Esports Broadcasting
DITCHING THE TV DREAM
The story of esports development is a complex one spanning multiple decades. It can be helpful to think about its trajectory as waves in which particular aspects come into focus and rise in salience. Such stories are, of course, always risky, potentially obscuring how earlier practices or forms of organization in the current moment can remain as tendrils, or making developments seem nearly predestined. They can also render invisible the ways that prior phases had innovations or experiments that were only later picked up in earnest. But with such caveats in mind, thinking with particular lenses can help refract and highlight important shifts. The history of competitive gaming’s development up until now might be formulated as such:
First wave: “Game” is the predominant frame in this moment. It is rooted in enthusiast and serious leisure communities. Amateur and pro-am orientations and competitions dominate.
Second wave: “Sport” becomes the predominant frame. The rise of third-party organizations—sustained infrastructures of competition, formalization, and professionalism—takes over as a dominant rubric for not only players but also many ancillary actors involved in creating an industry.
Third wave: “Media entertainment” rises as the predominant frame. Serious attention is given to media production, audience, and entertainment. Infrastructures, both organizational and technical, become attuned to as well as configure themselves around media production and distribution. Tournaments are harnessed as media events with an emphasis on the visual and narrative.
Though we are currently seeing traditional sports organizations wake up and pay attention to esports, it would be a mistake to not situate that interest within a media entertainment frame. Sports are, as a number of scholars before me have noted, largely “media/sport” now.1 In the following, I begin by exploring the transition between the second and third wave when DIY productions were developing esports as a media product, and then turn to the contemporary moment where creating ambitious productions that get broadcast to millions globally has become a prime focus for the industry.
Beyond Television
In 2013, I took the train down from Boston to New York City and attended my first ComicCon. Though the original and largest one takes place each year in San Diego, the New York event has been growing in size since first launching in 2006. I knew how big the Southern California one was, but was stunned when I arrived at the New York City venue before the doors opened and already found hundreds of people waiting to get in. Some were dressed in impressive and elaborate costumes from both comic-based franchises and games. These fans had clearly come out not only for the comics subculture but to tap into the growing number of talks and exhibits around gaming and other pop culture products as well.
I had reached out to some folks at Turtle Entertainment, the company that runs ESL, and told them that I would love to take a peek behind the scenes at one of the tournaments they’d be broadcasting. Turtle is one of the oldest esports organizations in the world and has run major tournaments since 2000. It had been incredibly helpful when I was doing research for my book on esports, and its story figured prominently in my research into that scene. If anyone was tackling the changes occurring within the industry as a result of live streaming, I figured it would be them. My plan was to spend the weekend backstage observing tournament production.
My contact met me at the VIP door and quickly handed me one of a number of exhibitor passes that he had hanging around his neck. This was a helpful gesture, as it allowed me access to the venue before and after show hours. Perhaps more important, it was a valued talisman to an ethnographer: an external signal that says, “Don’t worry about me, I’m allowed to be here,” while hanging around backstage. It was my first time meeting him, but he was friendly and immediately willing to answer questions as we made our way to the ESL area on the convention floor. Things were still in setup mode, and he explained all the prep that was happening. The show floor was close to opening, and staff members were putting the final touches on the stage as well as doing a quick dress rehearsal with the talent. I’ve been to many esports events over the years and have seen the setup, stages, and even behind-the-scenes work as the commentators prepped, but this event especially caught my eye once I saw backstage.
In a fairly compact area tucked behind the main stage, there was essentially a mini–television studio (see figure 4.1). My guide explained to me that the production team travel around the world producing events. All the gear I was seeing fit into reinforced travel boxes, and at each venue they set it up, tie it into the site’s electric and internet infrastructure, and produce major events for broadcast. Over the course of the weekend, I watched a full-fledged crew in action—one complete with emerging professionalized spheres of expertise and divisions of labor. As I have continued to visit backstage productions at esports tournaments, these setups have only grown, and now occupy some of the most cutting-edge work happening not only in gaming but the broader media industries.
FIGURE 4.1. Backstage at Intel Extreme Masters, New York ComicCon, 2013.
From nearly its start, esports has been intent on developing spectatorship capacities. Though the roots of the scene are based in grassroots communities, competitive gaming has long been closely tied to a variety of media practices.2 In the earliest days of esports industry development there was a push toward establishing a presence on television that was often seen as a legitimizing move. As one longtime esports broadcaster put it, “I think we all wanted and felt that if we had TV, it would validate what we thought was real and we all compared to TV and appealed to TV sports.” While he didn’t feel esports needed television to be meaningful, he did see the media transition as important. In the early 2000s, I continually heard this sentiment from people working to build formalized competitive gaming. Frequently people cited the success that esports had found on television in South Korea along with the widespread broadcasts of gaming there, and used it as an almost-mythical waypoint guiding development. They were simultaneously convinced that the scene would find inevitable success and that a transition to television was part of that trajectory—one that would both build audiences and signal they had “made it.”
There were various attempts to bring esports to broadcast television during that period, usually in the form of one-off novelty shows. But the one that captured the most attention was the well-funded Championship Gaming Series (CGS), which launched in 2007 as a partnership between DirectTV, British Sky Broadcasting, and Star TV.3 The CGS brought in traditional sports media professionals (such as Emmy-award-winning producer Mike Burks, who had worked with outfits like the NFL, the National Basketball Association, and the National Hockey League), executives who had their eye on traditional sports advertising and markets, and some of the groundbreakers in the esports industry such as Paul Chaloner, Marcus Graham, and Craig Levine. The venture proceeded to buy up, franchise, and regionally brand already-existing North American players and teams.4
While much hope was placed in the CGS, it ultimately did not successfully navigate merging competitive computer gaming with television. Despite some longtime insiders doing hard behind-the-scenes work to help guide the executives in ways that preserved an authenticity while attending to the specificities of competition in a digital milieu, many missteps were made in the service of broadcast. Game choices, altered structures and rule sets (ones that did not correspond to grassroots preferences, built over years of tournament trial and error), uneasy links to regionalism, and an overall mismatch in tone and approach led to a surprisingly quick demise of the organization in 2008. With it, many existing North American esports structures collapsed; it took years for the scene to recover.
As one current production director who lived through this era put it, “All [these attempts] failed because they tried to take something that was really its own thing and were sticking a round object into the square hole. They had this model of what they’re used to doing, which is old, old media, old broadcast, and they tried to apply it.” The failure of the CGS acted as both a serious blow to those who aspired to grow esports and ultimately reignited a focus on the roots of the scene. The risk to the stability of an entire region and pro player base—in this case, North America—also became clear with the demise of the organization. Being on television began to be seen as costly, with a high risk that outweighed the benefits. One organizer, summing up an approach I regularly heard post-CGS, said, “What I always wanted was TV quality, and if it ends up on TV, great. But don’t ever change our games again for TV.” Another remarked, “Being on cable television is way too hard. It limits yourself to where you can even broadcast. It’s expensive and it just didn’t seem to be the way that esports was ever going to thrive. Other attempts had been done previously that failed epically. It’s really hard to try to consolidate a game that should go forty minutes into a thirty-minute program. It just didn’t work.”
Amid the high-dollar experiments like the CGS, however, there continued to be grassroots media development by other esports professionals and fans. As I’ll discuss a bit more later on, many people in competitive gaming continued to look for new technologies that might assist them with distributing their content. The rise of internet-based live streaming ended up bolstering a turn away from broadcast or cable television.
Players and organizations alike now regularly say that they see their audience as primarily located online, and that is where they are serving them. Whether it is the longtime esports player using live streaming to broadcast to their fans or leagues and tournaments reaching millions of viewers over the course of a weekend solely via the internet, many of those invested in competitive gaming are using these platforms to continue to build what is increasingly a sports-media business. From the broadcast of mundane practice time to high-end sports spectacles, live streaming is being used to grow competitive gaming. And it’s working. While esports once held a place as a fairly niche segment of game culture, this shift to live streaming has been a boon to building audiences and bringing in even casual fans. Live streaming has been a powerful accelerant to the growth of esports, and broadcasts now routinely tout viewership numbers in the millions over just the course of a weekend tournament. Competitive matches are shown on channels at Twitch nearly all hours of the day and night. Fans, located around the world, would be hard pressed to not find something to tune into whenever they want.
One producer connected this trend to broader media shifts and what he sees as the cluelessness of mainstream media’s continued attempt to capture this emerging market with existing paradigms:
I think traditional broadcast television is going to slowly go away, and online streaming is going to be the future. Funny thing I always hear when mainstream news media cover esports, when they ask when do you think it’s going to be on TV? And I always shake my head at that question because it doesn’t need to be on TV. Yeah, it’s one of those things where the mainstream news media think that if it gets on TV, it somehow becomes legitimized. It is legitimized already. It’s big. It’s a big industry. Having people want to watch it and interact with it rather than just sit down on their couch and watch it where it could be prerecorded or available in only these certain regions doesn’t work for it. So I think traditional broadcast television is really going to go away and online streaming is going to be where it’s at, video on demand, anything like that.
This was a sentiment that I repeatedly heard as I spoke to esports organizations, particularly during the earliest years of the streaming boom. They were not only looking at how the technology and platforms like Twitch were helping them reach audiences in ways that felt more “natural”; they regularly linked up that development with broader media transformations.
Unlike previous broadcast attempts, live streaming content is generally coming directly from individual players, leagues/esports organizations, and game developers themselves rather than filtered to, or through, preexisting traditional media structures. And while moves to align esports broadcasts with sports media tropes continue to grow, live streaming typically breaks standard conventions around run time or commercial breaks. The inclusion of synchronous communication elements via chat windows that run alongside produced content are also pushing models of audience engagement.
Although the individual competitive players who utilize live streaming to assist their own professional careers offer a fascinating case, as I discussed in the last chapter, it is in tournament broadcasting that live streaming has had the biggest impact on esports. If any one thing has happened to assuredly secure the notion of an esports “industry,” it is the ability to now easily broadcast events online, globally, and to large audiences. The position one regularly hears now within esports is that they no longer need television. For many, live streaming has offered a declaration of freedom from traditional broadcast media.
And yet while television as an industry structure is no longer a driving goal in esports, it continues to hover as a broadcasting frame in a few ways. This is where disentangling television as a node of the media industry, hardware device, or set of televisual genre conventions becomes helpful. It is also where understanding the transition that television is making to “on-demand” modes becomes important. When esports broadcasters talk about ditching television, they don’t always mean ditching those boxes in our living rooms, or even the aesthetics or “live” aspect of sports television. What they do mean is jettisoning an old network era model, and imagining a media future that understands the role of the internet, interactivity, and on-demand and context-driven viewing.
This is not a conundrum unique to esports. The media industry writ large is grappling with these shifts. Be it the rise of companies like Netflix or Amazon, cord cutting, over-the-top models, niche on-demand products, time shifting, “binge watching,” or “social TV,” the industry as a whole is facing profound changes in consumption practices. As a longtime tournament organizer remarked,
Everything is on demand these days. Everything is moving away to the internet. I mean, you don’t watch TV shows anymore by waiting until Sunday to turn on HBO or whatever. You go to play soccer on Sunday, and after the episode is released, whenever you’re ready with your peanuts and Coca-Cola, you’re watching. You’re watching whenever you please. So that basically destroys the concept of television as we know it.
Though perhaps understating the power of a timed broadcast (many eagerly sat down for the latest Game of Thrones each Sunday night, for example), there is an insightful point in their statement about how much of our media consumption now rests on our own schedule and the explicit choices we make.
Esports broadcasters also understand that the current media landscape often involves users cycling across a variety of websites and devices, including their televisions. One describes it this way:
When I watch esports events, I’m at home watching on my sixty-inch TV. All I’m doing is pulling it up on my iPhone, and I have an Apple TV that you can just browse through them while you’re watching and boom! I flick it up to the big screen TV. That’s how I’m watching it. I’m watching it in my family room, or friends are over watching it with me, or my girlfriend is even watching it with me. . . . You’re going to start being able to tap in a live stream there.
Others emphasize the ways that users are watching primarily at their computers because that is where they spend the majority of their time. As one prominent organizer put it to me, “There’s no point in taking it [esports] to television because anyone that’s already interested in it is online and watching it most likely. Or is playing the game and is online. It’s like saying, ‘Hey, we need to take this baseball game and play it inside of Times Square because there’s more people walking around there, right?’ It doesn’t work that way. There’s no point to force a gamer to walk away from his PC and watch it on television.” Your own computer acts as a device to both play on and spectate others through.
These models of audience tend to firmly situate viewers within a demographic that has rejected broadcast television—a trend that indeed worries the larger media industry. As one producer observed,
To be honest with you, I feel like television, broadcast television, will do a disservice to esports. I’m actually pretty against it ever moving over to television as a platform. These guys from thirteen to thirty years old, they are consuming their content online. So the people who are into esports, the demographic that esports will always serve, even as it scales, will still all be thirteen- and thirty-year-old males. Let’s just be honest, right. They’re not going to like magically really just start going to broadcast television. So I feel like the internet is where it really needs to be, where it can reside, and it’s where it’s in the best interest of esports, because I don’t think you can put esports in a broadcast television model and make it work.
There is, of course, an old dream of convergence—one in which digital and networked experiences become interwoven with more traditional forms of media and their technologies. But that is currently challenged on at least two fronts when it comes to game live streaming. Generally speaking, the TV as a display device continues to be hampered, whether technologically or owing to price point, by resolutions that simply aren’t high enough to handle the level of visual detail one can easily see on a computer screen. Currently, game live streaming is also strongly defined by the interactive chat component of platforms like Twitch. This element is a part of the broadcast that doesn’t translate well to TV. Most people simply aren’t sitting at their televisions with a keyboard hooked up.
Still, the idea that the home television can be integrated into new production and consumption practices within esports is certainly part of a larger trend in how media industries are trying to understand the shifts that are occurring not only in their ecosystem but also within domestic spaces. Like television, esports is invested in the long-standing imaginary of display devices located throughout the home, seamlessly serving up a variety of content to a diverse household. Whether it is viewing on your personal PC (the current norm), cell phone, or console or streaming device hooked up to the television, both traditional and esports broadcasters are looking for ways to constantly provide programming at a moment when the equation of “TV” with broadcast network or cable television is eroding.
Esports broadcasting, though, is leveraging the power of live content to navigate the media future. The ethos of “do it live” and power of real-time broadcasting is one that I’ve heard over and over again from those who’ve been pushing media development in esports.5 Even the producer I quoted above who spoke about how time shifting was destroying “the concept of television as we know it” tagged on a caveat: “except for major live events.” Indeed, traditional television stakeholders hope to retain some power amid changing media trajectories via live events—often sports. While watching rebroadcasts of historic or “classic” matches is certainly part of the media landscape, the overall liveness of broadcast sports is considered by many analysts to be the levee against profound shifts in the industry. It is frequently held up as the saving financial anchor for traditional media.
In one regard, esports producers echo traditional media analysts in their assessment that sports will be one of the few content areas with a shot at surviving the disruptions that the industry faces. Yet the focus on liveness is, in the case of esports, simultaneously uncoupled from traditional subscription television models. While traditional broadcasters and cable operators look to live sports to stabilize unsettled financial structures, esports has become a media product offering many of the pleasures of consuming high-end competition native to internet-friendly devices and digital technology, boasting engaged and interactive audiences, and without costly subscription fees. Given that this has all happened on the back of a fairly new technology and within just a handful of years, a look at the roots of esports broadcasting can provide a useful balance to some of the more ahistorical narratives that circulate.
DIY Roots
Esports has always had a deep affinity with spectatorship and audiences. From the earliest days of LAN parties to contemporary tournaments where tens of thousands fill a stadium, competitive gaming has long been a space where the pleasures of playing with others and spectatorship find their home. These in-person events have had a symbiotic relationship with media technologies; they exist, rise, and thrive alongside emerging production and distribution systems. Even among competitive scenes that have deep roots in local communities and co-located play, finding ways to distribute matches has been important. As one longtime fighting game participant told me, “Before streaming, you go to the arcade and how did you get well known? You’d have to win and then people hear about you, or you travel to other arcades. It’s almost like a dojo. You train at this arcade and you go to another arcade and you beat up their champion and you become notorious. [It was] all very word of mouth. When streaming came out, it was another way to get your name out, your scene out.” Video and broadcast are not a secondary thread in the history of esports; amateur producers have long used media technologies to foster engagement among dedicated fans and bring new people in.
Even from my earliest days of my interviewing esports professionals, I consistently heard a belief in the inevitability that esports would grow. But as one producer put it, the road to that point was never certain: “None of us sat there and went, you know, one day a live streaming platform or the whole concept of live streaming is going to blow up. That will really push us to the next level. We knew the next level was there. We didn’t know how we were going to get there.” The indeterminacy meant that early innovators were constantly trying lots of different approaches, experimenting, and hacking together components to share tournaments. Scholars Sherry Turkle and Seymour Papert’s (1990, 136) article tracing out “bricoleurs,” those who “prefer negotiation and rearrangement of their materials” as well as “associations and interactions,” who “have goals but set out to realize them in the spirit of a collaborative venture with the machine,” resonates with what we see among esports broadcasters. The media history of competitive gaming is rooted in improvisers who pull together a variety of threads for both inspiration and practice.
