Esports encompasses many franchises and games across a plethora of different genres. From competitions like EVO that revolve around fighting games like Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat and Super Smash Bros. To tournaments for MMOs like League of Legends and DOTA 2 with prize pools ranging sometimes near 40 million dollars. Every game strives to produce a competitive and successful esports scene that naturally will bring new players into the fold. However, time and time again we see games consistently flop when trying to build an esports scene. Why does this happen? As someone who has been in and out of watching esports for the better half of a decade there are decisions that companies make that always seem to doom their scene for failure.

Rushing to Make Their Game an Esport

A very common mistake seen by new games that hit the market is that they feel the need to build their esports scene immediately on release. Esports is a very delicate endeavor that takes companies and publishers sometimes years to build up into a successful business. Counter-Strike is one of the biggest esports scenes out there, and it took them three iterations Counter-Strike 1.6, Counter-Strike: Source and Counter-Strike Global Offensive to get to the point where they are at now. Let’s look at an example of one of the many games that tried to rush their esports scene into existence and failed. Lawbreakers was an anti-gravity hero shooter that was created by Cliff Bleszinksi, the creator of Gears of War. The game was trying to break into the market that Overwatch had control over back in 2017. During this time, esports were having a big boom with games like Call of Duty, DOTA, League of Legends and Counter-Strike being in some of their most successful eras. Lawbreakers on release already had multiple sponsored events set up before there were even any teams or pro players appearing out of the game. What is a reasonable timeline for games and publishers to create an esports scene? Esports scenes are made by the players and not the company. The players build up the community through independent events set up by the community. Call of Duty esports started with small community LAN events that built up companies like Major League Gaming (MLG) an independent company that was a hub for amateurs and rising pros to get their name out into the scene. Call of Duty did not switch to the Call of Duty World League (CWL) until Black Ops III which was the twelfth installment in the franchise. CWL is ran by Activision who is the publisher of Call of Duty, and the only event before this that they officially ran was Call of Duty Champs. Allowing your community to naturally build up the competitive scene of a video game is the best path for success towards a thriving esports scene.

Franchising

Franchising is a relatively new concept to esports appearing a few years back with the first one I saw being the Overwatch League. It is a great idea in retrospect, tying an established city’s name to a team hoping to break into that market to get more attention onto esports as a whole. The problem with this is that none of these teams that take a city’s name like the Atlanta FaZe or Minnesota Rokkr in the Call of Duty World League do not even play in the cities that they are franchised to instead all the teams play in one arena in one city so what is the point of having Atlanta in your name. Franchising is seen as a way to make the sport much more understandable to a casual audience with setting up the leagues similar to leagues like the NFL, NBA, MLB, etc. Why does franchising not work in esports? Esports is an online sport and over the years of YouTube and Twitch many different teams and organizations have come and gone into different scenes with some becoming main stays and others being flashes in the pan on their respective game’s timelines. Organizations like Fnatic, Ninjas in Pyjamas, Team SoloMid, Cloud9 and Team Liquid are all teams that have multiple teams in multiple different games. When you franchise an esports league you inherently destroy the opportunity for teams from smaller regions and smaller budgets to break into scenes and make a name for themselves. That is a huge selling point of esports is that anyone can create a team and build it up into a juggernaut. Franchising also halts the progress of young talent in the scene with many franchised teams being signed to long-term contracts and you rarely see any roster moves in these leagues. The Overwatch League and Call of Duty World League are two scenes that have franchised and incurred teams to put down a massive payment down to get a team going in their league with the CWL asking for 25 million dollars just to get your foot in the door. I know I keep bringing it up but Counter-Strike to me has one of the best and most complete esports scenes. Their tournaments are mostly done by independent companies like BLAST, ESL, CCT and PGL with one or two official majors sponsored by the publisher Valve each year. In these tournaments you can see teams and organizations from a plethora of countries and regions competing that you wouldn’t be able to see if they were franchised. In the tournament going on right now, IEM Cologne 2023, you have teams like FURIA from Brazil, MongolZ from Mongolia, Complexity from North America, and Vitality from Europe all competing on the same stage. This to me is the beauty of competitive video games being to see people from all walks of life being able to compete even though they may be from a smaller region with less competition and being able to see different playstyles from around the world. My favorite events to watch are EVO and Counter-Strike tournaments.

The final message I will give to any publishers hoping to build a successful esports scene from their game is this. Support your community and let the competitive scene build naturally over time intervening and sponsoring events after the community has built a strong dedicated community behind the game’s competitive scene.