E-Sports?

Greetings! This is my response in a GPG forum thread discussing the upcoming Supreme Commander 2; regarding the fact that so far we’ve not yet been shown much about its supposed multiplayer features. Rather, they’ve focused PR heavily on showing us single-player and skirmish modes. It’s fairly obvious why, since SupCom1 gave us a relatively poor single-player experience.

However, this is what I said:

I’m waiting for multiplayer coverage too but for different reasons.

Why is Starcraft, an RTS, one of the most successful and notorious gaming franchises in the world? I would say in large part because of its suitability for e-sports. Seriously, I don’t think Starcraft sold that many copies because of the campaign. Yes it had amazing story, yes it had A-list production qualities which GPG/Squeenix simply can’t match right now on its relatively small budget. Yes Starcraft had the geek factor.

BUT… the reason it’s so popular is because of e-sports. It’s a Korean national pastime. I believe this is the bright future of video games. Starcraft has professional commentary, paid players in national tournaments with sponsorship and enormous media coverage.

I’ll say that the more conducive to e-sports the Supreme Commander franchise becomes, the more popular and successful it will be and the better for all of us. Balance is a crucial factor here, a much more difficult undertaking in an RTS with physics and emergent gameplay. It has to be tight, tight, tight. Solid, robust. Starcraft is totally brilliant of course, but it’s ultimately number-crunching, like chess. It also had fantastic multiplayer support. It worked. Look at Starcraft, a game from 1997… then look at Demigod when it was launched…

We have to have a seamless multiplayer online experience. Not too fancy, just robust, reliable, consistent. Regular patches to address balance issues and bugs. It’s totally worth the investment if they can keep people coming back in the long run.

But what do you guys think? I could be way off the mark of course. I’d just love to see SupCom2 really push into this niche. I think e-sports are going to be BIG in the near future. Look at the things Blizzard do on their website to push competitive play; it’s mind-blowing. I don’t think you need the billion-dollar budget to crack this, just a desire to break boundaries and push ‘hardcore’ video gaming into the mainstream through competition. No-one watches amateur sports on TV after all 🙂