While some leaned on their experience in traditional sports or media, most people I have spoken with over the years tend to frame their endeavors as ongoing experiments and DIY ventures where figuring out on the fly how to make things work led the way.6 As one longtime industry insider who has done everything from marketing to directing noted, when confronted with new challenges, his approach was “this is something I didn’t do before and if I don’t do it, we’re probably not going to do it. So I just have to figure out how to do it.” This ethos has extended into the live streaming era, where esports professionals who cut their teeth on building that scene tackled the challenge of broadcasting to hundreds, then thousands, and then millions. The desire to be able to distribute content that they were passionate about was often challenged by technological constraints and capacities, skill and expertise, and economics.
TECHNICITY AND HACKING
Though there has long been A/V technology available out-of-the-box ready to use, those wanting to broadcast game live streams frequently struggled with it being either too expensive or not quite suited to gaming.7 In much the same way that enthusiasts created tournament structures and found ways to sell their competitions to sponsors, technological challenges tended to be met with a “let’s just make it work” attitude. Three particular production techniques are especially worth mentioning when tracing the history of esports media: video capture, replay files, and audio overlay.
People who pointed a camera at an arcade machine or TV to record high scores produced the earliest-recorded material. These tapes could then be sent to organizations like Twin Galaxies for review and ranking, or shared with other members of the scene, as was the case with the fighting game community’s tradition of passing around tapes chronicling notable games.8 One of the limitations to this system is that the recordings, unless physically duplicated or digitized, didn’t support widespread spectatorship, and primarily served a niche group of competitive players and fans. While some dedicated participants learned how to digitize recordings and distribute them through software like Direct Connect (a file-sharing system) or websites like Shoryuken, for the most part sharing these videos posed a serious challenge.
As games expanded to personal computers that had the ability to save video directly from the machine, recording and sharing became more viable. Although still requiring hardware and software capable of capturing and processing the data, this shift toward pulling directly from the machine to produce digital recordings that could easily be copied was a key development. The proliferation of dedicated video distribution platforms such as YouTube allowed even nonenthusiasts easy access. Rather than having to know about an often-obscure fansite or exactly what you were looking for, YouTube increased access beyond the most dedicated fans and removed the costs of hosting content.
While video capture was, and remains, a critical component of spectatorship, some game developers addressed the desire to rewatch sessions within the system itself. Instead of mediating the game through another layer of technology (videotape recording), the advent of replay files took advantage of the fact that digital games are at a basic level simply bits of data rendered on the screen. One of the early ways that these developers accommodated the desire to review completed games was to offer the ability to save a play session as a file of game data—essentially digital notations about positionality and action. This file could be downloaded and launched within the game client to then “replay” the saved match for the viewer. A spectator could watch the game as it unfolded for the person who recorded it. These files were typically distributed through dedicated sites such as XSreality, Got Frag, HLTV, and GTV.org.9 Scholar and archivist Henry Lowood (2011, 7) argues that these replays, which were often then edited into smaller movies (dubbed machinima), were not just technical interventions; rather, “learning about gameplay by viewing these movies depended upon the development of practices for spectatorship, witnessing, and certification. The result was the full utilization of this new game-based performance space.” Each of these angles that Lowood identified in the earliest machinima without a doubt hold true for game spectating as we see it now within live streaming.
Lowood’s three core components to sharing gameplay—code, capture, and compositing—were mirrored in early approaches to spectating technology. Replay files and recorded video allowed players and developers to share their gaming across time as well as space. Audio overlays to commentate on and narrate games were also widely produced. Yet all these methods posed challenges and carried limitations. Though a tremendous technical feature, replay files require the viewer to not only own the game they wanted to watch but know where to find the file and how to run it. These built-in limitations created a hurdle for how widespread viewership could be. And while recording gameplay video directly from the computer was a big improvement from pointing a camera at a screen, it was often still cumbersome. Many players didn’t have hardware good enough to run processing software and games at the same time, while others lacked the software along with the know-how to edit files and then distribute them.
As Lowood notes, players and producers were experimenting not only with what was possible but also what could be, frequently via cobbling together a variety of technologies. This dynamic mix of technologies interwoven together, emerging practices of fandom, and a new form of professionalization hit a pivotal moment with the advent of voice commentary. Alongside the development of replay files and consumer-level video capture hardware and software, the rise of digital media players and distribution systems had a tremendous impact. Two early pieces of software, Winamp and SHOUTcast, both developed by Nullsoft (which was later purchased by AOL), played central roles in the production and digital distribution of esports content.
Before the days when it was possible to widely use video to broadcast and commentate on esports events, voice was a key augmentation method. Paul “Redeye” Chaloner (2015) humorously observes in his book Talking Esports that “back when I started streaming (in 1834 or thereabouts), we didn’t have video streams—we relied solely on Winamp and shoutcast [sic] software to broadcast matches and tournaments. In fact, in 2005 I streamed an entire DreamHack Quake 4 tournament live from the venue via audio!” (see figure 4.2).10
FIGURE 4.2. Paul “Redeye” Chaloner at DreamHack Sweden, 2005.
I first met Chaloner at that event and was instantly convinced of the importance of commentating work. While the setting was a far cry from the polished and large-scale productions we now see, even then I was captivated by the skill that he demonstrated in making the competition come alive for those listening. That he was doing it all via audio was both familiar in that it reminded me of when my father would listen to baseball on the radio and odd given how much advanced technology—from computers to networks—was the bedrock of this emerging sports scene.
With people using players like Winamp to listen to digital media in the late 1990s, however, an infrastructure was in place to transmit all kinds of audio to and from PCs. The broadcasting side of the equation was developed via the SHOUTcast program, which allowed people to distribute content through media players such as Winamp. Although SHOUTcast was primarily used to get “internet radio stations” up and running, gamers quickly found a way to harness the program for their own purposes. For example, one longtime esports broadcaster described his first uses of combining audio and video to assist his team as he was transitioning away from competing himself
One of the things that I used to do for my team is that I would watch their demos and I’d watch the replays of their games, and I would record an audio file for them over it. And so I would watch the game [and say], “OK guys. I’m going to talk about your game and I’m going to try to explain to you guys what I felt you did wrong, where I feel we need to improve.” And so I was really using it as almost like a coaching technique.
The jump from doing this to providing commentary for a broader audience was clear.
Chaloner, Marcus “djWHEAT” Graham, Stuart “Tosspot” Saw, Trevor “gfmidway” Schmidt, Scott “SirScoots” Smith, and others grew this early form of esports broadcasting, developing important outlets such as djWHEAT.tv, GotFrag, Radio ITG, and Team Sportscast Network, which produced and distributed live audio, and later video. Content ranged from commentary on tournaments to weekly shows focused on gaming and esports.11 As Graham (2011) wrote in a Reddit thread unpacking some of the early history, “Up until early 2010, djWHEAT.tv still broadcast via ‘Shoutcast’ and usually had about 400–500 people who would listen just via the audio.”12 Combined with software like GamersTV, which Graham recalls allowed players to log in to a Quake 3 server and spectate any game they wanted live, broadcasters and viewers were cobbling together ways to produce and consume early esports content. The use of this tool was so impactful that the term “shoutcaster” lingers as a name for esports commentators.
These earliest forays into what Lowood would call “compositing”—in the case of esports, mixing audio commentary over gameplay—were critical threads in what would eventually develop into the contemporary live broadcasting we see today. The ability to watch, comment on, and interpret gameplay is a mode taken up not only by professional esports broadcasters but also casual variety streamers. Both become adept at occupying a dual position during the live broadcast: being at once in the moment of play and standing slightly outside it, reflecting, joking, and talking about it to their viewers. Though the current landscape of esports media production increasingly takes on familiar conventions, these earliest iterations remain a crucial waypoint in understanding more recent developments.
As production standards rose to include multicamera shots, voices, and graphics, early innovators often turned to traditional A/V products meant for different markets. One longtime professional in the space described utilizing whatever tech they could: “Little things like the basic ATEM switcher you can buy from Black Magic that a lot of churches and other public service things use have certain limitations, that’s the way it is.13 But if you’re a nerd, you can get around these things. You can make hacks and macros and things that they don’t tell you about. It’s not an add-on you buy. So there’s nerds that build computers; we have all these guys that are nerding out on capture cards.” This sentiment was repeated over and over in my conversations with esports producers. Many of us in the audience have never paused to think about the unique challenges that come from broadcasting in-game visuals. As the producer I quote above went on to remark,
The hardest thing to encode and show is a video game. It moves faster. Like [basic] encoding, [I just need a] shitty PC, shitty camera. But they encode StarCraft and all those armies and everything . . . so just the fact that we’re broadcasting this kind of content pushes all that technology. So I might have to go “OK, I need to take this TriCaster, but I got to somehow use this replay system and how do I jack that in because I can’t afford to buy this system.” And everyone is doing that.
The reliance on personal computers augmented with third-party A/V gear often posed tremendous challenges for broadcasters. Software troubles and hacking solutions to solve problems were common. One recounted, “We were doing all the broadcasts off our own personal computers. There would be one person who would be producing the entire thing off his home PC, and sometimes that was me, and I remember on our very first broadcast day, we built up all this hype from the community and we started, and my computer crashed.” He went on to note that “we would build an intro video, but the codec wouldn’t be compatible with the broadcast software and the whole thing would crash, or little things like that were just a total hassle to deal with that are just so trivial now, because XSplit or OBS [third-party software now widely used for live streaming] basically handles everything you need to do.”
The impact of this has meant that the earliest broadcasters were doing a tremendous amount of skilling up to learn how to become media producers (not to mention network engineers), frequently utilizing cobbled-together systems with constant limitations. Though well versed in the games they were involved with, many of the people who were creating these broadcasts did not come with professional production skills but instead learned them along the way. While a few had some A/V experience from working with non-gaming events, such as large sales meetings or school productions, they were in the minority. Most were learning how to use these tools on the fly as needed, and as various tech emerged and became affordable.
This DIY attitude comes with a strong infusion of what game scholars Helen Kennedy and Jon Dovey (2006, 113) describe as technicity, “particular kinds of attitudes, aptitudes and skill, with technology.” It isn’t simply a matter of having specific skills but instead an orientation that gives you assurance that you can muck around in systems, tweak software, and push and pull machines to get them where you want them to go. This level of technicity is a central component to high-end competition, where players don’t just pick up a game and play as given but rather are engaged with tweaking hardware and software where possible. I was struck when this theme emerged on the production side of the esports equation too. The technicity present within production became an incredibly powerful ground on which broadcasting innovations were built.
The uptake of the SHOUTcast module is a prime example of how esports broadcasters were often early adopters, constantly on the lookout for tech that would let them do what they wanted. As one put it, “I mean I think in some regard this world [esports] is pushing technology or using tools that traditional broadcasting uses in a very set way, and jackknifing it and doing stuff that it was never meant to do.” Hearing them describe their early forays, what usually shines through is a passion for creating a media space and belief that somehow they would, through sheer persistence and dedication to using whatever was at hand, make it happen. One longtime shoutcaster said to me, “I didn’t know how to broadcast over the internet. I just said to myself, ‘I’m going to do this and I’m going to put effort into it,’ so I learned about what new radio stations used. Is there any cheap equipment that I can buy to make it sound better? Oh, now we’re doing video, how do we do that?”
While we may think about this stance as distinctly contemporary, it is connected to traditional sports broadcasting. Roone Arledge, the longtime ABC executive who is generally credited with how modern sports media looks and works on television, would probably have found early esports producers his kindred spirits. In a Playboy interview, he spoke about the origins of the instant replay—something that we now take for granted in sports broadcasting—saying, “I asked him [engineer Bob Trachinger] if it would be possible to replay something in slow motion so you could tell if a guy was safe or out or stepped out of bounds, and Trach immediately began sketching on the napkins. We talked and sketched and drank beer that whole afternoon and when we were finished, we had the plans for the first instant-replay device” (quoted in “Playboy Interview” 1976, 66). These “experiments” outside the eyes of executives are strikingly similar to what I’ve seen in esports media over the last few decades. While pornography is often cited as a driving innovator for media and network technologies, it is likely that any of us interested in the interrelation between cultural products and sociotechnical production should pay similar attention to what is happening in sports as well as computer games.
CONTENT AND AESTHETICS
While these early innovators were tweaking technology to serve their purposes, they were simultaneously engaged in thinking through content and aesthetics for their broadcasts. It was typically the case in the early days of esports that the person running the technical side of the show was the creative director as well. Just getting the game out was a huge challenge in itself, and creating shows that drew viewers in developed over time. Opening shots, narrative devices, action, and commentary eventually came to be a part of the esports media aesthetic, although balanced against a “playing field” fundamentally rooted in a digital space as well as beholden to a broader culture and community of esports enthusiasts.
Specific competitive communities within esports hailed different traditions such that there wasn’t always one standard “esports aesthetic.” Early on broadcasters drew from traditional sports, game culture, South Korean esports broadcasts, and even poker and lifestyle sports. Different games leveraged slightly varying conventions when it came to show productions. Within the early StarCraft broadcasting community, one producer said that their inspiration came from watching esports television that was coming out of South Korea: “All we were doing was watching Korea for Brood War. So that was 100 percent of our influence, watching what was going on in Korea. . . . Which is crazy for me now, but that’s all we were watching and being inspired by was the stuff that was going on crazy in Korea, and trying to get whatever degree of the same feeling we could do ourselves . . . we were trying to do.” A producer for a different league that often replicated the tone of North American sports spoke of using graphical elements and arrangements (lower-third graphics and a theme) to evoke traditional sports shows. And as a fighting game producer explained,
There are some conventions that I feel that our fighting game broadcast needs to have to be successful. For one thing, I think the fighting game community has the most high energy in that fans and players get crazy, they jump up and down and stuff, so we call them “pop-offs.” . . . That happens quite frequently in the fighting game community. Whereas you know in StarCraft, what happens when the guy wins, he goes to the other booth and shakes his hand. Here, people get hyped, they jump up and down, people rush the stage. That is very important to capture.
Early esports broadcasts, much like competitive gaming as a whole, were experimenting with a variety of ways to frame their content, drawing from both conventions that resonated within the specific community and media tropes more broadly.
Content was also deeply tied to the abilities and size of the production team. While there was an attitude of “let’s just try it and make it work,” one producer described the challenge of doing events with their two-man team. They faced having to balance keeping content flowing with low-level tournament chaos:
You’re trying to hunt this player down, just going to the [online game] lobby, and still trying to entertain the people on stream. And we weren’t running commercials. It was like, again, static images with music playing to like buy you time. It was just rough because you look at what it takes now to run a proper live broadcast and twenty, thirty, forty people are sometimes involved to just make sure they nail it. It was rough. It was rough. No doubt about it. In hindsight, it was rough. We tried to do exciting things like fly through the map and kind of talk about it. Sometimes we got in over our heads because from a production standpoint, it’s like a two-man show. It’s me and one other guy. So it was really difficult to dive too deep into making the broadcast look really sleek.
Content and aesthetics in these early days thus involved a mix of technology, inspirational sports/media waypoints, and the vibe and values happening within the local scene.
ECONOMICS AND LABOR
As I’ve spoken to producers over the years, the themes of hacking together technology and pushing it beyond its typical uses as well as constantly trying to innovate content remain steady. Since the early days, however, there’s been a dramatic change in terms of economics and an increasingly specialized, professionalized division of labor. There was always a complicated mix of professional aspirations and what we might think of as serious leisure—activities in which significant time, money, resources, and overall identity investment occur—in early broadcasting.14 This form of leisure is often the kernel that grows into increasing professionalization, where being a hobbyist or enthusiast becomes your day job (or at least you hope it does). One of the most important stories not just in esports broadcasting but also the scene writ large has been transformations from serious leisure to professionalized endeavors.
In the early days, there were several areas that frequently incurred high costs for production teams: equipment, travel, and bandwidth. As one longtime broadcaster put it, “The biggest issue is we were all spending for a dream we knew would become a reality but we never really thought how it would happen.” For some, the financial outlay was just part of the package for trying to pursue what you wanted:
It was just we were doing it because we love to do it, and since everybody in the community, at the time we organized it, we all knew each other. It’s almost like the tight-knit family. “Can we stream your event? Yeah, sure. All right. Fly yourselves out, and OK, we’ll get you a room,” and that was it. It was more verbalized than anything, and we relied on I guess a sort of an old-boys network too because we’ll just be like, “Hey, we go way back, can we stream your event?”
Others utilized any gear that they had access to, such as the student who made a weekly three-hour drive from his college to another city where the production equipment was located. Many of these people, who began their media careers as enthusiasts wanting to support the scene, came to see what they were doing as something that could be transformed into a job and professional identity.
Shifting to thinking about their media production work as something tied to professionalism was often prompted by economics. Early producers who kept at it and scaled up what they were creating would find the financial side becoming more pressing. As one portrayed it, “In the very beginning, it was more of we’d use these big events to showcase ‘here’s the production level that we can do,’ and it was practice for us. And then I think it was probably around late 2010 was when I think a lot of the people in the community started saying, ‘Look, we can’t keep doing this for this amount of money, we’re losing our own money spending money on our own gear. Please pay us.’”
Soon these relationships became formalized. As the same person explained, “We start[ed] to really learn about the business side of things like, ‘Oh yeah, we can’t really rely on people to say they’ll pay us. Maybe we should make a contract.’ We got burned by that a couple of times like, ‘Yeah, we’ll pay you,’ and then nobody paid us. And like, we can’t go to his house and break his legs. We had a contract. We could take him to court and stuff.” Even with these structures, most continued to hold day jobs, and produce shows on their own time and dime. Others, even while holding a day job, saw these early ventures as investment opportunities.
