I can see from my analytics that the video is being picked up by the algorithm a bit. Hello to all the new people! I'm working on the script for my next video right now (taking a bit to come together, but its getting there).
lmao I was about to write up a comment about how the video was good, but the title was complete garbage because the title had basically nothing to do with the actual content, but then I got to the very end. I'd still say that the title isn't great, but it certainly works as clickbait, so fair play to you for that. Still a good and thought-provoking video essay nonetheless.
Glad it did, you earned a sub from me for such a balanced and well done video essay. I kept a close eye on your smash evaluation and you nailed the "imbalanced mechanics" issue with smash 4 perfectly. You definitely know your stuff and made informed arguments. It's pretty refreshing compared to videos that clearly are made to pull views and generate discourse for engagement. (I'm not bothered by clickbaity titles, the content is what matters) I'll be looking forward to your next vid!
@@DseanSupreme The clickbait titles/thumbnails are just there to get people to watch the video/help algorithm, i always make sure to make the content more nuanced and interesting that just a simple "this game bad". Also Smash 4 was pretty much my intro into the FGC/competitive games in general, so I remember it quite well and even have a bit of a soft spot for it, although I know it wasn't a very good game and there's a reason why it died (not just ultimates release). I knew Smash 4 was perfect to bring up in this video when I literally picked a random moment in the first smash 4 set I looked up and saw someone run up spam sheild and then try to grab LOL.
ngl, companies need to stop making their games "competitive" and make a mechanically sound and fun game in the first place, the community will get competitive on its own anyway
Thats largely due to the community. A lot of players work full time behind the scenes to make the events happen. Many events are also now crowd funded, too.
@@wdililn I don't see anyone saying it never had any in this thread. My reference to the balance isn't that it never was patched, just the state of balance it reached (though in large part by map design as well), and has had for most of its lifetime.
Thank god I wasn’t the only one who thought this, anyone who was inside the overwatch esports community during the transition would easily disagree with this guy’s point on it. While I wholeheartedly agree on the stun problem, to say the looming “2 tank meta” is a game killer, when it was clear both rein+Zarya and winston+dva were beloved 2 tank combos, in addition to so many other tank combos that were fun to watch. No one had a problem with two tanks, EVER. People were scared of the problem of two *shield* tanks Edit: also the too much on screen is a 100% agrre for outsiders, and I’m not sure how it could’ve been fixed. But at the same time I think league of legends suffered from this same issue and they’ve done very well, but there’s always outliners
Too right! Well said it's the competitors translation of the "field" that IS the play. Not some perfect reaction times and predictable patterns. Good point.
I still find it fascinating that, with most fighting games, the beloved eSports scene was just like a byproduct of people loving the game. I think companies are failing to see that you can't just pump millions of dollars into 'competitive' eSports and watch it grow. the game has to be good first, and somewhat competitive by nature. Halo 5 and how they tried to push eSports with that game is like a perfect case study.
@@lyutsy888 im sure it'll be the new standard of what the general public will think of fighting games, given riots such huge presence between valorant and LoL. whatever project L ends up being, outsiders are gonna think that all fighting games are like that.
@@LizaPlz i have high hopes for project l as it will atleast let the new players not have to face all the fighting games bullshit that you have to go through to get into the genre. If veterans dont like it they will just play whatever they have always played
@@LizaPlz paying 60$ for a game and 100$ for dlc on a game they might not even like that has shitty netcode and like only 20 people online who are way better than you. And only singleplayer modes are training and generic arcade mode
My personal opinion is that ESports has bred generations of clip hungry, stat addicted, no personality players who only use that the “pros” or influencers use, nobody does their own thing anymore, like you said in the beginning, the announcers try to keep the lights on but nobody’s home, nobody but the top tiers
Personally, I don't mind this particular aspect. It's made the average player's strategy extremely predictable and gives me easy wins. It's hilarious to stomp people into the ground as their brains short circuit because you're not playing "the meta." My bigger issue is the "competitive balancing" bullcrap games do these days. They'll absolutely crunch the skill ceiling into the skill floor as hard as they can, noobifying the whole experience and say "look how balanced it is now, no one can do any better than anyone else." That shit makes for a boring to play/watch experience like the video talks about.
@@ChromeDaimao I absolutely love stomping some metahead with a “trash” character/weapon and have their minds blown. Like in Brawlhalla, I absolutely love playing Dusk, nobody plays him and oh boy the amount of thumbs downs I get after beating a scythe player lmao.
