning of a broader, long-term push by Turner into eSports, according to Craig Barry, the chief content officer for Turner Sports.
“There is just so much opportunity,” he told me.
Big business
Esports is already a big business. It's attracted companies like Coca-Cola and Red Bull, helped convince Amazon to spend about $1 billion to buy a live-streaming gaming outlet called Twitch and enticed Google's YouTube to launch a competing gaming site. Tournaments have filled L.A's Staples Center.
Last year, Alpharetta-based Hi-Rez Studios held the world championship for SMITE, its top performing fantasy fighting game. More than two million people watched the competition online and 2,700 people witnessed it live at the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre.
This year’s four-day tournament started Thursday in the same venue, with a $1 million prize pool.
Maybe a thousand people, mostly young guys in their teens or 20s but with a surprising number of women sprinkeled in, politely watched an early round between two five-guy teams — one from Brazil, the other from China. Players were on stage but nearly invisible behind banks of monitors. Screens gave fans close ups of each player’s face and a giant view of the on-screen play.
I heard polite applause like I’d expect midway through a so-so college hoops game. Then something — I don’t know what — happened. A play-by-play announcer (a “caster” in the gaming business) unleashed a stream of comments incomprehensible to a neophyte like me. Fans hooted, cheered and smacked Thunderstix.
It really did seem kind of sports-like, except for almost motionless humans on stage.
‘I don’t understand’
Akhil Kumar, a 53-year-old physician from Canada, confided to me, “I don’t understand the game.” But he was dropping close to $4,000 to give his 14-year-old SMITE smitten son, Deepal, his first in-person big gaming tournament experience.
Deepal watched last year’s world tournament a year ago on Twitch and was instantly hooked. Now, he wants to become a caster. Yes, he’s a smart kid with good grades. But his dad said he also has lots of friends, won a North American championship running track and plays basketball for his school. The son said he came to Atlanta hoping to meet gamer friends from around the world whom he had chatted with only online.
This isn’t a world that fits in a neat box. Esports isn’t like the tightly defined worlds of the NBA or college football.
Big brands are gingerly trying to engage in a gaming world where the spectators and players really run the show. There are lots of competing games, leagues and promoters.
“You look at these gargantuan numbers, you see this great global revenue,” Turner’s Barry told me. But then “you realize how small and fractured it is, regardless of these monstrous numbers.”
Unlike football or basketball, competitive gaming’s media draw bloomed online.
That makes it hard for TV to catch up, especially when TV looks one-dimensional compared to what gamers regularly experience on Twitch, where fans watch streaming play, text top players mid-session and hear them respond live online.
“Chat is a big part of the appeal because it is a community experience,” said Todd Harris, a co-founder of Hi-Rez Studios,. which has its own SMITE channel on Twitch. “When you go to broadcast TV that is a very different experience.”
Basement loners
I suppose that community aspect shows how much gaming has changed from my ancient stereotypes of loners in the basement with no connection to the outside world.
And this isn’t only kid stuff anymore. Half of American adults play video games (though only 10 percent consider themselves full-fledged gamers), according to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center. Even 40 percent of those between the ages of 50 and 64 play.
Yes, it’s a time suck. But, then, so is much of what else entertains us online and on TV.
Now, at least, competitive gaming is giving confidence and — in rare instances, riches — to the people who used to be derided as nerds. Which is a nice surprise if you like sports where sometimes the underdog wins.
Of course, infusing big money into any new arena has a way of making the ugly come out. There was a stir, for example, over players trying to improve their focus by taking Adderall, a drug commonly prescribed for people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Some tournaments started random drug-testing.
Harris from Hi-Rez Studios told me thinks the issue was overblown. But he found it interesting “that what the drug of choice is for electronic athletes is enhancing your mind, not your body.”