While physical gear costs were a constant theme in my conversations with early producers, even more significant and consistently mentioned were data costs, software, and technical infrastructure. Unlike current platforms, which rely on advertising and thus don’t charge users for the costs of streaming content, early broadcasters would typically buy bandwidth from server companies. This involved both estimating one’s audience and being on the hook if your broadcast took off and pulled in more viewers than you budgeted for. As one explained, “Before Twitch.tv, we were doing our own broadcasting of our own tournament online. We set up a bunch of servers, and one of our programmers programmed a load balancer, and I think on our finals we had ten thousand people watching and we were doing all the bandwidth ourselves, and it was crazy! We would have to call the server company and buy more bandwidth and that sort of thing.”
It was not unusual to hear stories of successful broadcasters both thrilled by their viewership but bracing for the anticipated bill from the server company. The sponsorship of streams still wasn’t widespread, and as one person put it, “It was all funded out of pocket. So we were only just playing with the idea of getting sponsors to look at the stream. Our broadcast starts snowballing. We’re like, ‘Oh, my God. We have fifty people watching!’ It’s just every month it was like, ‘Oh, we got a hundred. Five hundred. Oh shoot, two thousand people are watching! Five thousand!’ So it just kept snowballing.” These outfits also regularly faced issues around DDOS attacks and found themselves hustling to not only keep a show on schedule but also make sure it actually got out to an audience.
Some worked with companies that utilized slightly different setups, but those could pose challenges on the audience end. An early producer observed that
you would make a deal with Akamai where you would pay them a little bit of money. You would use their peer-to-peer sharing client. But the problem was for you to watch an Octoshape stream [Akami’s proprietary system], you had to download the client. And people were especially like, internet nerds, like, “I’m not putting this on my computer. What the hell is this? Malware or a Trojan?” It was a barrier of entry. You want to hit a button and it plays, right?
Issues on the client end were not constrained to these. While early producers typically pushed the tech to its limits, audiences didn’t always themselves have the hardware or network to keep up. As one simply remarked, “Not everybody could watch our stream because not everybody had a good enough computer or connection.”
As live streaming platforms such as Stickam or UStream started coming online—in 2005 and 2007, respectively—producers began exploring ways to use them to offset costs and broaden distribution. These were still met with frustration, though: “For a while we had zero options and then we had slightly shitty options.” Another noted that “a few sites started to pop up—Ustream; Livestream was another big one—and I remember looking at them and telling our programmer, ‘Hey, maybe we should do this,’ but they actually had viewer caps on them at that point because the bandwidth was so expensive for them.”
Recounting their annoyance at trying to explain the emerging esports media space to companies that were more focused on a model of live streaming rooted in “real-life” cams, one producer said, “We had these conversations [with] these guys at Ustream like, ‘Yeah, you guys really should think about this demographic better. We are pushing your technology. Look at our viewership compared to some of this bullshit.’ Paris Hilton on the front page or whatever this other stream shit is. Puppies and whatever. And they would never really, like, put us in the rotator. Never enhance it.”
Justin.tv eventually became an important service in terms of handling bandwidth, network infrastructures, and ease of use for audiences. He continued, “And then, Justin.tv was doing roughly the same thing. But it was just all bullshit like live cam. It didn’t have corporate clients, but we jumped on it because it was just as good at bandwidth. It was free. And then they went, ‘Oh, shit. Look at how many people are gaming and streaming!’ And obviously they took it so seriously they shifted their entire business model, renamed it, and closed the other one. What does that tell you, right?” Though esports production teams continue to pull together equipment whose primary use cases are decidedly not competitive computer gaming and frequently require their own network specialists on-site for events, the rise of third-party streaming platforms offered tremendous financial and infrastructure assistance to what was previously a grassroots as well as self-funded venture.
As we can see, there are deep interwoven threads between technology, content, and economics. They are interdependent with each other and co-construct what esports broadcast is. These productions extend the event space well beyond the digital gameplaying field itself, from audio commentating to progressing to having multiple cameras (in game, onstage, and pointed at the audience), graphics, commentary desks, and even narrative interstitials to entertain the audience between matches.
The technology works in constant conversation, however, with the creation of aesthetics and conventions for how esports should be presented as well as experienced by audiences. This includes ideas about what the preferred referent is (sports versus, for example, music concerts), notions about ideal and expert play, and models of who the audience is and how it consumes content. Amplifying, constraining, or subtly nudging it are the financial, infrastructural, and labor underpinnings. Promoters could have blue-sky ambitions, but without economic models or networks to make it happen, it would simply have remained a dream. Not unlike the instrumental mind-set that one utilizes when playing, esports media broadcasting itself became a puzzle early producers sought to crack.
Esports as Networked Media Event
Over and over again, interviewees told me about the profound shift that has occurred in esports with the growth of live streaming. While early large-scale tournaments like the World Cyber Games or World Series of Video Games were foundational in conceptualizing esports as spectacles or pushing media components, tournaments have been amplified by the ability to broadcast them live, globally, over the internet. The recording and distribution of competitions has always been a part of esports, but the current approach focuses on the creation of media events. Pairing live tournaments with streamed broadcast is now a huge component of esports. Doing so has become not simply an exercise in scaling up tournament production but also iterating processes to account for a range of media technologies, new aesthetic and genre convention, forms of audience (onsite and via the internet), and emerging business models.
TECHNOLOGIES AT WORK
Competitive gaming has only been possible via an assemblage of technologies, and this is just as true for the viewing practices that have come out of that space (Taylor 2009, 2012). Almost from the start, the desire to share experience and foster spectatorship took hold among gamers. As discussed, game developers began to experiment with building in spectator modes (allowing people to log in and watch the game as it unfolded). Early innovators (from gamers to tournament organizers) often pieced together expensive gear to pipe out the game “stream” for capture and distribution. At times a full broadcast was only produced after the fact, when recorded gameplay was then overplayed with voice commentating and distributed via a website. The goal of live broadcast with multiple cameras, rich visuals and commentary, and compelling production values has been something that producers have been working on for decades.
Backstage areas demonstrate the culmination of gaming interweaving itself with broader media production technologies (see figures 4.3a and 4.3b). The most basic nodes in esports, game and player, are extended and stretched; other technologies insert themselves into the dyad with the goal of bringing viewers into the experience. The system at this level adds a range of audio and video mixers, monitors, graphics packages, recording racks with hard drives, and cameras (both physical and digital). Headphones, microphones, walkie-talkies, keyboards, laptops and desktops, handwritten tags that notate the mixing boards and audio switch box, desks and less than ergonomic chairs, paper (and digital) scripts and schedules, and endless amounts of cables and cords link it all together.
FIGURES 4.3A AND 4.3B. Backstage at Intel Extreme Masters, showing multiple production stations and networking, San Jose, 2016.
As noted previously, large-scale production teams operate out of traveling road cases known as “fly packs” that gear is bundled up in, shipped off to the next international location, and set up to do a show all over again. As one producer explained, “It’s easy for load in, load out. It all travels together.” When I asked him to speculate on what a sports broadcaster might think if they walked in and saw a large tournament setup, he replied,
If they came in now, it is fairly close to TV-quality content being produced around esports. Pretty damn close. We’re not in trucks yet, but we’re pretending like we’re in trucks, TV trucks. Years ago we were on shitty little tables with shitty little setups, so the director walks in [and] he goes, “Oh, we know what we’re doing all about this. We got trucks and we’re smarter than you about the game.” They had trucks. [But] they didn’t know how to shoot our game.
Although some broadcasts are now using production trucks (for example, ELEAGUE’s Major series in Boston rolled out one of its standard rigs to the venue), it is still not the norm across the board. This has long been one of the fascinating tensions in esports broadcasts: while the setups and tech were frequently less sophisticated than traditional broadcasting, it was esports producers who knew how to tackle the specificities of computer game content and events. Some skills certainly transfer over from traditional broadcasts, such as, “The jib movements that these guys are doing at StarCraft stage are no different than the jib movements the guys are making the Beyonce videos or in an N.F.L. pregame show.” Yet others remain deeply tied to the specific context of computer games, from in-game cameras to knowing how to effectively capture a visually explosive digital field of play because you understand what is actually happening in-game.
The development of specialized tournament heads-up displays (HUDs) is just one illustration of the ways that knowledge of the game becomes critical in helping render a playing field legible to fans. While those who don’t follow a particular game may mostly focus on the center of the screen action filled with sniper fire, or lots of magical spells and action, for more astute viewers, all the additional information provided on-screen is important to “reading” the match. Esports producers rely on their knowledge of the specificities of the game that they are working with to create broadcast HUDs that will help audiences engage.
Consider, for instance, what it would look like if you sat down to watch a baseball game on television with someone who has never seen the sport before. You both would certainly be paying attention to the action in the center of the frame, where the camera would be directed to the pitcher, the hitter, and the ball as it flies across the field. But if you were a baseball fan and knew how to watch the broadcast more fully, you’d also be noticing the details on the screen that show how many balls, strikes, and outs there were. You would notice what inning the game was in, and if it was the top or bottom of it. You’d catch when a stat popped up helping you contextualize this particular pitcher/hitter matchup. It is the same for esports.
Broadcasts regularly tweak the HUDs of games to provide richer info to the spectator than what any individual player is seeing within the game at that moment. This can range from mini maps that reveal the location of all players to having the full team lineup visually represented on the screen with some information about them (name, weapon or class, amount of in-game money that they have, etc.) as well as a way to visualize when their character gets killed. HUDs are tremendously important not only to good gaming experiences but broadcasts too; they help the viewer make sense of an otherwise visually complex field of play. They provide vital information to help an audience synthesize what is happening overall, and for more expert fans, provide a hook for deeper engagement. They are also a space that can be branded with sponsor content such as logos.
Perhaps it’s obvious from this example that given the level of detail on digital playing fields, broadcasters often have to contend with pushing their technology to handle better resolutions. Traditional sports broadcasting generally goes out at a lower resolution than esports. Gaming fans and those attuned to making a visually compelling broadcast will seek out much higher resolutions, and especially if watching on a computer screen (incredibly common), they will want at least 1080p. Esports events will frequently be creating and distributing content at resolution levels well beyond what is being used in traditional productions, and, in turn, can sometimes push media companies to upgrade their infrastructures and systems.
Overall, the level of production and gear in esports is creeping up to traditional media, and in some cases surpassing them. When I visited a new studio being built in Burbank, the engineer putting the technology together noted that he had pushed for that location so that they could be near all the broadcast suppliers. His background was in traditional media, and being in a location where they could easily buy and rent gear was a serious consideration when he gave feedback to the executives about where to set up shop. He noted, though, that it turned out that the media companies he usually dealt with didn’t quite know what to do with his esports productions. He described trying to explain to his suppliers when he picked up mixing boards and other equipment what he was doing with gaming content. He said that they looked at him with confusion and shrugged, not understanding or doing much to help him fit their gear into his production system. Within months, with the help of a young “hacker” (who he proudly pointed out to me during a tour), he was working with traditional A/V gear in ways that had not been done before. Over time his suppliers had started to catch on and began using his setup to show off the features of their equipment to their regular clients.
While mixing boards and cameras are visible technology, the unseen infrastructure is just as, if not more so in the case of digital gaming, critically important. Communication networks—from an internet connection to cell phone service to the private audio channels that allow the production team to constantly be speaking to one another—form the backbone of esports being transformed into broadcast event. This is perhaps one of the most challenging aspects of doing research about online and gaming spaces. Much of what makes it up is simply not visible at a glance.15 It is only after watching for a while that you really start to notice how often people are looking at their phones, talking into headsets while flipping a mixer switch, hunched over a laptop furiously dealing with a downed internet connection, or typing in commands to start a game in the private chat window.16
Invisible infrastructure, however, is regularly embodied and made material through the people in the space. On the second day of an event, I heard that there were some network hiccups (not unusual in esports), so I casually asked those backstage what was happening. It was at this point that someone pointed to a long Ethernet cable that went into the rafters and said, “See that? That’s our internet connection.” They walked me through how the connection was interfacing with firewalls, a virtual private network server, and their own proprietary system meant to foil DDOS attacks. Across that communication system, the data coming out from the event was being transmitted to various servers around the world and then picked up, localized (with custom graphics and language translation), and broadcast online in different regions. Various forms of A/V encoding were happening along the way, advertising servers were jumping in to add content, and metrics were being generated and collected. The network problems had, up until that point, been entirely unknown to me. My attention had been so focused on being physically present and observing backstage that what fell out of my view was the experience of the event unfolding within the infrastructure that made it possible.17
But these various communication networks form a critical component of esports productions. Digital playing fields are fundamentally networked spaces where players and individual instantiations of games are communicating with servers, and production systems are picking up feeds and working with them. That content then gets sent out worldwide across both satellite and terrestrial systems, and in turn, often goes through another round of reworking (localization, for example, or meshing with ad systems) before getting transmitted out to audiences. Esports broadcasts are multinodal artifacts that exist only through various networked assemblages.
PRODUCTION LABOR
As game live streaming has developed, the systems themselves have become more complex. Technologies get pushed and prodded to better work together. Much of the gear that game live streaming uses comes from traditional media production, and regularly has to be tweaked to do what is needed. Software is developed to facilitate game video production and distribution. Engineering steps in to create servers to handle loads. These operations and technologies require their own mix of human labor to make it work.
The rise of esports as a professionalized domain has meant that it has undergone transformations in its division of labor. While the earliest tournaments were players and maybe one or two organizers running the whole event, over the last decade and a half, various roles within tournament organizations have been broken down and covered by people with increasingly tailored skills—from team owners to event planners. This specialization is extending into the domain of media production. As one longtime producer speaking to me about how he got in on the ground floor of esports with no special training said, “There’s no doubt in my mind that I just lucked out on the window of time that I was at a certain age, and we were at a certain place in the industry. And everything from here on out is very quickly getting professional.”
Though you can still find smaller tournaments operating with amateur labor, larger-scale productions require more extensive teams including technical engineers, audio engineers, graphics/overlay specialists, camera operators, in-game observers, event producers or managers, technical and creative directors, stage managers, network administrators, ancillary content producers (photographers, interstitial video creators, etc.), hosts, analysts, commentators, and communications personnel handling press and social media.18 This team is also typically working with contracted-out laborers who may handle things like lights, audio, or any other number of production details. Venue-specific teams (including unionized ones, most of which don’t specialize in esports at all) take care of rigging, stage build-outs/teardowns, cabling, and general events labor.19 The game developer themselves might want representation on or oversight of a production as well. Some of these roles mirror what you would find in a traditional live television broadcast while others are unique to competitive gaming.
One of the esports broadcast teams that I shadowed has refined who does what over the years, and their team now includes people with both esports and traditional media production backgrounds. One creative director explained how he and the technical director worked together on a production, and where some of the segmentation lay:
We just have a great working relationship together because we’ve done so many shows and we’ve pissed each other off [laughs]. And we understand exactly where the boundaries are. . . . So how are we transitioning from one segment of the show to another? We will sit down together and figure that out, and sometimes we involve [the host] in that and we’ll have a little powwow back and forth.
He went on to note that while he was charged with having an eye on the high-level creative issues, his counterpart focused on the technical implementation and handled communication with the various engineers on the team. He, by contrast, was the one who dealt with the clients, which were typically game developers or other organizations that hire the company out to produce their competitions and shows:
I handle all of that relationship management on our end with their management people and creative people so that there’s this barrier between the client and all of our technical guys. We have very strong rules that you do not talk to anybody on our team except for me or [the head].
This kind of division of labor and formalized lines of communication is something that I saw much less of in the earliest days of esports. While there were certainly particular roles that people occupied, and those who handled clients specifically, the scale of productions along with the money at stake has grown such that specialized skills and sticking to your own domain has become much more common. It is now not at all unusual to find production areas with formal directors, assistant directors, producers, technical directors, and an assortment of engineers who all work within more constrained spheres.
Other roles, such as the observers who operate an in-game camera that shows the audience varying player views during a match, speak to how new forms of labor are needed (see figure 4.4). Though akin to a traditional camera operator in that they are in the game and pointing a digital “camera” at particular locations on the game map that then gets broadcast out, their role is unique to computer gaming and a fairly specialized skill set. Observers are expert enough at a given game to know how to parse the action, including anticipated moves, and shift around the digital playing field, providing a view of the action for the audience. They also work closely with the analysts who are supplying live commentary for the match.
FIGURE 4.4. In-game observer Phil “inFeZa” Bertino working backstage at Intel Extreme Masters, ComicCon, 2013.
One observer, Heather “sapphiRe” Garazzo (herself a former pro player), described the job as akin to an “in-game director” and distinguished her role, saying, “There’s a main director who’s telling people when to go in game, when to look at the team, the analyst’s desk or the host. Then there’s the in-game director, which is the observer. My job is to direct the action in the game. Essentially I’m a storyteller. I’m telling the story of a round or the match” (quoted in Stenhouse 2016). In talking to observers over the years, I’ve found that while they have an open communication channel to the director who can weigh in, the most experienced ones develop an independent feel for not just individual “shots” but, as Garazzo puts it, also have an eye on the larger “story” of the game that viewers should pay attention to. They give us a glimpse into a new form of labor that mixes several traditional media roles within the specificity of gaming.
Perhaps one of the most interesting shifts that I’ve found while talking to people in various roles over the years is that they come from a wide range of backgrounds—some with formal training in the domain that they are now working, and many others not. They also bring to the job a mix of referents for what it should be. Some lean on their experience in traditional media productions and talk about their job through that lens. Others are self-taught and root their training in their gaming passion. They sometimes see what they do as fairly unique and requiring a different mind-set. In much the same way that I saw early pro players and tournament organizers working through different models to make sense of what they were doing (typically using a “sports” framework to interpret their passions and activities), these folks are constructing meaningful ways of working and talking about their labor as not only esports but also media professionals.