It's really sad, honestly, it's getting incredibly difficult to spend time with friends in a casual F2P game like you could back in the day in Team Fortress 2 for example. I'm trying to enjoy some time after exam season with some colleagues in a free to play game (cause not all of us own the same games) so we hop on OW/League and are met with hyper competitive players running esports level strats and champs with insanely delicately picked comps and people dodging if you don't play the meta in champ select, all of that in NORMAL QUEUE, sometimes even blind pick! Not to mention all the flaming that happens after the game ends or during it, for seemingly no reason. Not like we care what the enemy team says but why are they taking a normal queue game so seriously? It makes me feel second hand embarrassment that they base their worth so much on whether they win a video game match in a non-ranked gamemode against 5 washed up casual gamers lol. It's insane how bad F2P games have gotten for casual players, even Team Fortress is suffering the same fate, can't join a normal game without 3-4 people in a premade just destroying everyone on the server with 2 pocket medics and soldier/demoman combos, at that point just go play Highlander or UGC, stop polluting casual play and leave the new and casual players alone, the game already has a userbase problem as it is. I don't see why I have to search for community servers where I can get a chance to relax when quickplay is right there in the main menu but it's so bad I'd rather play against bots. Back to Red Dead Redemption 2 for me I guess..
i was surprised when Blizzard announced their ambitious esports scene when Overwatch came out. I always thought that the competitive community of the game needed to grow and test out the game more during ranked seasons. Before that, making huge commercialized events out of the game was gonna be a huge gamble as the balancing issues and core gameplay problems started show. I personally feel it also affected the ranked experience negatively as people took the game too seriously.
I think Blizzard is putting all their money in esports in recent years because of the whole Warcraft3/DotA fiasco. Their executives saw that a game that was literally born out of one of their own games was profitting bazillions of money and none of that was theirs, so they thought that they could have it for themselves and have since made the devs focus pretty much all their manpower in esports. But they skipped the most crucial part that is mentioned in the video and you said it yourself: the fun and engaging gameplay backed up by an active community.
the overwatch esport was never fully realized until like a year into the game's lifespan. and when it eventually did, a big portion of the community already quit because the metagame was complete nonsense because they forced the "esports" element to it. early overwatch was one of the must fun experiences with a multiplayer game, and now even if OW2 is significantly better wouldn't match the overall experience I had back then
@@lloydpatam4189 I haven't seen this video, but I can believe that Jeff was telling truth from his perspective, however the higher-ups may not have shared the same idea as him and we got Overwatch league as we know it now regardless of what he wanted.
Ranked gets taken too seriously? Well it's ranked. You play for something. Casual mode? Mfers are more competitive in a casual mode than competitive, that's where my issue lie. You wanna try something whacky in a "casual" environment? Not allowed, you gotta play the strongest hero or else you're trolling. Wanna play for fun and see where it goes? Nope, not allowed, you only play to win, no matter what.
I always thought the biggest issues were trying to force casual and hardcore into the same servers. I remember when OW came out, and the hardcore gamers screamed at every little non-meta thing you did, while the casuals would borderline throw matches with their Hanzo picks, not caring at all about what the outcome of the match was. Putting them together is an explosive combination.
@@wombatgirl997 No, we found an older gamer that remembers when joining a specific server was a choice and you could view who you would be matching with before the game.
Absolutely. Separating the two is a necessity but they need to first be together to make a good experience. Not to mention the metas that happen that can absolutely be avoided with apt hero changes but the devs dont ever make enough changes at once to matter and eliminate metas, just change the metas.
Problem with esports that too many people think they are worth to be in it while being complete crap, or for that matter cheat and cry when they are busted.
Coming from a coach, best way to get into esports is start now no matter what game or rank you are, join low-tier teams/tournaments and get the improvement/team mindset over everything else
No cause I thought I kinda suck but I still joined an eSports team for Overwatch 2 for my school and then I get to actually play with my team and I realized I'm not actually that bad because Jesus Christ my team sucks😭 They're fairly good on their mains but our sponsor wants us to branch out and play other characters so we can counter better, and so far I'm the only one he hasn't gotten to💀
Yea the competitive scene ruined melee for me back in the day because you could not just have fun with it and it just became a tryhard fest. It was always final destination/battlefield no items 3 stock. It got so boring that all the players at the local table top game store only wanted to play like the competitive melee players instead of just playing for fun.
