What're your thoughts on this potentially hot topic?
As an avid competitive (and quite frankly awesome) gamer, I feel that it's time for professional gaming news to make an appearance in conventional mags. eSports, as its called, has shown steady and promising growth since the formation of organizations like CPL, CEVO, MLG, WCG and the CGS (despite its demise in late 2008) becoming ever more popular with gamers across the globe, or rather the Northern Hemisphere.
Many websites have been set up over time such as Cadred, Gotfrag and each organizations own site for the gamers to tend to their eSport needs. Now, this is perfectly fine for the people who want to catch up on which teams dropped who and who won this, but what about casual gamers or achievement *****s? Most magazine buyers disregard the concept of competitive gaming as their first thoughts on the subject are either "oh god, what a loser" or "you're ruining gaming" etc. Of course, there are an elite few who manage to spend time attending MLG events whilst still catching up on the latest release dates and reviews, but there aren't enough.
We know that Korea is thriving off of eSports (Starcraft, what they see in that...) as they dedicate TV channels to airing leagues and tournaments, and the players themselves earn a pretty healthy amount of money playing games. If anyone can tell me why its so robust over there, please fill me in.
This is what brings me to eSport news being featured in gaming mags -- whats the harm in doing so? If anywhere other than Korea could get such an enormous gaming fanbase, how would they go about it? Right now, MLG has coverage on ESPN and the CGS had coverage on Sky. These have both provided steady communities, but why not go for more? Magazines appeal to a wider and bigger audience and if gaming news ever did get published, who would read it? Would you? Would you prefer dedicated magazines for eSports?
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Seriously, though, I think it is still not popularized in the US because Counter-Strike or Halo would be boring to watch if you don't already play it. Since I'm not familiar with Starcraft I can't really understand why anyone would watch people playing Video Games on TV.
even at the arcades you would have to watch other people play before your turn but you interacted with them before, during and after.
go outside or play the game yourself. watching people game on tv is about the most boring thing aside from watching people on tv play poker, i think that's pathetic and you don't learn a thing from it.
To those saying that spectating games isn't interesting I'd watch a few matches of starcraft or some of the other top quality spectator games/moments.
Watching "EVO 2004, moment #37" of Street Fighter, "Boxer's perfect SCV Rush", or some 'grandmasters' at rhythm/shumps/tetris games (not guitar hero) easily shows the potential of the medium.
FPS games don't lend themselves well to spectating in my opinion though. They are difficult to capture all of the action. If you have the camera setup as a 3rd person view it's difficult to properly stay focused on the action. Switch to first person to follow a player and the player's actions will confuse viewers as they don't get a steady view and instead a very limited and sometimes confusing view (for example if you were to watch someone in first person rocket jump you might not know what's going on).