As with other parts of emerging new media spheres, questions around compensation remain critical. Historically esports labor has been seeded from fandom roots, with those producing events receiving little compensation, and in fact often incurring debt along the way for their activities. The earlier periods of esports production were typically a form of a serious leisure where people spent not just time but also money to participate in an activity that they love. In conversations with them over the years, I’ve found that they are frequently acutely aware of balancing their hopes for a living wage against what they see as realism about the state of the industry. Some see foregoing a competitive salary as an “investment,” imagining that their work in a nascent industry will eventually pay off when esports gets big. With growing professionalization, however, especially on the media side, this model has been shifting.
As major money has entered into esports, the status quo around “sweat equity” and other low/no-pay models has been met with more dissatisfaction. Previously private labor skirmishes have come to public attention. The hype around esports, where industry reports proclaim that there are millions of dollars of revenue to be made every year, has at times come to leave people even more acutely aware of the cut that they aren’t getting. I previously discussed the ways that early producers have faced the economic challenges within esports. With live streaming, the powerful role that “talent” (including hosts, commentators, and analysts) have in making broadcasts successful has become apparent. This has meant that many of them now situate their work within an entertainment labor market where reaching massive audiences and being a celebrity in their own right should come with meaningful economic boosts. Chaloner (2015) outlined in an article overviewing talent pay that there is a range from “TV rates” at the highest end of the scale all the way down to low-end rates with online leagues or small organizations.
In 2016, popular commentator (and onetime team owner) Christopher “MonteCristo” Mykles issued a statement along with several other freelancers that they would not be working at one of Riot’s League of Legends competitions due to the failure “to arrive at an industry standard rate for our services.” The group said that it had carried out research across a variety of caster contracts and found that Riot was offering 40 to 70 percent less than other productions. Mykles and his colleagues said that taking the contract could “damage our careers in the long term by accepting below-market rates,” and that “by agreeing to a significantly lower wage we fear that we may contribute to the regression of standards for freelance casters in the industry as a whole” (OGNCasters 2016). They had in fact been longtime commentators and analysts for the popular South Korean outlet OnGameNet, a media company that had been bringing esports to audiences for over a decade, so it is perhaps not surprising that of all the freelancers to push back on this issue, publicly no less, it would be them. The case caught a fair amount of attention, due to both the popularity of the game and the high production values that Riot had brought to its competitions.
While public opinion was split on the matter, it did make visible conversations that had been going on behind the scenes for years. It crystallized the ways that the emerging broadcast side of esports was changing the labor landscape, and where growing audiences and revenue—be it hyped speculation or actual—were causing everyone along the chain of production to rethink their value. As with esports players, there continue to be newcomers who are willing to forego higher pay in hopes of getting a foot in the door or for whom the activity was more hobby than regular work to pay the bills. In an emerging industry without any unions or other regulatory mechanisms helping gate keep and maintain pay standards, the economic precariousness is real.
AFFECTIVE AESTHETICS
Nick Taylor (2016, 296), in his work around live esports audiences, notes the ways that spectatorship “becomes a crucial site of experimentation for an e-sports industry eager to sell the excitement of live competitive gaming events to a mass audience of online spectators.” Beyond the actual matches of the tournament, the auxiliary content, stage and theatrical lighting, and cameras that capture the on-site audience currently make up a big part of broadcasts. Audience banners and signs, clapping and thunder sticks, rising to their feet to cheer, and other embodied performances of engagement and excitement all get leveraged back into the broadcast (see figure 4.5). As one director put it, “My saying is there’s a difference between streaming and putting on a show. Everybody can stream, not everybody can put on the show.”
FIGURE 4.5. League of Legends LCS Summer finals, TD Garden, Boston, 2017.
There is, however, nuance in this sense of a “show” being created. Media producers must negotiate between building compelling content, retaining a sense of authenticity for hard-core fans, yet simultaneously harnessing and developing newcomers’ enthusiasm for the games and competition. One director—who began in the early DIY days and now manages some of the biggest broadcasts around—highlighted what they felt can be compelling in even low-end live streaming: “You may not have any of the technical parts, but you’ve got the emotional experience for people, and that is often good enough.” He explained that a large production “can be crystal clean, and you can hit every shot that you need to and every transition you need to, but you’re like ‘It’s just . . . something is not there.’ And it’s sort of the passion, a lot of it is the passion of the crowd, but it’s also sound and light and everything that’s going on and creating something that is sort of this big cohesive package.”
This focus on creating memorable, compelling events that pull in and capture the audience (both off- and online) is similar to the affective turn that individual live streamers make. Whether small or large, these productions are meant to be evocative. He continued:
We want to create these legendary experiences, and I mean, the big thing for me is that, and I’ve been preaching this a little bit to my friends. I didn’t even know if it was real until I went and Wikipedia-ed the other day for “emotional memory.” I was trying to figure out for the longest time why do people remember these esports events that were fairly crappy production value, and it usually comes down to like there were these few epic moments, and people have really good memories for those and really terrible memories [meaning forgotten ones] if there was a two-hour delay. And then I went and studied it, and it’s like a negative bias where people just don’t remember negative things as well as they remember positive things. I was like, oh wow, well that’s what we have to do right.
Even though he was particularly thinking about how to construct on-site live events, he was keenly attuned to their need to be broadcast in such a way that viewers were also drawn in. This sensibility echoes the work that traditional sports broadcasting has long done to bring a stadium experience to the home viewer. Sports media are broadly used to tap into and build fandom, and emotional resonance for viewers, to help them connect with a remote event and keep watching.
The structure of modern sports broadcasting is generally traced as arising from Arledge’s shaping of North American sports media starting in the 1960s. Almost mythical in recounting now, he is said to have brought “unheard-of techniques [such] as the use of directional and remote microphones, the replacement of half-time shows with highlights and an analysis of the first two quarters, the use of hand-held and ‘isolated’ cameras, the use of a split screen and the filling of ‘dead spots’ during the game with prerecorded biographies and interviews” (“Playboy Interview” 1976, 63). These conventions are familiar to anyone who has watched sports and esports productions. Esports producers have long looked to how compelling emotional and even visceral content for viewers is created by traditional sports broadcasting. Indeed, these dominate both the look and feel of esports now. They have become a kind of orthodoxy within broadcasts.
Esports business developer Jesse Sell (2015) has noted the high level of “sports emulation” in how esports tournament broadcasts are structured, from stats and show rundown to aesthetics, wardrobe, style, and narrative frames (see figure 4.6). Game scholar Elizabeth Newbury (2017) has found similar patterns in some segments of esports such as CSGO.20 Esports broadcasts are now regularly filled with story arcs and pivot points in the game that amplify tension and excitement.
FIGURE 4.6. Dota 2 International grand finals commentator desk, 2014.
Personal stories and trajectories as well as team and player rivalries figure into the framing of a game. Interviews, hype reels, and interstitials (often comedic) entertain audiences between matches. The early days where esports events were fortunate to have a commentator or two on hand regularly now have full-scale teams producing all kinds of material. Analysts and commentators outfitted in suits sit at sleek desks. Hosts manage onstage activities. Multiple cameras cover a range of shots, including on the in-person audience, especially between matches. The focus on showing passionate fandom to those watching is a huge part of the staging. Spectatorship is not only produced on site but also folded back into the broadcast to in turn bring an affective experience to home viewers.
At tournament venues, the spectating experience is also interwoven with various media practices, from small screens scattered throughout the environment, jumbotrons, and a myriad of cameras installed everywhere that capture both the game and spectators. Being on-site at the event is an experience tied up with media too. This is certainly the case within esports, where there can be significant chunks of dead time between matches or during technical breakdowns. Given that esports tournaments are often multiday affairs, producers typically deal with having a live audience that needs entertainment during these times. While some events have experimented with live musical acts (perhaps akin to the Superbowl’s famed half-time show), such attempts have been met with mixed results, especially from hard-core esports fans who feel it is a distraction.21 In many ways, the live event experience at esports tournaments currently reflects a scene betwixt and between its roots in LAN parties, where people would have their own gaming to keep them entertained between competitions, and the conversion of a scene into a straightforward media-event spectacle.
MANAGING DIGITAL STADIUMS
While an important component to esports broadcasts has become the show on-site at a venue, another critical part of a stream is the chat happening within the platform, live alongside the content coming from the tournament. Unlike variety streamers with their more focused viewer interactions and socialization practices, a large remote audience poses serious challenges to channels that want to keep their chats intelligible or perhaps even positive. Though I’ll discuss this issue further in the next chapter, it’s worth saying a few words about managing this part of esports broadcasts. As one producer put it, “It gets extremely wild west. Like every time we have like one or two like specific teams, like some of the big-name teams on our stream, there have been times where chat gets so crazy, we just make it subscriber only.”
But this level of moderation often doesn’t get at the truly pernicious speech that happens in tournament channels, where harassment, racism, sexism, and various forms of hate speech are a sadly regular occurrence. Harassment on the platform is a major barrier not only to entry but retention too. Legal scholar Danielle Citron (2014) argues in her extensive treatment of online harassment that these are fundamentally civil rights issues that warrant serious attention, prevention strategies, and focused redress. If we understand live streaming as an increasingly significant sector of media, and thus cultural, development, this is a major ethical and business issue. It goes to the heart of full participation not only in media and gaming but also in popular culture writ large.
In one of the white papers published for AnyKey—an initiative to foster diversity and inclusion in esports that I codirect with Morgan Romine—we explored a persistent theme that occurred in our conversations with professional women players who live stream: the continual harassment and abuse they face. As one of them told us, they came to think that “being insulted is a regular part of the job” (“Workshop #1” 2015). For some, the toxicity became so great that they left live streaming and sometimes competition altogether. For those in the audience who witness these ongoing verbal assaults in streams, it can also be a powerful reminder of the boundary policing at work. You may come to feel quite sharply how that space is simply not “for you.”
Unfortunately in the case of large esports productions, managing the community in event channels has been woefully under attended to. The focus of tournament organizers and broadcasters has thus far tended to be on the stage productions and competitions themselves. Online chat in live streamed broadcasts, where huge audiences are participating, is, if moderated at all, generally handled by bots, volunteers, and on rare occasions, a couple of paid staff members. Given that many of these tournaments have millions of viewers over the course of a weekend with just as many lines of chat streaming through, this is shocking.
While there have been many instances of harassment and hate speech taking place in esports streams over the years, one that brought the issue to greater public attention happened during a Hearthstone match at DreamHack Austin 2016. A large audience watched the final match between professional players Terrance “TerranceM” Miller and Keaton “Chakki” Gill as it was broadcast live via Twitch. Journalist Colin Campbell (2016a), covering the incident for Polygon, described how “during the Twitch livestream of his performance, and the interviews that followed, Miller, who is African-American, was the subject of a torrent of racist abuse on the stream’s chat panel. The abuse included hateful language targeting African-Americans, as well as graphic descriptions and imagery. There was so much abuse that moderators were unable to keep up.” Even though Miller himself did not witness the hate speech in real time, others, including his family, did. And he saw it all after the fact when he got a chance to watch the broadcast, where an archive of the chat played alongside the match.
There are many devastating common threads in Campbell’s recounting here. The resigned predictability of this kind of hate speech in tournament broadcasts (he quotes Miller as saying, “I knew it would be bad, but I didn’t think it would be that bad”), the hope that people just hide the chat, and the continued frustration at the lack of meaningful oversight within online spaces. Yet unlike so many other incidents of this type that have happened over the years, one important difference occurred this time: a moderator spoke up publicly and called the process as well as organization to account.
In a piece posted at the popular esports site Gosu Gamers, Carling “Toastthebadger” Filewich, a longtime Hearthstone community member and chat moderator for DreamHack Austin, offered a reflective accounting of what happened during the tournament, and revealed the gaps that currently exist in how most moderation and community management get handled. She specifically called out what many of us have long observed: far too often, chat is somehow not considered organizationally central to the broadcast and the responsibility of the organizers. She wrote, “Tournament organizers spend countless hours trying to get every little detail just right for their event. They take time to ensure they have the right casters, the right administrators, and the right production staff so that the final product presented on the broadcast is something they can be proud of. Very little, if any, consideration goes into what happens once the broadcast reaches the public” (Filewich 2016). She continued by astutely observing that the failure of DreamHack to properly moderate the channel is an all-too-common pattern, where many organizers simply do not put the time, labor, and I’d argue, money into actually building out robust community management. She asks,
Why wouldn’t you screen your moderators like you screen your casters? If you logged in at the right time over the weekend, you would have seen a moderator joining in on the racist spam and offering to unban anyone that had been permanently banned from the channel for horribly racist messages. Why was this person ever made moderator? Why were moderators with experience dealing with large chats only brought in after the racism became unmanageable? Tournament organizers should consider chat moderation an important part of the broadcast and plan ahead for it. (ibid.)
Her account painted a devastating portrait of a moderation team made up of volunteers, many of whom were working hard to keep the chat from running off the rails while others were actively undermining them. The lack of clear guidelines, training, and accountability is striking.22
It is also, sadly, unsurprising. When reading her recounting of the incident, I couldn’t help but think about a long-standing pattern in both gaming and social media: the lack of meaningful community management. Over and over again, both game developers and platforms build tremendous communities—and capital—by having users constantly engaging with each other, producing content, and deeply building value by their presence and interactions. Yet at the same time, it is stunning how underprepared and undercommitted companies can be in terms of managing those communities. They want the value that all those people create, but on the cheap. From Twitter’s ongoing foot-dragging on tools and processes to combat harassment to games that continue to be home to a consistently toxic culture, companies continue to want to bring people onto their platforms but neglect them once there. Far too often, corporate calculations focus on high daily active user counts while not investing in making these spaces sustainable. Not only are there real ethical issues with this approach; there are also actual long-term economic costs to this lack of attention. Harassing and toxic behavior has the concrete impact of pushing positive users off the platform, and keeping others from joining and participating.
Game developer Jessica Mulligan’s (2003) book Developing Online Games called on the industry to take community management as a core aspect of production. The minute you put multiple players together, you need to realize that you are now also fostering community. Esports tournaments and broadcasts need to face a similar truth. It is one thing to live stream matches, but the moment you put in a communication method for people, you have to attend to them. Tournament organizers are responsible for that space in the same way that owners of sports stadiums are. They are not exempt from managing the behavior that happens within them. Intervening in bad behavior on the part of attendees is incumbent on those who run the venue, and online spaces are no different. Part of this is, I would argue, an ethical condition of providing public environments. Both competitors and those in attendance (even digitally) have a right to a safe, nonharassing experience. This includes not being subject to racist, sexist, and homophobic slurs while you try to play, live stream, or spectate a game.
Most traditional sports stadiums have attendee codes of conduct, and some even offer confidential texting so that you can contact help without drawing (perhaps-risky) attention to yourself. These codes, of course, do not fully prevent bad things from happening; there remains more to be done on building inclusive traditional sporting communities. But the presence of codes and methods of enforcement (visible staff, mechanisms to reach out for help, etc.) signal a fundamental understanding of responsibility from the organizers that what happens in the stadium is part of the experience that they are accountable for. Esports organizers need to come to recognize that their live streaming and chat spaces are part of a digital stadium that they must manage responsibly.
There is also an economic angle that, if nothing else, broadcasters (and game developers) should certainly care about. For those who are really thinking about long-term growth, understanding how your product is affected—both symbolically and practically—by the chat is critical. One organizer noted the impact of bad stream chat on potential sponsors, saying, “I don’t want to see them scared away . . . You know you’re doing a ‘listen in’ [popping into a stream to show a sponsor], and people are dropping racial slurs or using the f-bomb and stuff like that it takes away so much space and it only sets us back. Esports is still, although growing, too fragile to have any setbacks where people are publishing really bad stuff about it.” Even just sticking to the main demographic that esports chases after (young men), it’s important to realize that many of them also don’t want to inhabit toxic spaces. It is woefully shortsighted to overlook the tremendous impact that unmoderated channels have on industry growth.
We can also think more expansively about audiences. In the case of traditional sports, women make up significant portions of both stadium and broadcast audiences. People of color and LGBTQIA folks are an always-present part of sports and gaming player bases, audiences, and leisure communities too.23 If you are fostering, even through negligence, the construction of an online stadium where a large slice of the audience will not want to spend time, you are affecting your bottom line. Conversely, if you work to build spaces that accommodate diverse audiences and construct possibilities for fandom along with engagement—especially in the current esports climate—you are likely to be well ahead of your competitors.
BUSINESS MODELS
The economic side of esports has always been one of the most ever-changing and fraught aspects of the scene. Hype bubbles, shady promoters, and impatient investors have long disrupted stable growth. One of the upshots of this has meant that successful organizers have become adept at finding a variety of ways to pull in revenue, often extending their focus of running tournaments to game event media productions. Live streaming, in particular, has not only heightened some traditional outlets but also produced new ones. One streamer described to me the shift that has occurred, saying, “It’s a big game changer for tournament organizers, because as opposed to actually renting out a streaming service, and paying big money for it, we actually now make money by creating good events. So that turned from ‘Hey, we have to pay $20,000 to stream for three days,’ around to ‘Oh, we’re earning $20,000 because we streamed for three days.’” This transformation—from producing and broadcasting an esports event on your own dime simply because you are an enthusiast to being able to actually make money from a production—has come through a variety of economic structures.