@@tmma1869 I do kind of get why studios prefer multiplayer, it's something that makes it easier to milk games for many more years than if they had to create all the content themselves, but some people just want to play on their own. I completely stopped paying attention to Quake after Quake 3 completely ditched the singleplayer campaign and similarly that dumb move by Blizzard to make Diablo 3 only multiplayer was even dumber. I mean seriously, I'd only been gaming for decades before that polish turd was released, it's not like I know whether or not I want to play online.
Yea hilarious i said "smash can have items turned on" and i got my head chopped off or cause i mentioned the "smash is a party game" and forever will be to i'm guessing some got a hate boner for that. But i miss games were fun back then, now their lame full of nothing that stands out to those who don't play games as games but a "career lane" which the TTV culture come in to play. Comp smash looks zero fun to me holy shit on top of the way too many grooming that just seems to never end and the cringe but funny controller spike videos lmao.
I treat it like this. I can show my grandfather a grand final match of street fighter and he can instantly recognize one person is getting his ass beat. I show him Overwatch and he has not a single clue of whats going on so he wants to turn to something else.
also people naturally get better at fighters out of time in the game. most other games its people using aim trainers and busted tactics in order to be better instead of just playing over time.
@@nathanjokeley4102 Calling overwatch league successful.. I am not sure if it was successful. Half of the roster left to Valorant for more fame and exposure (possibly more money in the future). Overwatch League players were traveling more than NBA players in United States... viewership has never been that good, every esport during a tournament should be topping the viewership. The failure to implement their league system of "regional base" esports.... i mean they had to limit how many koreans can be in each team... wahts the point of this when we call it Los Angeles w/e or New York w/e when the teams are all korean or half of them are. Complete utter failure to engage with the audience with the whole "team" system they were trying to emulate from Real Sports. They did a big shift on Overwatch league moving this to TH-cam which was a bad move at the time. Overwatch League is far from Success and everyone really knows that. Compare OW to even a new game like Valorant. Valorant has been soo successful not just for their esports but the GLOBAL economy for Valorant Content Creators that HEAVILY bleeds into the Esports Scene for Valorant... OW just didnt really have that due to Blizzard being god awful at taking care of their content creators and their pro gamers.
@@jeppong Pro sports teams recruit players that come from different cities or countries. That's what happens when you look for the best players. It just so happens Korea has a lot of very talented esports players, so yeah a lot of koreans. It's not like you can look at the NFL and say that the majority of the players on the Buffalo Bills are locals from northern New York and the surrounding region. Pro sports just don't work that way, esport or otherwise.
They should have just went wild and implement all the fun mechanics even if it’s imbalanced Sgt hammer’s siege mode is such a unique mechanic and there should be more of it
@@wombatgirl997 Games are in some way, art. And in those failed games, the developers lost their vision. They basically copied someone's art. No wonder the magic is lost if your attitude is like that. But in other art domains, you'd get inspiration from others, BUT you know you want to do something creative for yourself. You are your own intrinsically motivated person, because you want to make good art. Then comes the profit, the recognition. Do good work to get good praise, not the reverse.
Well, HoTS was Blizzard's desperate attempt to take even a share of what LOL and DOTA was earning a year. This is especially hilarious to me as a Warcraft 3 Dota fan.
One thing I hate about "esport" games is how the companies starts to balance the game around "esports". While esports can be very popular regarding to the game, the esport players are the definition of a vocal minority. 200 players can be the voices of the entire game and its balance when there's literal millions of players who will hate the changes because it ruins the fun of the game.
Kinda weird that the games that have listened to their casual audience died while games that cater to their pro players are usually successful and popular.
@@dudocainelol. Ive seen many games driving itself to its grave because they were trying too hard to be competitive. In their pursuit they drives out the casuals and the result is that they just leave. For example i left marvel snap because the devs keep changing cards, meta is so hard to catch on, the deck i like suddenly become weak af. Like i just wanna have fun man
@@Walterhartwellwhite07 Its saul goodman here i have a new gig for your return i signed up to navi i need a guy who can have good chemestry with me so i think your good with the job and if you on with this. well better call saul!
