Does Professional Gaming Have a Future?

The Impact of TV

One big problem is finding games and formats that will work on mainstream TV. According to UKeSA’s Ray Mia, you need regular tournaments, standardised rules and high-quality gameplay, but you also need a way of making competitive gaming accessible to a wide audience.

‘We all know that there are some top-quality shoutcasting matches that exist online,’ Mia notes, ‘but it’s how you then translate that into a bespoke, professional, television studio environment.’ On Xleague.TV, the FIFA Interactive World Cup was successful, partly because it could follow an established ‘Football Focus’ model, and partly because the wider audience already knows how football works. ‘The problem falls with games such as Counter-Strike and hardcore, committed gamers,’ Mia adds. ‘I think some of that will translate to the mainstream, but do you really want that to translate to the mainstream?’

Commentator Paul Chaloner might say no. ‘I still think the kind of demographic you’re aiming at are the hardcore fans. You either have to bastardise the format of a game to suit the mainstream at the expense of the purity of some of the games or you take the hardcore route. It’s a tricky choice, and a lot depends on whether you’re interested in helping competitive gaming to grow in the UK, or just enjoy it for what it is.’

Chaloner might have a point. As he notes, the core gaming demographic doesn’t watch TV anyway; it’s more inclined to watch gaming events as video-on-demand streams through big gaming portals such as QuadV (www.quadv.com), GotFrag (www.gotfrag.com) or Enemy Down (www.enemydown.co.uk). After all, these are already the specialist media as far as competitive gamers are concerned.
Meanwhile, clips knocked out on the fragmovie scene play a similar role to that of the cheaply made tricks-and-slams videos that were crucial to the rebirth of skateboarding in the 1990s. Gamers love them, but they’re not the stuff of which mainstream TV is made.


It’s a strange question why gaming, which has such a huge market, hasn’t regularly translated to television. ‘I think there’s a lot of fear and suspicion from both industries,’ speculates Ray Mia. ‘I’m not going to say that when I started in this industry I understood what was
going on in Counter-Strike. As a non-player of Counter-Strike, and a TV person, trying to get my head around what was going on with
the commentary was tough.’

However, the more TV producers and gamers work together, the more these barriers can dissolve. UKeSA has already been engaged in talks with TV channels, and while some aren’t interested in the hardcore FPS scene, others are looking for something that can hold a niche audience for late-night programming; a visually exciting game, such as Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, could be just the thing. For Paul Chaloner, though, this isn’t essential. ‘If we could see results on the little bar on Sky Sports news, that would be cool. If the mainstream just took us seriously, that would also help, but I think eSports will always be a niche sport, much like volleyball or skateboarding.’

Is the PC a Spent force?

Some people will tell you that consoles and piracy are killing PC gaming, and the same people might tell you that the growing popularity of titles such as Halo 3, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, FIFA and Project Gotham Racing is doing the same for the PC in the competitive gaming sphere.

This idea isn’t totally misguided. It’s true, says Paul Chaloner, that ‘consoles are catching up fast, especially in the USA, with Major League Gaming and Halo 3. Console makers are starting to understand how to capture the hardcore eSports player with clever communication tools and instant messengers’. All the same, he describes the PC as ‘the main platform for eSports’, adding that ‘for me, the true skill is with a keyboard and mouse’.

It isn’t all about the games. The PC will always remain a strong platform for competitive gaming for two other reasons. Firstly, as Ray Mia explains, ‘PC gamers are a dream come true for technology companies and software companies. They’re the ones who are going to make things snowball for a product or title, and stick by a title long after it has come off the shelves’. More importantly, adds Mia, ‘PC teams are organised, vocal and mobilised, and more interconnected than the console players, online and globally. I think that’s the key and it will always be there’.

The trick for the big teams, then, is not to abandon the PC but to diversify. ‘I think that console gaming will move up, but that doesn’t mean the PC will move down. I view eSports teams as having multiple squads, and the better eSports teams have console squads and PC squads,’ continues Mia.

4Kings manager Ian Leckey agrees. ‘Gaming in Europe is still dominated by PC players. However, more teams are picking up squads that compete on Microsoft’s Xbox 360 console, and the UK is home to Europe’s most prestigious console LAN event, XL. ‘In other words, time spent developing your keyboard and mouse skills will never be wasted, but if you want the best chance of making it, a little time with a console controller might not go amiss either.’