Revenue generation in esports is a motley mix of sources such as partnerships, licensing white label productions, sponsorships, in-game content, ad revenue, pay per view, event revenue, and crowdfunding. One person active in formulating tournament deals described it to me as different “buckets” and noted that how organizations tap into them varies not only from company to company but across titles as well. For some, the revenue mix will be made up more of white label productions and sponsors, while others will strongly utilize in-game content. Given that it is all still very much an industry in the making, new opportunities continue to present themselves (often in concert with platform development) even as others fall away. At the time of this research, the following were most important to understanding revenue in esports broadcasting.
Partnerships. As game developers/publishers have become more interested in leveraging the potential of broadcast competitions and game content, esports organizers have been able to step in and bring games to larger viewing audiences. Developers uninterested in or unable to carry out productions in-house will often reach out to an esports company that specializes in running tournaments and ask it to produce one for them, complete with a broadcast component. They will often issue a request for proposal (RFP) and have multiple companies bid on a project. An increasingly important part of organizer’s operations are sales teams that work with and pitch to potential clients to create “partnership” deals in which, for a fee, they will produce an event around a specific title. Revenue from these productions is a critical part of a company’s financial life. Indeed, one of the most interesting challenges that some of these organizations face is an energetic sales team making deals (commission being a driving factor), frequently beyond the current capacity of the production and event side of the company, pushing it to continue to expand aggressively.
Media licensing. Given the ways that traditional sports utilizes media licensing as a major revenue generator, it will perhaps be surprising to learn that third-party esports organizers have operated relatively free from burdensome licensing costs over the last several decades. Historically, organizers have not paid developers/publishers to use their games, and if they did, the amounts weren’t large. In fact, the money has tended to flow in the opposite direction, with game developers and publishers actually paying third-party organizers to produce events. Prior to living streaming, esports productions were seen by developers/publishers along a continuum: a distraction from their core business of making games and not warranting their time to simply a good source of free marketing.
Organizers are now dealing with game companies paying more attention and wanting in on the action. For example, in 2016, Riot agreed to a $300 million deal with BAMTech, the venture spun off from Major League Baseball Advanced Media that pioneered the MLB’s use of online streaming for games, for the right to distribute League of Legends matches. BAMTech’s gambit was that it would monetize advertising (of which Riot would also get a portion). Blizzard’s Overwatch league set several exclusivity deals in its launch year. Preseason matches went out on the MLG platform (ActivisionBlizzard purchased MLG in 2016) while Twitch paid “at least $90M” for streaming rights to the regular Overwatch league season.
One of the critical things to keep in mind with media-licensing deals is that they may often tap into other “buckets” in the overall revenue mix, especially when a platform like Twitch is involved. Once you have bought the rights to a tournament’s broadcast, tying it into other revenue-generating systems such as in-game content (discussed below) can mean that an otherwise-stunning number might be offset by unique forms of revenue sharing in the gaming space. As I will explore a bit more at the end of this chapter, it is possible that as future deals like these get made, they will transform and at times cut into the financial models that traditional esports organizers currently operate with. If game developers start exercising more sports-like terms in their licensing deals, it could pose challenges to both online platforms and third-party organizers.
White label products. Probably the least known outside the industry, but of growing importance in terms of media development, are esports companies taking on clients to produce and broadcast events. Unlike partnerships in which the organizer is still identified and a game title may even be integrated into one of its regular leagues, white label products typically have no explicit linking to the esports company. Game developers and others will hire outside teams (again typically using an RFP process) to handle their tournament or event, frequently from prep to media production to pack up. From the viewer’s perspective, the entire operation appears to be run by the event or game developer, but behind the scenes another organization will handle all or part of the production. One notable example of a white label event has been BlizzCon, which has historically had multiple companies running both event broadcasting and tournament production. White label products transform esports tournament companies into media companies. White label contracts can involve a tremendous amount of prebroadcast work such as setting up brackets, scoping the event including with floor plans, producing the show, and having connections to the right talent (host and commentators) to bring in. As organizations develop their ability to do these productions, they are simultaneously figuring out where the sweet spot is in terms of costs and production. One noted, “I think one of the things we also learned early on is how little that little added boost of production value actually gets you in relation to viewers. If you double your time on a piece of content, you’re not going to get double the viewers for it. So it’s trying to find that, you know, nice balance.” Because esports media production has grown to such a massive scale, often with deeply specialized labor, it is probably not surprising that some organizations have stepped in to augment their revenue this way.
Sponsorship. Esports has historically rested on endemic sponsors: those companies and brands that are seen as hitting the core “native” interests of the audience. In the case of esports, this has tended to mean that computers and peripherals have been the dominant sponsors in the space. Some of these, such as Intel, have been major financial supporters of large tournaments and a significant part of revenue generation for organizers for many years. With the growth of live streaming and larger audiences, more sponsors are seeing potential and getting into the mix. One producer who has been working in the field for almost two decades said of the shift, “It’s like so suddenly all the practices that esports has put in in terms of getting these sponsors and getting these sponsors exposure are now sort of like super amplified because now all these companies that sponsor get all this additional exposure through live streaming.” While still not quite reaching what we see in traditional sports or esports in South Korea, where a range of lifestyle brands play a role, there have been new non-endemic sponsors including soft drinks and insurance companies. Live streaming also offers increased opportunities for team sponsors to get their brands out there by having logos on jerseys, which are now getting prime screen time during tournaments.
In-game content or items. One of the newest sources of production revenue comes from the collision of two relatively recent developments: the fact that game developers are becoming much more involved in esports, and the ways that microtransactions have become a huge part of gaming overall. Games now regularly feature the ability for users to buy add-ons to the base product, from “skins” to cosmetically alter weapons or characters to new game modes. As game developers begin to make deals with production companies to handle their events, revenue generated from microtransactions has become a part of the potential overall revenue mix that broadcasters can receive. Some of the in-game content can be branded in conjunction with the tournament and offered up as special limited edition purchases while others will simply be regular items. Revenue is negotiated between developers and broadcasters. Other technical developments, such as account linking between Twitch and game publishers or the platform’s extensions and API, facilitates offering viewers opportunities to get game items via their Twitch account and even tied to their watching particular content.
This is a form of production revenue unique to gaming, and highlights just one way that audiences are getting enlisted as both viewers and consumers. That formulation is certainly at the heart of traditional advertising, but in-game merchandise takes it to a whole new level. Traditional advertisers have long dreamed of systems to connect up and quantify viewership to consumer behavior. While it doesn’t yet seem that Twitch has reconceptualized itself as fundamentally a platform on which raw data on user behavior is a prime source of revenue generation, in-game content purchasing as well as linking up to game and Amazon accounts may signal what’s on the horizon. If the platform that you watch games on has detailed information about your viewing and spending habits, and can structure and monetize them to sell back to game companies and advertisers, one can certainly imagine a future in which Twitch is as much a consumer data company as a gaming one, with its revenue shifting accordingly.
Ad revenue. Despite platforms using advertising as their underlying financial structure, commercials have not yet formed a major part of revenue for most broadcasters. Though one team owner I spoke with referred to ad revenue as “a cherry on top,” allowing both the team and pros to supplement their incomes, as noted in the discussion in the last chapter, there remain issues hindering this bucket. While major organizations can negotiate more favorable revenue-sharing agreements, deeper systemic problems still pose challenges to a traditional model of commercials in esports broadcasting. While ad-blocking software has largely been mitigated, producers express concerns about audience pushback, worried that triggering ads risks oversaturating the audience. One producer said, “I mean we’re like any other broadcast. We have to pause to give praise to our sponsors and then we also have to run ads. It’s always trying to find that balancing act of when is it too much ads.” Regional rates for ads may mitigate against the revenue potential of otherwise-large audiences. For example, the lower CPMs traditionally paid for viewers in Russia can particularly affect esports given that a significant audience for games like CSGO is found there. Although a component of a diverse revenue package, online advertising more broadly faces serious hurdles, and live streaming is no exception.
Pay per view (PPV). Given the difficulties with advertising, one might expect subscription or PPV to have stepped in to fill some gaps. It is certainly a mechanism that has been utilized successfully by traditional sports. There have been a few attempts to build a PPV model in esports, most notably from MLG before Activision Blizzard purchased it. There was a fair amount of pushback from the community to this approach because many felt that they had already invested both time and money by being paying members of the website. The resistance also dovetailed with broader expectations of free content online. In an interview addressing MLG’s move away from PPV, Sundance DiGiovanni (then CEO) told journalist Rod “Slasher” Breslau (2012),
The goal was never to block the community from having access to the Arenas [a StarCraft tournament]; the goal was just to prove that there were business models and revenue lines that we can associate with the activity. Everybody makes assumptions that we’ve got unlimited funds to invest and we’re milking as much money as possible, but if these activities are able to sustain themselves, we can do a lot. We don’t see ourselves getting a million people to sign up for PPV, but we do see an opportunity to get advertisers and sponsors interested based on the audience size. I’m hoping that stuff we have planned for next year is even more open, free, and available for the audience again. Somebody has to pay. It’s either us, advertisers, sponsors, or the community. I want the community to be the last line in defense in that equation.
MLG’s transition event was sponsored by game development trade school Full Sail, and while it continued to experiment with revenue models, it dropped a PPV approach. As DiGiovanni remarked, “There’s a fine line between creating a sustainable business and keeping the community happy and making sure those things are in direct connection with one another” (ibid.).
One of the few exceptions to the informal no-PPV rule in the world of gaming has been the annual BlizzCon fan convention focused on Blizzard’s games. Though it had a partnership with DirectTV in 2008, it expanded in 2009 to include an online live stream and now reaches huge audiences.24 The “virtual ticket” costs around $199, and the broadcast includes a live stream of developer panels, assorted events, and esports tournaments happening at the convention (as well as some in-game items). The esports component of the convention is usually also broadcast on a free live stream, and the 2017 online esports audience for the matches was reported to be more than eight hundred thousand worldwide.
Perhaps sensing some potential still to be leveraged in pay models, just as this book was being finalized Blizzard announced that viewers could, for $29.99 a season, access additional content for its popular Overwatch competitive league. Its Twitch “all-access” pass would give subscribers access to special in-game skins—unique Twitch emotes for use in the live chat—as well as the “Overwatch League Command Center.” While some expressed disappointment that, despite the language, they couldn’t control in-game match views, those with access would get additional camera angles to matches, behind-the-scenes shots, and assorted recorded content. As an added content package, it seemed to scattershot hit all the revenue buckets that organizations have been experimenting with. Whether or not it succeeds is yet to be seen.
Event revenue. Esports productions currently approach live events as a component of a media spectacle. Elaborate lights, staging, preproduced content, and even musical guests now make up part of the show. At its heart, it also relies on visually folding the audience into the broadcast, turning the cameras on the cheering crowd. Filling up sports stadiums and turning grand finals into weekend-long events has become the norm. These then get broadcast to viewers globally.
The size, scale, and polish of these tournaments have grown. While in the past events like the World Cyber Games drew decent-sized crowds, current tournaments operate at an even greater scale. The International, Dota 2’s premier season finale, held in Seattle’s Key Arena, has had around seventeen thousand attendees for several years in a row. Tickets cost $99 for a six-day ticket. The League of Legends Championship finals in 2016, costing $47 to $71 for a daily ticket, gathered twenty thousand people in Los Angeles’ Staples Center. ESL’s 2017 Intel Extreme Masters event in Oakland, California, cost $34 for two days and garnered in-person attendance numbers as high as six thousand people daily. Being able to buy T-shirts or fan gear is a growing trend at these venues. Enthusiasts, keen to express their love of a team, game, or player this way, will spend money at venue pop-up shops (with revenue divided up among various stakeholders).
Live events are still very much a work in progress, and over the course of my research for this book, they did not yet make up a meaningful revenue generator for esports (indeed, they could at times lose money or barely break even). They are often held in sports arenas, which while creating a compelling visual spectacle for the camera, frequently carries a significant price tag and means lots of seats to fill. They can be incredibly uncomfortable for on-site participants given that events frequently run for a full weekend or more. They tend to be odd mixes of competition and expo, with game/PC demo stations located at various places throughout the venue. With the amount of downtime typically at esports events between matches along with the challenge of keeping tens of thousands of people entertained at an otherwise-sparse stadium, producers face a real challenge with big on-site events.
The mirroring of traditional sports spaces may prove to not be the best option for live audiences, despite producers being drawn to the visuals. In 2016, I attended the Boston Major, a Dota 2 tournament produced by the Professional Gamers League that was held in the beautiful Wang Theater in Boston. The seats were comfortable, and the space offered a more intimate experience that both captured the fans’ enthusiasm well and was much more audience friendly on-site. It was a welcome contrast to sitting in a massive sports arena. It will be fascinating to see if either the visuals that producers seem intent on chasing via large stadiums or revenue from them can be reconciled against the specific conditions of esports tournaments as generally multiday affairs that pose an endurance challenge for the audience.
Crowdfunding. Though the last handful of years have seen the rise of free-to-play models within gaming as well as the widespread growth of free UGC, this does not mean that gamers are unwilling to spend money on esports. Tournaments like the International have benefited tremendously from sales of Valve’s Compendium and Battle Pass, digital packages that include everything from in-game items to a “wagering” system. The more that people buy, the more incentives are added for purchasers. For each sale, Valve gives a cut to the tournament prize pool (currently 25 percent). When this crowdfunded system began in 2013, Compendium sales contributed $2.8 million to the tournament pot. Just a year later, that figure had risen to $10.9 million, and it broke $23 million in 2017. It is critical to understand that the International is not just a major esports tournament but a major media event broadcast worldwide too. And rather than being a production primarily funded through commercials or ads, fandom is at the heart of its economics.
Tournaments like the International reveal the power of funding directly from gamers and fans who often want to express loyalty, support, and enthusiasm via their spending. For some, this means purchasing multiple copies. This is yet another powerful way that games, and their formal competitions and broadcasts, get woven together with the passions, commitments, and affective work of fans. It is also an example of a circuit of engagement that feeds back on itself constantly; players get a game and play it avidly, their fandom is harnessed so that they not only purchase digital goods for themselves but those purchases also contribute to a growing player base and expanding media space (tournaments and broadcasts), which in turn fuel more energy back into the game, retaining players (and drawing new ones in), and the loop repeats.
While crowdfunding, both in gaming and out, has proven a powerful mechanism for consumers and supporters to directly bolster goods as well as activities that they are excited about, I have some pause about the extent to which a system can and should healthily rest on this model. One component of my concern lays in the ethics of monetizing fandom to this degree. Of course it is reasonable and indeed exciting to see fans be able to express their financial support for the things they love. There is without a doubt a particular sort of power, albeit narrow, in their ability to use their wallet to vote things up or down. And esports has historically rested on fans being incredibly dedicated in terms of giving money, time, and labor to sustaining the scene. This has been a way for enthusiasts to exert influence on how it operates—whether in terms of helping decide rule sets or tournament structures, bolstering particular games that they find valuable, or creating the overall culture. The power of fandom expressed economically is important, and should not simply be written off as exploitative or superficial. Compendium and Battle Pass purchases can be a way to show support not just for esports but for the pro players in that space too. Team and player loyalties, and the desire to help sustain them, can regularly be heard when people explain purchases. Purchasing can also help people feel that they are participating in the event in a way they might not otherwise.
Yet we would be remiss to not think about the ethics of monetization. While I would not want to pose a theory that imagines gamers are simply being duped—they are often insightful about the economics of fandom—I don’t entirely want to let companies off the hook for the degree to which they trade on the affective engagements of their communities. Matt Demers, a writer who regularly covers esports, signals this issue a bit in his discussion of the Twitch Bits system, which allows people to cheer within chat via an in-system currency, of which Twitch takes a cut. He argues that “if Twitch is going to sell us something based on the altruism of fans wanting to support their community it is hard to ignore the elephant in the room of their cut, and how it clashes with the current standard of ‘hit donation button, send money directly, they (or you choose to) deal with fees’” (Demers 2016). In much the same way that some variety streamers express concern about and will even shut down donation trains if they feel like they are getting out of control, organizations should think critically about the ways that they monetize fan emotions without full consideration of the labor involved. For instance, it is perhaps a bit imbalanced to give only a quarter of the proceeds of multimillion-dollar digital sales back to the actual professional gamers who are doing a significant amount of work engaging a broader community of players.
This ties into a second component of my concern, which is more structural in nature: Are these huge crowdfunded prize pools actually distorting or neglecting a competitive space that needs to sustain itself day in and day out? As esports reporter Ferguson Mitchell asserts in his analysis of Dota 2’s massive crowdfunded prize pool tied to the final, it actually undermined the long-term stability of the competitive community. He observes that “the scariest fact is simply how many teams build around the event,” and this clustering (combined with a qualifier system) produces an all-or-nothing model in which only the topmost competitors have resources. Mitchell (2014a) maintains that in its current configuration, the “underclassmen”—those players not yet at the most elite level that make that final event—“are being trampled by an unrewarding and unforgiving format.” Game scholar William Partin (2017) argues for the ways that the system has created “tremendous wealth disparity and income inequality among Dota 2 players.” By contrast, the major fighting game tournament Evo announced that it would donate crowdfunded money that it received from the Twitch bit system (30 percent of the total that Twitch took in) directly to the players and casters to whom it was directed rather than pocketing it themselves as part of event revenue.