I will say as a soulcalibur 2 nut; it’s actually a very balanced game. You constantly see the worst character hold his ground against the best character in the game played by multiple different people. It’s roster is simply balanced around 1. The strong defensive universal mechanics allowing everyone to prevent a steam roll and to approach, 2. Damage isn’t that high on average meaning there’s no easy way to steamroll or rob and invalidate the other players work up to that point, and 3. (For the most part) having a move that would on paper be bs for them to have, but because everyone sans yun-seoung has a contender for the best move in the game you have to respect what everyone brings to the table. These three things combined means anyone can play the game unlike 12 in 3s or king in t4 who just don’t play the same game as even the mid tiers because of how deficient they are, and that every character can be viable because the game doesn’t allow anyone to get obsoleted by other characters or prevent them from competing with what makes a character meta.
I think that a major issue that most game companies miss these days is the fun factor. A lot of games these days focus so hard on being cutthroat competitive they forget that a game, at its core, must actually be fun to play.
At this point I basically don't play any multiplayer games unless they are strictly co op. And I refuse to play any live service games because they are designed to eat my time just to keep up, let alone get ahead.
@@dab88 True the addiction eventually eats up the source. The more people show all their money into one picular game the less money the other games have to make and there's a lot of people like me who straight up refuse to spend money on any kind of game aside from the initial purchase price. There are actually a lot of games that I refuse to play just because The Only way to enjoy them or keep up with other people is by spending Money. I eat to live, I don't live to eat.... Is substitute food for video games.
@@0potion I used to play so much multiplayer 10 years ago but nowadays I just can't be bothered anymore. they're always such a grind and even co-op games suffer from this.
The thing is, you exactly trade out fun for balance, and you can't make a competitive game fun without making it imbalanced for another side So competitive games are stuck between either being incredibly fun to play and foregoing most of balancing, or being the new "e-sport" and trying to be as balanced as possible to not make people too angry about losing Single player games don't have this issue, which is why I just stick to these, but it's kinda sad that a lot of MP games with great potential sucked bc of this factor..
I feel like these days a big problem is that some devs only want to make their game competitive they forget about the casual audience or at least the ones that aren’t at the top level
Bingo. Splitgate could've been so much more than what it was but only focused on its esports aspect and completely killed the majority of its community the moment it got one
I'm glad there are still fighting games like Mortal Kombat who cater to casuals. I was so pissed when Bamco completely removed single player content on Tekken. Don't even start with the Story because that was so ass.
As a person who's played competitive games for awhile. I'm so damn tired of people forcing games to be competitive. Just make a fun game please and let the players decide what they wanna do with it
Yeah for real I remember when knockout city came out me and my friends were super excited to play it but the game quickly got way to competitive and quickly became boring
They won't stop convincing players to have competitive scenes in their game, whether it from the game design perspective or marketing. Competitive scene has a shit load of business opportunity. Yes, it's always that one executive, investor or publisher that prevent us from having a good stuff.
Honestly thats a major reason why I dislike Halo Infinite, couldn't even get a lobby without like 20 sweats ready to ruin the experience. I want to play Halo, not get railed by the entire team for 20 minutes, I wish more games had tf2's mentality of being able to have an actual game or just make a game last like 3 hours because everyone is just messing around and having fun.
I've been saying this for a lot of time. Esports is something that, if you develop a game focused on it, you will alienate the vast majority of casual players. Dooming it from the beginning, because if only the best players find it fun, you'll find yourself without an audience.
Spot on about the community aspect. Look at speed running. No teams, no sponsors, no million dollar prize pools yet some of the most dedicated people I’ve ever seen and a whole chunk of them speedrun for charity in things like Games Done Quick too. These companies always want the short cut to the big payoffs but they don’t want to put in the work and players see through that and drop em like a rock.
At least speedrunning doesn't typically affect the rest of the playerbase. (Although there are exceptions like Kingdom of Loathing doing a bunch of unfun things to kill the one day speedruns that had become relatively common)
@@verycalmgamer4090 it could very much be a sport. Sports like swimming, running or javelin throw are all about extremely small changes to well developed techniques which are the results of countless amounts of practice. A speed runner replays the game a million times simply because it is their discipline. Beating the game is easier for them in the way that kicking a ball is easier for a football player.
I imagine there was no mention of DotA 2 because it is the paradox to everything stated here. -It is hard to understand, watch and high skill ceiling -It is unbalanced because if everything is broken then nothing is -The game itself has a modding community that allows you to play previous versions of the game with other people using the same servers - Community is passionate but toxic -More than a decade old
I'd say it's a pretty well balanced game in terms of the roster in a weird way. There's always a few highly contested picks each TI, but they all seem to fill a niche that makes them viable. Iirc there were less than 10 unpicked heroes in TI11 and even less in TI10.
Not to mention, the game received extraordinary 1st party support from Valve. I would say of any successful, modern esport, Dota 2 has received THE MOST intensive developer support out of any of them, simply because of the gargantuan task of transitioning Dota from its underpinnings as a WarCraft3 mod to the Source Engine, and then in turn transitioning the game from Source Engine to Source Engine 2. To say nothing of the entire uplifting of the Dota tournament infrastructure by standardizing larger prize pots with the inception of The International.
I think Melee is such a gem in the eSports world. It wasn't meant to be competitive and it only became super competitive because people basically broke the game through insanely well-timed moves and turned it into something completely different. The community shaped it into something competitive.
@@noakinnMy FGC knowledge is about a 1 out of 17 but aren't most fighting games designed with competition in mind? I thought that was a major reason why the genre struggles to bring in new and in comparison smash was made to be a casual party game players
Only for the smash players to consistently sabotage their own Esport. Usually when this happens, its the company fault but smash Esport is a special bred.
@@absqrbi wouldn't say it's because the games are made for competition in mind, in the way "esports" are, but more like the games are just fundamentally harder to pick up, alongside little to no fun and engaging tutorials which worsen this problem. But yeah, it is a good point. In my case, I've always viewed fgs as party games too, because of how my friend group played them in between classes (smash was one of thode games, too)
I can't help but cringe every time I see a game come out where it's so blatantly obvious that the game was created specifically to be an esport instead of just letting it be something that happens.
You forgot to mention toxicity. Guilty Gear Strive is a very hard game, but I never raged from losing at online fights with it. The fights are fast, and I always feel like I learned something new from it. The opposing player can break you to pieces and still be nice to you.
Interestingly enough strive is the only game I've ever played where people don't do that 1 and done shit. Sucks it doesn't have any real ping based matchmaking though
Reminds me of when some guy at 343 said Halo is a competitive shooter. Meanwhile fans always loved that it was a fun game to play with buddies. They saw the hype and money other shooters got from being an e-sport and decided the 20 year fan base wasn't important.
Halo was always a competetive shooter i mean it was the biggest game in the MLG days. its just doesnt need to be balanced like one and should be made for the peoplr who want to play it for fun
I disagree. Fans complained massively about the loadouts and random item pickups in halo 4 and 5 because they added RNG and made the game more casual. The majority of vocal halo fans always call for the games to be conservative (i.e. similar to when they started playing by not adding new features like sprint or ADS), and competitive by focusing more on gamemodes like ranked and swat that aren't easily approachable to casual fans.
I never played Halo "competitively", usually just custom games with friends. When Halo became more competitive, I stopped playing. Too tedious, frustrating, and monotonous.
"Nobody wants to play a platformer where running and jumping are slow" The NES Castlevanias would like a word. I played them for the first time last month, and they are now my second favorite 2d platformers.
I meant unbearably slow, Castlevania is built around it being slow (the whip attack is even slow so that you have to plan your movements and attacks). The difference is that if a 2d Mario game had Castlevania movement, then it would suck because the levels and enemies of Mario aren't designed around those mechanics.
I'd even argue that my favourite multiplayer shooter is slow - Steel Diver Sub Wars. It all comes down to how the game is designed around it and ironically, they would probably be a pretty readable eSport though Nintendo have their hands full with Splatoon which is on console at least. If I had to say one thing about it... You have to chat by typing in morse code.
@@thelastgogeta Why are you bringing that up? My favorite multiplayer shooter is probably Battlefield 1, Overwatch, Insurgency Sandstorm, or one of countless others.
my favorite esport example of all time has always been melee, but fan made inspirations of that game such as Prpject Plus and Rivals of aether been left into the wayside to other more modern takes of the genre... brawlhalla and smash ultimate being more popular in the esport showcase then these games ever will be.