This experimentation with shifting prize pool generation directly to the consumers has extended to Valve also attempting to integrate crowdfunding mechanisms into how it pays show talent. Unlike the embrace of the Compendium and Battle Pass system by most of the player base, crowdfunding talent pay was met with pushback, most notably by some high-profile commentators. The International 2014 implemented a system that would allow people to get “signatures” attached to their digital goods for a fee—a percentage of which would go to the commentator. But some, such as James “2GD” Harding, expressed frustration that they weren’t guaranteed any base pay to supplement this system.25 For commentators such as Harding, who will often be on-site at an event from when the doors open to long into the night, and be on camera for tens of hours, this model was woefully inadequate. The issue, having been made public, was rectified, but for many it highlighted not only the limits of this model for funding events but also the lengths some companies will go to in order to offset their costs directly onto consumers.
Given the economic precariousness that so many pro players and talent face, these approaches strike me as unethical. The disparity between how much money major game developers are making off esports (whether through direct sales or indirectly as a form of PR) and what the actual professional players themselves make underscores worrying stratification in the industry. This argument could also be extended to talent like hosts, commentators, and even production teams. For decades now, people playing and working in the space have been willing to forego livable wages, not to mention long-term professional stability, due to their love of esports and commitment to wanting it to break through. Given the fast growth currently happening, more must be done to take care of the people working in the sector. Game companies profiting off esports have responsibility to contribute to the long-term economic health of players and other professionals in the scene, especially when revenue is built on a foundation of fandom.
Looking at the range of economic models currently being used in esports broadcasting, it is easy to see that it is a motley mix of approaches. Part of this originates from no one being entirely sure what will work over the long haul, while partly it is a result of the unstable division of labor and emerging forms of specialization among organizations. Third-party organizers who have been building the industry for nearly two decades are finding themselves with both more interest in what they do and new competition. Game developers and publishers, with few exceptions long relatively inactive in building the esports scene, are now often stepping into the mix. Platform developers are trying to stake their own claims in the space. Combined with profound shifts in media production and distribution more broadly, iterations, experiments, failures, and economic flux are likely to continue.
Constructing Audiences and Markets
An important thread woven throughout questions about revenue models are how audiences and markets are being imagined in the esports broadcasting world. In my conversations with people creating products and conceptualizing audiences, I see two consistent patterns. The first relates to advertising, and the second concerns internal models of who gamers are. There are always imagined audiences when companies are working out event details along with how it will be packaged, marketed, and sold. Even postevent “hype reels” are tied up with audience construction and deployed as sales devices for future events.
This pattern is not unique to esports (or live streaming more generally) but rather part of the way that content sits within a commercialized sphere. Media studies scholar Toby Miller (2010) notes that producers don’t simply want to attract viewers but also want to “make audiences.” Audiences are not a given empirical fact; they are actually constructed packagings—ways of describing, understanding, and bundling a mass of viewers. In the same way that individual stream communities articulate a vision of their audience, platforms, game developers/publishers, advertisers, sponsors, and any number of other economic actors build models of their audience. Those conceptualizations, in turn, get fed back into the system and work to (re)produce segmentation. Audience making is always ongoing work, but it is particularly important to consider now, at a time of tremendous growth in esports.
IMAGINED AUDIENCES AND ADVERTISING
When it comes to imagining audiences, the digital gaming industry continues to lag behind cultural trends and practices. Though developers have made strides in understanding that there are heterogeneous users for their products, much more still needs to be done. A major factor continues to be deep misunderstandings around how leisure and gender operate in people’s daily lives. While cultural expectations around who plays games have changed quite a bit in the last fifteen years, esports is still playing catch up. Despite women’s actual involvement and interest in competitive gaming, they continue to confront uphill battles to full participation. A rhetoric of meritocracy prevails amid serious ongoing structural and cultural barriers to entry as well as retention. Outdated ideas that women are not interested in direct competition, or more sociologically inflected issues around recruitment paths, the power of social networks, or outright harassment and sexism, are still prevalent.26
The belief that women are outside the core for esports has, unfortunately, also spread to audience construction and participation. Women are not seen as important stakeholders in terms of spectatorship, and by extension are sidelined from its economic underpinnings. Put simply, over and over again young men age eighteen to twenty-five are framed as the prized demographic for esports sponsors and advertisers; in turn, events and broadcasts are primarily constructed with them in mind.27 They are “hailed” constantly in broadcasts in a variety of ways and become an imagined audience that ends up holding tremendous metainstitutional power.
Part of this stance comes from a longtime “truism” in advertising that sees young (white) men as valuable consumers unable to be reached via traditional paths. Advertisers are thus always on the watch for new ways to get their message out to this tough-to-reach market. Esports has, quite instrumentally, piggybacked on this panic by prominently building into its sales models the claim that it knows that market segment well and can reach it effectively. This is not by any stretch a hidden rhetoric. If you listen to any number of public interviews with high-profile esports executives and game developers with esports titles, this notion is clearly touted as a prime strength of their “product.” This rhetoric about who the valued audience is represents a collision of survival pragmatism and ideologies of gender and race. Companies are desperate to find sponsors wherever they can and have not shied away from tapping into hackneyed verbiage.
Yet as we’ve seen in game studies research over the years, there is a gap between how industry actors conceive of their space and what is empirically evidenced. I certainly recall in the earliest days of massively multiplayer online game research how many of us had an abundance of data on the women playing as well as motivations that disrupted easy stories about “what women like,” only to be consistently met with industry resistance. More often than not that pushback belied deeper assumptions about gender than actual user practices and experience. Indeed, if you had looked at qualitative work emerging early on in game studies, you would have clearly seen a cultural transformation in progress. Computer gaming was moving from an activity mostly taken up by young boys and men to a leisure activity also for women and across their life cycle.
Conversations in esports feel much the same. We see more and more women playing games like League of Legends, Overwatch, and other competitive titles, turning up to esports events, watching streams online, and developing fandom around games, players, and teams, only to be told by the industry that they are a negligible slice, anomalies, not the “core” demographic. Barriers to entry and retention are constantly reasserted despite women’s expressed interest in competitive gaming. From the lack of hailing in stories, advertising, and visuals to outright harassment, women who try to enter esports in sustained ways face regular serious challenges.
Part of the ideological move within marketing and audience construction has been to render practices invisible, re-centering the imagined player. Given how much of the esports economy relies on sales—from advertising to deals with developers/publishers and other sponsors—there are huge incentives to construct a demographic profile of esports fans that can then be said to be captured and offered back to advertisers and sponsors. Traditional advertising, which fears it has lost the ability to reach young men, is now encountering esports companies (often in dire straits to stay afloat) confidently proclaiming that they have the prized demographic at the ready.
It’s easy enough to see how this move starts out harmless. That demographic without a doubt makes up an important part of esports fandom, and it especially did in the earliest years. But the problems set in when it gets conceived of as the unchanging and primary one. As an empirical consideration mutates into an ideological one, other props (such as industry “reports” and repeated stereotypes) get raised to help perpetuate what has become an overly narrow understanding of the audience. As Miller (2010) illustrates with the example of the historic miscounting of Latino/a audiences, analytic errors can be rooted not only in poor methods but political, economic, and ideological frameworks too. Lotz (2014, 207) has also pointed out the ways that audience construction via measurement is tied up with advertising-supported media in particular as well as deployed as a way of “encouraging and discouraging various innovations during periods of industrial change.”
The people esports sales teams are selling to—be they advertisers, sponsors, or game developers/publishers—often have audience models that tend toward a fairly conservative and outdated view of games as the domain of primarily young men. Pitching alternate productions and audience formulations simply doesn’t get traction. The upshot is the continued same old story in which the imagined audience member is a young single man. This only helps reify that dominance of this demographic in everyone’s minds. If you keep surrounding yourself with that model of participation, it’s not surprising that you start thinking it is reality, which in turn limits how you might formulate more up-to-date possibilities. The cost of this decidedly unvirtuous circle has been several decades of inequitable access and participation opportunities for women and girls to digital playing fields, and that is now flowing over into audience construction.
As esports has risen in prominence as a media space with real economic stakes, a new actor has appeared on the scene: the analyst and their accompanying reports. This is not dissimilar from the massive industry around traditional media metrics and audience reporting. Usually replete with colorful graphics, and lots of hype and press releases, these reports have come to play a significant role in how the scene is developing. Unfortunately, retrograde ideas around gender and gaming regularly get bolstered by these quasi-research reports, which are not subject to peer review and utilize black boxed methodologies. They are often too expensive to be read and evaluated widely, so instead are used as “data” feeding back into the flawed cycle. Business developers, frequently with a model of use and audience already solidified in their minds, regularly turn to these reports not for meaningful research but instead to make cases for their own internal stakeholders.
The reliance on quantitative data in particular continues to produce profound misunderstandings of actual audiences, uptake, and use. Three major culprits are usually at work: surveys, algorithmically generated data and profiling, and “big data.” It’s important not just for researchers but also those in the industry who aren’t analysts yet often rely on that work to understand the methodological limitations of each of these. So much of the industry in particular now claims to be “data driven,” but stakeholders and executives often lack basic methodological social science training to evaluate the reports that they are utilizing. As Baym (2013) puts it in her excellent overview of measuring audiences and online metrics, “However magnificent it may seem to have so much data available and to be able to mobilize that material in different ways, the promises of big data are a mixture of real potential with uncritical faith in numbers and hype about what those numbers can explain.”28 With that in mind, let me say a couple words more about these methods.
Survey data can be tantalizing. They seem to offer big, confident, generalizable claims that are particularly easy to pull from for sales decks. With free online tools like SurveyMonkey or in-house “quick and dirty” surveys that are offered with some kind of token game perk for participation, it can seem almost dumb to not do a survey. But doing good survey work is hard and not cheap. Poorly worded questions and lousy sampling can be fatal blows to good data as well as subsequent analysis. And as television scholars noted decades ago, “watching television” is a more complex category than might appear at first glance, and quantitative measures often don’t fully capture varying contexts along with nuanced behaviors and attitudes.29 Morley argues, for example, that audience measurement has historically not been about quantifying viewing but instead simply capturing things such as if the TV is on. Such measurements have tended to assume that tuning into something indicates an affirmative desire to watch it (versus, say, a habit done when getting home from work). They have also been woefully unsociological in their orientation, imagining an individual actor making a singular choice versus social and contextual dependencies that shape what is on (Morley 1992).
Algorithmically generated data and profiling, and their companion of big data, represent the newest in the arsenal of “data-driven analytics” that are especially used in online spaces. They arise from an orientation that assumes most meaningful data can be automatically captured via platforms and various data sets (for example, frequent-buyer card tracking or purchasing data from credit card companies), and without needing sampling (there is no subset to consider when you think you have it all). There is often an unquestioning belief that all these data will offer clear patterns and trends. While profiling will often end up producing “personas” or types of users, big data will regularly be presented as if simply visualizing everything will offer obvious analysis and insights. I suspect most of us have encountered one of those evocative “network maps” at some point, with their threaded lines and words of varying font sizes seeming to indicate something meaningful. Or you’ve encountered demographic claims drawn from Google or an online analytics service.
This impulse is also not new, and it is tied to a much longer history within television audience measurement. Lotz does a good job showing how changes in distribution channels frequently upset traditional audience measurement techniques and how “engagement” has become a new currency in the postnetwork era. This chase after engagement, which is something more than simply watching but also includes demonstrating your participation as a viewer through things like sharing on social media, has become a rubric around which a number of platforms now offer metrics. Media critic Mark Andrejevic (2009c) discusses how the desire to track and quantify audiences, and thereby validate the efficacy of advertising, has grown with the use of various analytics.
There remain several serious and often-fatal challenges to these methods when trying to understand leisure, gaming, live streaming, and esports in particular. These data are produced with little consideration of multidevice use, shared accounts, non-signed-in use, everyday contexts, and how people understand and give meaning to their own actions. Usually sign-up processes do not actually collect data such as gender, much less data that can then be meaningfully linked across all behavior. Graphs that show big-bucket categories like “time watched” sidestep the fact that they actually can’t capture watching; at best they can simply show how long something played on a screen. They can’t capture the other people in the room who weren’t signed in but were also watching and engaged. They can’t count multiscreen or multitask context. Fundamentally, they capture only the coarsest of things, such as the number of calls made to the server to receive data.
Perhaps most pernicious, though, are the ways that big data and algorithmically generated systems are utilized in deeply conservative ways. I don’t mean this in a political sense but rather a social scientific one. Such models often assume that you are a man or woman because you do things identified as what men or women do. This means, for example, that a woman who has leisure patterns or interests that “look like” a man’s may, in fact, be miscategorized as a man according to the system. Data pulled from that system and sloppy analysis then feed back into lousy analytics that only reinforce stereotypes. Simply put, women who do “male” things look like just more men to the system (and vice versa). Only after a massive shift has occurred in the culture—typically one that bubbles up enough to redefine what a man or women can do without stigma—will this discrepancy get dealt with. In the meantime, counterexamples, innovators and trendsetters, and behaviors that simply don’t fit dominant cultural models may be rendered invisible, irrelevant outliers, or wholly misunderstood.
One of the most significant problems with quantitative data in the domain of gender and leisure is that it is usually unable to capture fast-shifting changes in cultural patterns as well as preferences. And more often than not, these so-called data are captured in huge swaths with no rigorous interpretative work as a component of the analysis. While such approaches are meant to get at “actual behavior” and not claimed identities, in practice they lag too far behind what are really complex constellations of practices and how people understand themselves—engagements that shift far too quickly for quantitative models to usually account for. Some platforms have come to understand the ways that other variables may actually be more salient than gender. Netflix, dubbed by Wired as a “notoriously data-driven company,” has, for instance, ditched gender as a variable in deciding which shows to invest in. Todd Yellin, Netflix’s vice president of product innovation, has said, “There’s a mountain of data that we have at our disposal. . . . That mountain is composed of two things. Garbage is 99 percent of that mountain. Gold is one percent. . . . Geography, age, and gender? We put that in the garbage heap” (quoted in Barrett 2016). While as a sociologist I would advocate for a bit more caution in a wholesale rejection of these variables, they must be carefully considered, weighted, and interpreted in specific domains and contexts. The problem lies in our often misattributing to gender what might otherwise be better understood through not just other variables but a specific intersection of them, of which gender may just be one.30
The issue of changing leisure patterns is tremendously important not only for researchers but also stakeholders who are keenly attuned to the rise and fall of markets. Capturing a known market or demographic is one thing; being ahead of your competitors can be a critical business advantage. Growth spots are frequently where people are at or want to be, but that haven’t yet been saturated or leveraged by others. There are several noteworthy flavors of this: critical cultural moments and developing ones.
Big cultural shifts are usually unpredictable, although once upon us, can seem inevitable. Think, for example, about the mainstream changes that World of Warcraft, Minecraft, or Pokemon Go fostered. As someone who had previously done work on massively multilayer online games, I remember being amazed when this small slice of gaming became, for a time, a huge part of the popular culture with coverage reaching even mainstream outlets like the New York Times. Minecraft opened up UGC, as well as a practice of watching your favorite gamers on YouTube, to millions of kids. Most recently, Pokemon Go crystallized the powerful potential of alternate reality games—a genre that has existed in various forms for decades. All these practices and platforms previously existed before a particular title burst on the scene. All of them became mainstream cultural objects and activities that crossed gender lines, and became popular forms of leisure not strictly tied to any identity. They became transformational objects, bringing people into gaming but also shifting public conversations.
We’ve now seen within esports how the introduction of live streaming has opened up the audience for competitive gaming in significant ways. It has brought more mainstream attention in just a few years than decades of activity had. Time and again, I have heard from women (and, to be frank, men) about how they went from enjoying playing League of Legends or Overwatch with their friends or family to being amazed and excited about esports once they went to a Barcraft, their first live match, or even watched a tournament online. The rise and amplification of these massive events via live streaming—such as the International, Evo, League of Legends Championship Series, or Intel Extreme Masters—highlight how the long trajectory of a subculture can often burst through in unexpected, unanticipated ways. Models of audience, especially around gender, must be agile enough to handle these big cultural shifts.
EQUITY AND ETHICS
Beyond the unanticipated moments that shift behaviors, practices, and identities, there is the long game of cultural development. When conversations arise about the need to conduct surveys to see “how many women are actually into esports,” I often ask how useful it would have been to query women fifty years ago about their interest in soccer or athletics more generally. If you had done that survey, you would have likely come away with a judgment of “nope, no big interest” and not pushed for any change. But that wouldn’t have gotten you to an understanding of how audience and participation develops, and how to look for potentials and plant seeds for growth. This is not simply a market issue but also an ethical one.
In a US context, a profound social movement sustained through cultural and institutional interventions, including law and policy, has been fostering athleticism and sports participation among women and girls. The history of women in sports is unfortunately one in which many talented athletes were actively barred from competition, and just as devastatingly, women and girls were not even allowed the opportunity to engage in athleticism for fear it would cause them bodily harm or upset “feminine sensibilities.” As recently as 1971, women were actively prohibited from, say, running in the Boston Marathon; dedicated athletes like Roberta “Bobbi” Gibbs and Katherine Switzer had to sneak onto the course or obfuscate their identity to participate. The prohibition against sports participation has long dovetailed with a desire to keep women out of public and democratic spheres. While there remain serious and deeply worrying regulations around gender and sports—witness, for example, the policing of bodies that the International Olympic Committee perpetuates with various “gender testing” or outright prohibition of women from certain sports as was the case in 2010 with women’s ski jumping—tremendous progress has been made in the United States to bring women and girls into athletics, and by extension, the public sphere.