To be fair, part of this can be attributed to those projects trying very hard to reflect the same competitive nature of melee, which does shorten the scope of people who would be interested. Previous melee fans who decide to give games a shot, but most who hear its "like melee" will either go "its like an old game? That doesnt sound good" (ignorance or the view that old games=less fun, which is annoyingly common) or "why not just play melee isntead"? I love Rivals of aether, but it took me time to get into it because it was simply too close to Melee. It took me time to see where it was different and worth investing over Melee to play it, and i lnow im far from the only one. I do agree with the idea that a game's core mechanics need to be solidly refined, but i think games made to be competitive, and that ignore a casual side, are doomed to fail. A good example of how being easy tp get into mechanically, hard to mast is important is Skullgirls. Its easy gor a newcomer to pick up, do the tutorial, and do the single player arcade and story, the combo trials, etc. But when you see its depth, you realize the game has a shit ton of small things going on, but you can mostly follow it. Its casual side can be easily embraced and uou can understand the vast majority of the game on surface level, but it has insane depth to dedicate to, such as what does each character taunt do? How many to train with for your rooster (you can make a team of 1, 2 or 3 characters, with smaller teams getting some stat boosts, but lacking the flexibility assists can bring.) And much more.
@@hellfrozenphoenix13 Your example of Skullgirls resonate with me. It is the first fighting game i've ever taken seriously, simply finding it from a random video and youtube and 15yo me saying "This game looks COOL" so i grabbed my pocket money for the month and bought the game. It was worth the 2 weeks of not buying snacks at school lmao. You can pick up the game, learn a bit about the controls, seeing every attack just seem to flow into a simple L-M-H combo for both punches and kicks and then decide which character you want to pick up. Finished all the story while piecing the lore together (I remember telling this one friend of mine who's interested in the game all the juicy details of the story while in cram school) and then trying to learn my favorite team combos (Peacock, Ms. Fortune, Robo Fortune) for hours while at home. The game allows for flexibility and i think it's the greatest point. You can go solo Parasoul and do some sick 1v3 setup or go for a Double, Cerebella and Beowulf for that hard hitter tag teams. Either pick-up and play characters you like with the universal L->M->H combos that works on almost everyone or spend hours labbing even the most intricate setups you can think of. It's one of those competitive fighting games that doesn't ignore their casual fanbase, and that's why the game and it's community is going strong even now.
wait so do you like melee? also i dont think that comparing them to smash ultimate is a great comparison for the reason that Project + and Rivals of Aether were made with significantly less money and people. project + and rivals were def created to be competitively viable games but personally i think they are more about trying to recreate the innovative gameplay of melee that a slightly more niche audience of people really enjoy rather than purely "trying to be competitive." thats not even getting into the fact the Nintendo has actively been killing project + for years and how modern takes of the genre are much easier to get into and dont require the same amount of dedication to feel like you know how to play.
@@cyrus4285 uhh if ima be honest, I've only followed melee, a game that was almost completely made by its community. The whole meta founded upon in game discoveries not intended by the devs, so many local tournaments and hosts, funded by the fan base itself, and the dedicated pro scene isjust incredible. Me myself however, I found the intense requirment of many of the interesting tech options in that game to be too hardcore. I'm not into precise mechanics... aside from csgo, for for fighting games it's not really something I find to be interesting. Thought Rivals of Project M gave me a bit of a break and allowed me some lee way. It's alot easier to wave dash in Rivals, and a bit faster in a few other ways. One could say the skill gap being lower in that game is a bad thing, I won a few of my university locals, and some diamond level online ranked games, but I still consider myself a casual as I only play the game on occasin.
@@danramirez8553 Oh ok, in context with the video I thought you might not like melee/rivals/project + or only like melee/ultimate and not like rivals/project +. But reading your second comment Im thinking your initial comment was a more general statement than I thought it was and you know about/have played the games your talking about. Alot of people will argue that games being modern and popular makes them the best without ever giving projects like Rivals or Project + a chance.
Watching this video made me realize that I really want rhythm games to have a larger competitive scene as by design they can't be unbalanced (unless if they have characters for some reason but I can only think of like 2 games where that would be an issue).
This was a great video! One thing i also think is really important is basically all games with a big e-sports scene didn't design their game with the thought in mind that it's gonna be a big e-sports thing, they just made a really fun and deep game. Tekken, street fighter, smash, cs:go, fortnite, rocket league, league of legends etc. all got such big competitive scenes cause they built up big fanbases by being fun games with very high skill ceilings. On the flipside you have games specifically designed to be an e-sport (halo 5, dead or alive 6), and most of those just never catch on, cause there just isn't the fun factor and creativity of the others
Well said! It's also why so few games feel one-and-done to me nowadays, but I will always have interest in going back to classic games. In a way, they *had* to get to the fun part quickly because that's all the time you got. You didn't have the peer pressure of a game that all your friends have been playing for the past six months, so you have to catch up on the mechanics, find recent videos because old videos are out of date due to balance changes, keep staying up to date because by the time you're caught up the meta has changed... It's a chore rather than your downtime.