Early advocates ran “play days” where girls and women would try out sports in friendly, low-stakes environments. Various initiatives in communities and local institutions helped to seed ground for women’s participation in physical play. A critical turn occurred though federal legislation in 1972, when the Title IX Act ensured that “no person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance” (TitleIX.info 2016). The law covers a range of domains from academic assessment to sexual harassment. It was also the lever through which sports was transformed.
An important part of what drove the adoption of Title IX and its continued defense has been the fundamental understanding that gender equity, even in leisure spaces, is a key human right, and fair access and support is central to a democratic society. While some tie the benefits of gender equity to increased leadership and teamwork skills, I want to make a much more basic case for why it matters. It’s great if these arise as a side benefit, but sports, play, and games need not be in the service of instrumental aims. Access to leisure, and even its sometimes-professional transformation, is a human right. Being able to tap into a range of activities and subjectivities to develop as well as express our humanity and connection with others is due all. Even if it “serves no purpose,” women and girls have just as much of a right to take pleasure in sports, competition, fandom, and spectatorship as anyone.31
As a New York Times article reviewing the law’s forty-year impact states, “It’s hard to exaggerate the far-reaching effect of Title IX on American society. The year before Title IX was enacted, there were about 310,000 girls and women in America playing high school and college sports; today, there are more than 3,373,000” (“Before and after Title IX” 2012). While there remains much to be done to support women’s sports, the law has without a doubt opened up athletic participation to women and girls. Whether it is youth soccer teams, amateur marathons, any number of professional sports, or everyday exercise and just getting in those 10,000 steps, women’s access to and desire for physical sporting activity has grown enormously.
Part of the power of Title IX was that it created a legal framework that fostered structures to support the exploration of activities one might not have otherwise known they would enjoy. As women and girls came to sports, it fostered legitimacy around their participating in not just physical activities but competition too. We are at a pivotal moment in esports where we must begin to take to heart not only the ethical call that legislation like Title IX prompts but also the larger imperative of equitable access as a fundamental human right. While this may sound hyperbolic to those who either continue to see esports as a strange niche of gaming or view leisure as frivolous, it does matter. The right to participate in esports—be it as a fan, player, or someone working in the industry—shouldn’t be held to any lesser a standard than we do for traditional sports. If you would be aghast at the thought of the women and girls in your life being held back from engaging in physical activity and competition, you should stop to consider the trajectory that esports is on.
With live streaming, more and more game developers and esports companies are creating tournaments as well as grappling with whether they are going to import gender segregation from traditional sports. In my experience, many working in the space currently understand the power that esports has to upend retrograde formulations of skill and expertise, yet they often struggle with how to understand women’s current marginalization in the scene, both as players and as potential audience. Faced with sponsors and advertisers who often turn to more traditional audience segmentation, even well-meaning insiders can end up reconstituting structures that they themselves take pause at. There are two critical threads to pick up in the face of this confusion—one around biological sex, and the other concerning sociocultural factors.
Esports industry professionals frequently remark on how digital game competition does not tap into physical differences. In this regard, they are hitting on the possibility of a truly radical disruption of traditional sports’ long-standing problematic: the biology-as-destiny argument. Historically this model asserts that there is a fundamental reality situated around the “fact” that males and females are so physiologically different, the segmentation of athletics along these lines simply makes sense. Sometimes shorthanded as the “muscle gap,” it is a framework for understanding human action along sex categorization and segregation. It underpins a notion that gender and sex is a simple binary. Esports participants often sense that this schema doesn’t make sense within the space, though typically because they see esports as an activity that doesn’t rely on traditional categories like strength. But this division of the world has been more broadly challenged by a number of scholars who have pointed out the ways that (sloppy) science gets deployed to reify this split and thus have contended that sex differences are regularly overstated.32
Sports scholars such as Mary Jo Kane have picked up on this critique and advocated for thinking about how a continuum is always at work within athletics—one that might help us fruitfully disrupt these reductionist models. She argues that a binary model is reproduced in a variety of ways, from rendering invisible women’s participation in sports traditionally coded as male (such as rugby or ice hockey) to erasing the actual shaded gradation of physicality within and across sexes. Her example of marathons is a powerful one. She describes how we can literally see the “continuum of performance stretched out for miles along the road with women and men running simultaneously, interpreted randomly along the same course.” Yet as she astutely notes, this visible complexity gets reduced down to men’s and women’s divisions, where “certain gender comparisons are highlighted while others are ignored altogether” (for instance, how women regularly beat men within the same race) (Kane 1995, 209). For Kane and others, there remains a fundamental ideological move in constructing sports as sex segregated, and one that erases the actual continuum along which athletic experience is inhabited.
As sports sociologists have long observed, however, it is gender, and not sex, that is a powerful category for understanding how athleticism functions in our society. By this I mean simply that it is not about the genitals one is born with but instead the gendered identity and body in a specific sociocultural context (woven through with race, class, sexuality, disability, religion, and nationality) that shapes athletic participation. And this is where the industry’s intuitive understanding that a binary model doesn’t hold real value might be fruitfully informed by thinking about equity in light of the social, cultural, and structural barriers to participation.
There are tremendous barriers to entry and retention for women in esports. Lack of access to competitive networks and informal learning, stigma and harassment, or even the lack of role models all highlight the social and structural factors along the way that often impede women’s ability to advance in esports professionally. Scholars have also long pointed to the power of the media to render invisible or misrepresent women’s engagement with sports. Sports media plays a powerful role in upholding the binary and segregation model. It offers limited coverage of women’s sports despite audience interest (or potential), regularly focuses on women athletes sexuality or looks over skill and accomplishments, and constantly works to reproduce segregation and difference through visuals, language, and narrative framing.
As esports has become a media product, it too has become even more tied up in this reproduction of sports hegemony. While the scene has long grappled with its own varying forms of masculinity (geek and athletic) and how it has handled women, live streaming has upped the ante. Because of the reliance on traditional advertising and sponsorship within esports, hackneyed formulations of audience are increasingly coming into play. These have tended to be in terms of traditional audiences and market segmentation, which has, unfortunately, been consistently tied to chasing a young male market. Through its development as a media property, esports is formulating a public imagination of what it could and should be, who it is and isn’t for, and who should and shouldn’t be there. As we’ve seen from the history of traditional sports, an ethics of equity must be central to our understanding of this domain. Equitable access to and participation in esports—including being a spectator and valued audience member—is something not only game developers but also their allied media outlets must become attuned to.
FOSTERING NEW MARKETS AND AUDIENCES
Of course, many new companies, especially ones operating in niche areas or with tight margins, do not think about ethical imperatives or, even expansively, market development. They go for what they see as low-hanging fruit. In esports, this has meant “grab the guys we know for sure play our games and that advertisers want.” I get it. Money is tight, labor is stretched thin, and things feel precarious. But it’s also a head-scratcher when those same folks—ones who have ambitions to see massive shifts in sports and media driven by dreams where esports will rise to prominence, if not dominance—simultaneously do not carve out space in their business models to think about not just the future but, to put it coarsely, what money may be left on the table right now.
This attention to broader audiences is something that traditional sports have had to face after decades of serious neglect. A Bloomberg piece reported after a survey on football audiences that
for the NFL to grow, it has to court women, its fastest-growing fan demographic. No matter how you measure it, female viewership has grown much faster than male viewership in the past several years. Conventional wisdom suggests that every man who could be a football fan already is. The NFL has squeezed everything it can from that segment of the population. There’s still potential to convert more women into full-time fans, and that’s where the league’s revenue growth must come from. (Chemi 2014)33
Major sports leagues have, albeit with some missteps, begun to recognize that women make up an important part of their audience demographic and are starting to attend to them.34 Reports place women as at least 30 percent of regular season audiences, and a 2015 Gallup poll showed 51 percent of women identifying as sports fans (Dosh 2016; Jones 2015). They are also engaging their fandom via fantasy sports and social media—both signals of what marketers call the coveted “engagement” metric.35
Beyond current attention to women in traditional sports, I would argue that there are other important financial angles that must be factored into how we understand audience value. Though they continue to struggle to attain wage parity, women do control a significant share of household spending and are a key economic actor. At a moment when young people in the United States are increasingly overburdened with student loan debt, and under- and unemployment across both genders continues to be a persistent issue, companies should tread carefully on writing off entire market segments.36 In fact even when employed, men earn a lower median income than in the past (Thompson 2015).37 When you look at the economic landscape now versus fifty years ago, it is clear that the old models that imagine high-earning white men as key consumers are woefully out of tune with current realities. Advertising models appear to be seriously behind actual practices, engagements, and, frankly, economics.
Rather than rely on outdated notions of an advertising industry behind the curve, I’d assert that developing the audience of women for esports is much easier than it was for bringing them into soccer or any other number of traditional sports where the very notion of physical engagement had to be evangelized. In the case of gaming, we have women already playing all kinds of titles and integrating it into their everyday leisure practices at growing rates. It’s also the case that we now have decades of solid data to show how they are engaged players, and importantly, work that demonstrates that things often attributed to gender are actually about being new to gaming or a genre (Yee 2008). Women are also attendees at ComicCon, AnimeFest, PAX, and any number of fan gatherings, thus revealing their interest in participating in live events.
There has also been the evolution of a new generation of women for whom owning a laptop or PC that they game on, Nintendo DS, game console, or even iPad they use for games is simply normal. Devices themselves can be gendered, and as gaming technologies have become embedded in everyday gadgets, the possibility that women and girls take it up becomes all that much easier. Gendered leisure choices are not primarily driven by a deep essential psychological or biological orientation; there is a complex constellation of sociological and structural factors at work. As these shift, internal ideas about what might feel legitimate for a person to enjoy, what is reasonable for “someone like them” to do, also evolves.38
Finally, and crucially for esports, women and girls now have a history of engaging in sports and identifying as athletes, and have come to thrive in competitive spaces. Old-fashioned notions that women don’t like competition (direct or otherwise), shy away from tough physical and mental challenges, and don’t want to push themselves to be the best, to be a champion, simply no longer hold up. We now not only have the amazing history of groundbreakers like Billie Jean King or Switzer but several generations of women who have come after them as well, inspired by their accomplishments and pushing women’s sports more. Athletes like Serena Williams, Abby Wambach, and even the young Mo’ne Davis are powerful figures. Alongside them all, we have the tremendous growth of women who are fans and spectators of sports of all kinds. It is not just that women and girls are playing but they also enjoy watching.
These are critical factors for esports and audience construction because they are about how forms of leisure come to be accepted as a part of gender identities, preferences, and possibilities that weren’t before. It is stunning that an industry so willing to push the frontier with new ideas about what might count as sport would rely on outdated models of gender. Perhaps what is most ironic about esports’ continued unwillingness to question its own assumptions about gender, audience, and participation is that traditional sports, a waypoint that it constantly uses, itself had to start wrangling with exactly these issues decades ago. Traditional sports—in part driven by a crisis in audience growth—has begun to face up to the reality that women are an important part of their space. Sometimes this is as players, but even more often it is as spectators. While some of us continue to press for interventions in esports and gender because we are motivated by the data we see along with the ethics of access to play, I continue to strongly encourage those stakeholders who may not feel a principled pull to recognize that the data are also in service of market expansion.
Growth, Competition, and Consolidation
The developments I’ve described in this chapter should signal that while companies, organizations, and players have greatly harnessed the potential presented by live streaming, significant challenges remain. Although the next chapter will focus on some of the regulatory issues arising within live streaming, in the remainder of this one I will take a closer look at how competition, licensing, and oversaturation are shaping the esports broadcasting space.
INTERINDUSTRY COMPETITION
In my conversations with producers over the years, I have often asked them at some point what worries them the most. One, hitting on something that I heard repeatedly, put it quite simply: “Competition in the space keeps me up at night. Trying to forward our company and make it a viable business keeps me up at night.” While enthusiasts and third-party companies native to the scene, and often operating without outside influence, dominated esports broadcasting in the earlier years, they now face serious competition on a variety of fronts.
One of the most significant changes in the industry over the last several years has been the profound shift in developer interest and engagement in the space. The history of esports has been one in which the actual game developers (with a few exceptions like Blizzard) pretty much took a hands-off approach. With the advent of live streaming, a scene that was previously rooted in deep fan communities became accessible much more broadly, and as it began to garner larger and larger audiences, game developers in turn started to embrace esports. This has meant not only thinking about designing titles with suitable “esports elements” into their game but also seeing tournaments and broadcast opportunities of interest. Companies like Riot and its League of Legends title epitomize the absorption of previously third-party esports business activities—from tournament organization to media production—into a development studio. Riot runs its own worldwide league for its game, and handles event and media production in-house, utilizing crews with experience in traditional sports as well as gaming. Activision Blizzard, though it has a long history of working with third-party esports companies for its competitive gaming, purchased MLG in a move to own part of the vertical.
Such developments do not go unnoticed within esports broadcasting. As one producer put it to me, the vulnerability of the middle layer of the industry gets accentuated as game developers and publishers start saying, “Hey, we can do this in-house. We don’t have to hire you.” This extends to not only backstage production labor but also onstage talent that may have been nurtured outside a developer-driven system. A Los Angeles Times article on ESL briefly touched on this shift, writing,
Industry experts fear that game makers could cripple ESL by bringing eSports [sic] projects in-house. ESL’s hedge is dedicating 15 employees to developing fan bases for smaller, newer games. Executives also argue that publishers—or new entrants—would need a long time to match ESL’s skills and efficiencies. ESL also is busy branching into related businesses. It’s looking to spearhead drug testing, betting regulations, stat-keeping and other industrywide standards. (Dave 2016)
While these are certainly savvy moves, and ESL being purchased by the large media outlet MTG helps anchor it in a broader media ecology, as esports has become more interesting to developers and publishers, it is unsurprising that they would make moves to own that part of the industry when possible.
And while esports has certainly grown over the last few years, it is still an industry in which companies are competing for clients. While some of the biggest developers have turned toward in-house management of their scenes or to using traditional media production companies, developers and other organizations that want to run tournaments or leverage the enthusiasm for esports will still look to specialized third-party esports companies. Those companies then themselves rely on broadcasting platforms to provide distribution. But what happens when a distributor starts to make moves into the event and production space?
This is exactly what has occurred as Twitch has begun to build out its own esports team, which ends up at times competing with organizations like ESL.39 Although tending to remain behind the scenes, this has been one of the most important industry collisions in this early period of live streaming growth. In the same way that third-party organizers have had to sort out where they could viably sit in the esports industry, platforms such as Twitch are constantly on the watch for emerging business opportunities beyond merely being a distribution platform. It holds a special, and in fact powerful, position in owning both the broadcast mechanism and possibilities for content production. While this is not unusual in traditional media spaces, it is unique within gaming. Though Twitch continues to primarily be a platform for broadcasting, it has extended its business into other domains, resulting in some skirmishes and tensions.
While companies such as ESL have a long history of being a key organization in producing esports content, it does not itself own a broadcast platform (though Modern Times Group [MTG], a big media company in Sweden that purchased a majority stake in it in 2015, does). This has meant that it has sought and indeed needed to maintain a good working relationship with Twitch as a core broadcast provider. It regularly partners with Twitch for events, but has also had to navigate competing via RFP bids and sales.40
Other companies, like MLG or the now-defunct broadcasting platform Azubu, faced their own unique challenges with the rise of Twitch. Each went head-to-head with it, trying to consolidate esports broadcasts on their respective platforms. Through exclusivity deals (sometimes with streamers, other times with teams and leagues) and attempting to provide better revenue sharing, both platforms tried to position themselves as the unique place for competitive gaming. For a brief moment it looked like, perhaps, there might be real broadcasting competition.
But constant issues around quality and audience sizes have plagued these attempts. Indeed, professional gamer and streamer Matthew “NaDeSHoT” Haag, who made the jump from Twitch to MLG’s broadcasting service in 2013 (and encouraged many other of his fellow Call of Duty players to do so), reflected on the toll that this move took a year after saying, “Honestly, my biggest regret is leaving Twitch TV to go stream for another platform” (quoted in Hernandez 2015). He went on to note in a question-and-answer video how he saw the platform move as causing a serious disruption in the growth of the Call of Duty scene. The viewers, he observed, simply didn’t follow.
I saw this dynamic play out firsthand one night in 2014 while watching another popular Call of Duty streamer, deathlyiam, broadcast his final night on Twitch. He, like many others, was moving to MLG. It wasn’t an entirely voluntary move. He’d been caught between Twitch and MLG vying to own the esports broadcasting space for partnered streamers who would pull in big audience numbers, and was forced to choose between the platforms. Partnership contracts often contain exclusivity clauses, and Twitch was enforcing its version. As deathlyiam’s bot explained in chat to viewers, “As of Monday I will no longer be partnered on Twitch due to a conflicting partnership on MLG. Since I livestream full-time, in order to compensate for the lack of revenue, I will solely be streaming on MLG. http://www.mlg.tv/deathlyiam.” As a timer counted down and with nearly a thousand people watching, he got emotional, talking about his community along with his time on Twitch. With three minutes to go in his final Twitch broadcast, he went offscreen, put on a music video, and typed to his viewers, “I honestly love the shit out of you guys. Being forced to choose fucking sucked. I’ve never been happier of what I’ve accomplished.” MLG.tv turned out to not be the “Twitch killer” some thought it might, and deathlyiam and NaDeSHoT as well as many others ended up back on the service. The platform remained committed to enforcing its exclusivity deals.
When Google launched its own competing site for live streaming in 2015, YouTube Gaming, a new wave of articles began discussing these clauses in contracts. Though it didn’t start as a strong competitor, YouTube’s dominance in hosting recording game video, and being the platform that innovated alternative modes of production and distribution, continues to make it a site with real potential to give Twitch a run for its money if it improves functionality and can get buy-in from creators who will help shape it. It has, like Facebook, brought on a former professional esports player, Ryan “Fwiz” Wyatt (who also did stints at MLG and Machinima), to serve as global head of gaming for the site.
Amid these forms of competition, I have been surprised by the frequency with which I heard professionals identify the ongoing work of amateurs and grassroots organizations as also posing a real risk. One side of this is tied to the number of people who really want to work in esports and will do so cheaply to get a foot in the door. As one producer told me, “There’s always going to be a guy who could say, ‘Hey, just fly me out to your event. I’ll do it for free.’” This move has become as viable as it has given how accessible and affordable live stream platforms now are.
Professionals in the industry regularly reflected on how they are working to distinguish what they do from any amateur who sets up a camera and streams an event. Given a big part of what drives live streaming is its accessibility, there is an interesting tension at work between the draw of large spectacle events and everyday “bedroom” broadcasts that still pull in huge audiences. One producer described it this way:
So for all the guys like the real big dogs on the playing field like MLG and DreamHack and ESL, we obviously distinguish ourselves through our production value. But our actual, the value proposition that we offer to your average esports fan is not hugely different. This is sort of a problem I’ve been discussing for a while; fundamentally we are all offering the same product. Say 80 percent of our show is in game. So OK, yeah, we have a different set of graphics. A kid at home who’s very talented in Photoshop can make a great set of graphics. So for the live streamers, you can suddenly become Kripp or one of these guys from your bedroom, and pull in bigger numbers than something that might have cost a hundred thousand dollars in investment.
Esports companies work hard to prove their value to developers. As one producer put it, “Our product offering is not just we’re going to showcase your event, but it’s producing your event, you get high-quality production. So we learn to differentiate ourselves against the guy who will undercut us.” Now, however, they are vulnerable because the lowered costs of broadcasting have allowed new competitors into the market—ones that, desperate to be a part what they see as an exciting esports industry, can now pitch at lower rates. As the above person noted, while 80 percent of an esports broadcast might be in game, it is critical for the more established companies to boost the remaining 20 percent if they are to survive.
TRADITIONAL AND SOCIAL MEDIA COMPETITION
One of the most interesting turns in esports and live streaming has been the way that both traditional media companies and non-game-focused platform developers have also entered the space. In July 2015, news officially broke that MTG had purchased a majority stake (74 percent for €78 million) in Turtle Entertainment GmbH, the holding company for ESL and its international subsidiaries. Though rumored since May, in a scene where speculation often travels across back-channeled Skype conversations, Slack and Discord channels, and specialist websites, the announcement still came as resounding news, and was covered and discussed widely within the community as well as in some mainstream media like Forbes.
Many of those who’d never heard of MTG before probably had some familiarity, at least among Europeans, with its media properties such as the extensive Viasat line of cable channels, TV3 network, or one of its radio stations. While MTG had a bit of experience in the esports world through its Viagame channel (which provided online esports content) and tournaments like the Viagame House Cup, most of the coverage specifically called out the importance of a traditional media company finally investing seriously in competitive gaming. As Leslie (2015a) described it in a news article, “Make no mistake, this is a huge deal for esports. It’s one of the first times a traditional media organisation [sic] has made a major investment in esports. With MTG’s experience and investment combining with ESL’s reach and influence within the industry, this could be a very powerful partnership indeed.”
Simultaneously, articles—in an almost-reassuring tone—mentioned that the founders and team that had built ESL would not be going anywhere, that this was an investment and not simply a takeover. Most pieces had substantial quotes from Ralf Reichert, CEO and founder, who tended to frame the deal in terms of the amplification and distribution that esports would get via MTG’s extensive infrastructure. Despite my hearing over and over again in the field how people’s attention was shifting from television, Turtle’s press release underscored that partnering with a media company that owns television stations “allows us to reach an even wider audience and explore new opportunities. We will continue to work with our longstanding and awesome online partners but can now also explore avenues and channels which were previously difficult to get into” (quoted in Schiefer 2015).
MTG’s interest in esports did not stop with its majority purchase of Turtle. In November 2015, it was announced (again after rumors) that MTG had purchased 100 percent of DreamHack (for SEK 244 million). Begun in 1994 as a hobbyist LAN party in Sweden, the event had since grown into a mega experience dubbed the “world’s largest computer festival” and boasted a growing collection of esports tournaments.41 No longer just tied to Sweden, DreamHack had started taking its show on the road and, combined with live streaming, had become an international media property. In contrast with the excitement that I sensed in conversation and coverage of the ESL purchase, the DreamHack sale seemed to tip the scales for many. It is one thing when an esports company gets recognized by a big-time media player and receives financial backing, but to many it is another thing entirely when that conglomerate buys up two major esports companies.
While MTG was purchasing esports organizations, other traditional entertainment companies like the William Morris Endeavor–International Management Group (WME/WME-IMG) worked on esports from alternate angles: player talent and media initiatives.42 In January 2015, WME-IMG acquired Global eSports Management (cofounded in 2013 by Tobias Sherman and Min-Sik Ko), which represented players like Carlos “ocelote” Rodriguez and other talent such as commentator Mykles. Unlike the ESL and DreamHack sales, which the esports press primarily reported, Global eSports Management’s acquisition extended to major entertainment industry news outlets like Variety and the Hollywood Reporter.
Although early reports framed the purchase in general terms (situating esports as a growing sector of entertainment), it was in September of that year that the big payoff news hit. It was announced that WME-IMG would be partnering with Turner Broadcasting to form a new series, ELEAGUE, which would be shown on TBS, a cable and satellite channel touted as reaching ninety million US homes (Spangler 2015). A Variety article noted that “the parties cut a deal with game publisher Valve to feature its ‘Counter-Strike: Global Offensive’” (CSGO) game, and Valve hired Christina Alejandre, who had previously worked not only at Viacom but also within the game and esports industry, to be its vice president and general manager. Interestingly, Lenny Daniels, president of Turner Sports, was reported to have said of the possibility of partnering with an existing league that “‘it just didn’t make any sense’ given the resources of each [Turner and WME/IMG] company” (quoted in ibid.).
Like many, I was curious to see how the first big sustained televised esports program since the failed CGS would fare.43 While there have been some criticisms within the esports community along the way, the program has overall generated a lot of positive responses. I had noticed over the course of the first season that one longtime esports organizer was publicly praising the efforts. This surprised me a bit given how in other instances, they’d been fairly sharp in their judgment that being on television was not a goal for the industry anymore. I wondered how they reconciled this and reached out to them to follow up. They replied,
My praise of ELEAGUE is genuine, for it really does make a good product out of the league, but the only thing that would make me excited over the prospect of [our tournament] on television is the money we would get from the broadcast rights that we could use to improve [the tournament]. Think of it this way. TBS has most of the content on Twitch, not on its [cable] channel. If it so happens that a random person loves the content on TBS, they will migrate to Twitch. And stay there. ELEAGUE is currently a tool to force some millennials to watch a Friday night broadcast on TV, but at the same time it’s a tool to funnel a TV audience onto Twitch. There’s one clear winner here. It’s not TBS.
This was a fascinating way of thinking about the relationship between traditional cable TV and live streaming. Indeed at the ELEAGUE CSGO Major held in Boston in 2018, the online stream of the tournament broke records by boasting of over one million concurrent viewers during the final match while going unbroadcast on TBS. Whether or not this analysis bears out in the long term, it does present a more complex model for how television might work—as a path of entry into online content. This is a decisive upturning of how media flows have been generally conceived of thus far.
Not only traditional media were starting to get into the esports broadcasting game; so were social media platforms. In May 2016, Activision Blizzard (which had acquired the majority of MLG’s assets for a reported $46 million in January of that year) and Facebook announced that they would begin live broadcasting esports tournaments on the site. Starting with a Call of Duty and Dota 2 event at the X-Games Austin, and expanded into other titles, this has become an interesting example of a social media platform getting in on the growth of game broadcasting.
Notable to this venture have been people hired along the way on both the Activision Blizzard and Facebook sides. In October 2015, Steve Bornstein, who had previously been president of ABC as well as CEO of both ESPN and the NFL Network, was hired to head up Activision Blizzard’s new esports division. The same piece that reported this noted that Mike Sepso, cofounder and vice president for MLG, was also hired for the team.44 And just a month after the Activision Blizzard / Facebook announcement, it was reported that Facebook was hiring former League of Legends professional gamer Stephen “Snoopeh” Ellis as a strategic partnerships manager.
Untangling which property was driving the partnership is tricky. Facebook pitching itself as a place where game developers should want to be (and in turn making the platform even more valuable in users’ lives) is one important angle. As one article observed, “Using the massive reach of its social network, Facebook and Ellis could lure in more game studios to build integrations with Live that give Facebook content while promoting the studio’s titles. When people watch an esports star playing a game, they want to buy it. Combined with the platform’s biographical data, it could be a powerful place for game companies to advertise” (Constine 2016b). On the flip side, game developers have become keenly aware in the last few years of the economic power of esports fandom. Bornstein, reflecting on the thirteen billion hours that players dedicated to Blizzard games in 2014, commented that it “dwarfs the engagement that fans spend on all other sports,” and added, “I believe eSports [sic] will rival the biggest traditional sports leagues in terms of future opportunities, and between advertising, ticket sales, licensing, sponsorships and merchandising, there are tremendous growth areas for this nascent industry” (quoted Spangler 2015).
Of course, bringing live streaming to Facebook is not just a simple matter of opening a video pipeline. As I’ve discussed throughout this book, thus far there has been much more to successful live stream productions than merely broadcasting game footage. One article captured this by writing, “Facebook will have to play catchup to Twitch, which has spent years honing its player-picture-in-game-footage-picture video streaming and its live chat. The dedicated interface, ad and subscription monetization options for video creators, and thriving community of gamers will be tough to match” (Constine 2016a). Esports viewers, having grown used to consuming content through Twitch, are coming to the experience with a set of expectations that any competitor platform will have to navigate and address.
Outside the esports domain, Facebook has had several powerful moments of live streaming, particularly around police abuse, thereby bumping the functionality into public consciousness. The reach of the platform is huge, and, as we’ve seen, it can provide powerful opportunities for video distribution. Whether it can be flexible enough to accommodate established tastes in the medium remains a crucial issue. Perhaps just as important to consider when thinking about Facebook entering into live streaming might be that the conventions we’ve seen arise on Twitch are, in fact, the anomalous moment—one tied to a history of a new, fairly open platform and a genre that had not yet stabilized. Aesthetics, forms of interaction, and other components are deeply linked to the architecture of a service, and whether or not they drive that choice, or will be driven by it, is yet to be seen. While the kind of innovation and experimentation that Twitch does such a good job supporting is critical to variety streaming, if esports goes more the way of traditional sports broadcasting, Facebook’s ability to offer a pretty simple pipeline out to millions of users may be all that is really needed to upset the distribution balance.
Deeply interwoven into the rising competition issue is the role that licensing and rights are coming to play in the broadcast space. The earliest days of televised sports are again instructive here. While Arledge is regularly heralded for innovating production, less often remarked on is how central his ability to secure the right to broadcast was for modern sports. In this regard, he was, while highly respected, not especially beloved:
The TV production of sports is a two-sided enterprise: physical production and the acquisition of rights. Arledge’s gaudy genius for the former has been lavishly attested to by virtually everyone in the medium (his awards include 17 Emmys and the grand prize at the Cannes Film Festival), but his colleagues are somewhat less generous in their assessment of his performance at the conference table. “When it comes to acquiring rights” says a top executive at one of the other networks, “the man is totally unscrupulous. A jackal. He’d rip my heart out for a shot at the world series.” A former associate claims that “beneath his Howdy Doody face lurks one of the most ruthless, opportunistic guys in the business.” Arledge answers such criticism blandly. “If you don’t have the rights, you can’t do the show.” (quoted in “Playboy Interview” 1976, 64)
Whereas Arledge had to negotiate with entities like the NFL, esports companies face game developers. Despite interesting skirmishes over the issue (which I’ll discuss further in chapter 5), the game as an intellectual property remains the deciding rubric for understanding who controls the rights, licensing, and, increasingly, franchising around it.
As we move into a much more institutionalized form of esports media broadcasting, the fight over rights and exclusivity is growing. Whereas in the past game developers often just let people put on tournaments and distribute media for free or low cost, they have increasingly come to see their games as an asset to be leveraged, bargained with, and sold. This is not all that great a leap given how vigorously companies have long sought to protect their games as intellectual property, but it does represent a new node of ownership claims. And as game developers come to see their games as tied to broadcasting models as well as recognize the ways that leagues and teams can be deployed to build audiences through those broadcasts, their reach of ownership and governance has extended. As esports journalist Leonard Langenscheidt (2017) writes, “Publishers do profit from a stable scene and well-branded teams, as popular teams ultimately draw more fans and create rich storylines of rivalries and upsets. In light of this, publishers are understanding the value of franchised leagues and tournaments with regulated revenue splits and an established group of team owners.” These are increasingly deeply connected to media broadcast.
Both Riot and Blizzard have been some of the most active in formally developing a model that interweaves media and league structures. From Blizzard offering franchise opportunities for Overwatch (with a rumored minimum price tag of $20 million per team) or Riot’s close management of team ownership with its top-end Champions League, developers are increasingly coming to see the ways that these structures and media broadcast are tied together as well as worth attention and, increasingly, regulation. This has meant that both independent leagues and teams are facing entirely new terrain where domains that they were previously able to exist in without much developer input have become a business with increasing regulation and costs.45
Some team owners have been especially vocal about feeling caught in economic systems in which they are incurring the cost and facing the real risk while not financially benefiting equitably. In 2016, news broke that eighteen teams—including prominent ones such as Cloud9, Dignitas, CLG, Team Liquid, SoloMid, and Fnatic—had sent a joint letter to Riot detailing a number of concerns about the league that included both regulatory and economic issues (Nairn 2016). Financial matters dominated the leaked draft letter, and revenue sharing across a number of domains, from merchandise to digital items, was of key concern. Given the ways that promotional activities are deeply tied to audiences and visibility, the media context around esports is certainly at work implicitly in these sales. The handling of sponsorship and media revenue sharing was pushed off with both Riot and the owners agreeing that the issue wouldn’t be pressed again until 2018.
This is perhaps a mistake given how fast media rights are being structured and staked out in esports, and how much they are getting valued at. Setting up a league or owning a team is no longer simply about competitive gaming but instead about creating a media product. A number of traditional sports teams and owners, including the Philadelphia 76ers, Manchester United, and Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots, have expressed a newfound interest in esports. It will be intriguing to see if those coming from traditional sports bring with them some of the models and negotiation tactics we see there.
Of course, amid all these companies wrangling in the space are players who currently sit at the bottom of an increasingly industrialized model. While a handful of individual pros may fare well and gain some long-term stability, their precariousness is often not discussed publicly, and yet it is quite acute. Their churn rate combined with a general lack of legal representation along with, frequently, the desire to play at any cost sets players up to be on the lowest rung of the ladder in the future esports media economy. Player contracts increasingly detail requirements for broadcasting and indeed require signing over their rights to publicity. Few players, aside from those at the top of the “food chain” with negotiating power and/or excellent legal representation, are meaningfully given a stake in media rights and revenue.
OVERSATURATION GAME CHURN
Amid tremendous growth there remain persistent concerns by insiders about overly crowded tournament schedules causing even more broadcast competition. The ultimate life span of any game is also something that gets mulled over. While it appears that most fans have genre/title preferences, there nonetheless remains the potential for big scheduling problems. Imagine the NBA Finals and Super Bowl taking place on the same day; even if it may not be the exact same audience, the advertising collision alone would be impressive. We’ve yet to have that happen within esports, but as one producer cautioned, it’s a real possibility:
But also remember that, you know, it’s not just League of Legends, it’s also StarCraft, it’s also games like Call of Duty. And at which point it’s going to be a major clash like OK, we got both of these leagues doing an event the same weekend and it’s going to boil down to a lot of factors, you know, prize money, loyalty. If it’s a team sponsorship, they may send all their players to specifically one despite what their players think. But I think for now, the leagues, even like small tournaments, like small local tournaments and stuff, everyone’s being very careful to try and not interfere.
While most organizers attempt to be watchful of these potential scheduling collisions, as the competition for audiences grows and more titles expand into offering formal tournaments, it will become more and more difficult.
Beyond scheduling are the ways that games are always at risk of losing player’s interest. While some titles have had tremendous staying power, questions about their longevity and what new offering might come on the scene to sweep everyone’s attention are always present. As one person put it, “The games could get stale. Nobody would want to watch [them] anymore.” The current esports field offers a range of ways it can shake out. CounterStrike is a great example of a game that has supported nearly two decades of play. First released in 1999, it has undergone various iterations over the years and remains a popular competitive title. League of Legends, by contrast, quickly rose over a handful of years to become a prime illustration of a new title coming onto esports and taking it by storm. And StarCraft, a game that was a foundational esports title for many years, has faded substantially. The success of an esports game is deeply tied not only to its intrinsic properties with regard to skill and expertise thresholds but to the larger audience of players it thrives in. As gamers’ tastes ebb and flow, so to do the fates of titles. And in a world filled with live streaming, this also quickly becomes a media broadcast issue. While there is a circuit that flows back and forth from everyday gaming to esports fandom, it is a fragile one. For companies, whether they are esports or traditional media, to invest millions of dollars in a broadcast future for any single game is a bold gambit.