@@CyoteBongWater87 Wasn't DoA 6 the *only* one that didn't lean into fanservice? I remember that being why OP's example was it as a "made for eSports game".
@@moldyshishkabob yeah, DOA6 tried to get into the Esports scene. They toned down the normal outfits... then had the more suggestive outfits as DLC packs... and some of the DLC packs cost way more than the game. Can't have the game be "too sexy" for public esport events. Just like Street Fighter 5 censored Mika's butt slap when she does her super. But issues with the gameplay was they did the "make it easier for new players" appreach, and sidestepping was braindead easy, you can't hit people off of the floor, neutral is constantly reset. And they put in a meter, with "combo-breaker" holds, and supers... yes, take a game that's already guessing and mind games, and add MORE guessing, and let people panic press supers when you come at them.
This is the first time I agree with a TH-camr that thinks some aspect of gaming is "dying". You truly exposed the problem, all of us who actually grew up playing counterstrike, halo ce, fear combat online etc, couldn't care less at the time for eSports as long as we were having fun, but today everything seems to be only successful if it's trending on some reddit trash hole by kids screaming for nerfs or buffs. Loved the vid man, keep it up!
They definitely cared bro you just weren't in a circle where they cared that much. Yes it may have not been the companys intentions back then but gamers on their own crested tournaments with cash prizes and companies saw that and decided to capitalize on it. Just look at most other hobbies that exist today that have tournaments like football , basketball , pool ,chess and others, you probably dabbled in them for some fun too but just didn't decide to be too competitive about it and you just need to find other with the same mindset and play with them in gaming. I am pretty sure all those sports became so big now because of similar situation that you see in gaming now
@@DatAsianGuyno it's just an excuse for morons to sit inside all day trying their hardest in a supposedly fun game. It makes them money, sure, but video games are meant to be fun and enjoyable and not necessarily a hub for professional competition. If a game focuses only on being competitive and not fun, it dies. Taking every iteration of its eSport potential with it.
@@cesj1 I can agree on that a game shouldn't just focus on the esport, but any game that has some competitive angle to it, can become an esport. every sport is also just a game.
Team Fortress 2 is a perfect example how good a game can be if you are not worrying about competitive pro balance while creating it. The genius behind the concept of spy class is something competitive games can only dream of. I mean seriously, in what world could that be balanced for pro play? This things are why a 20 year old game is up and running with a living community while brand new games are dead after a month. That and hats i guess.
Team Fortress 2 thrives a lot from its casual enjoyment to the point where you can spend a long period of time in this shooter game without actually shooting anyone. A lot of people call it a "war-themed hat simulator" and I would also call it "the world's greatest cryptid video game." It, of course, also has a competitive scene.
@@t-qb1sq any community-made competitive mode is better than one made by the developers. Community competitive allows for the players in the community to directly alter the game rules, stats of weapons or apply bans in order to make the game fair. A niche example of this would be L4D2 versus competitive, the base L4D2 versus is already a VERY balanced and competitive mode with a lot of gameplay depth, the community-made competitive mode simply makes the game more balanced in the Infected side's favour in order to accommodate for high-level play. Thing is, in today's age developers don't give their community the tools to host their own servers anymore, because it would ruin their "live-service" model.
@@niks660097 There's a good reason for that. It's extremely difficult to make invisibility fun to play against. There is no fun to be had in trying to fight somebody who you literally cannot see, especially if they are still able to see you. Often times the invisible player is having fun at the expense of everyone else.
I'm watching you for the first time and I really like the Commentary channel OC expressions but executed in a model with texture shaders in a more 3D enviorement. It looks so detailed but yet also so simple that it works beautifully
The main issue in my opinion is that the fixes needed by competitive players and casual players usually are complete opposites, because they don't play the same way. But game devs appeal to the smaller, comp community even though they play a different game from the causal audience and usually fix their own problems anyway. Like with 6s in TF2.
I miss when videogames were just about having fun. It honestly feels like most people treat them as a job now, and company-made E-sports is the perfect manifestation of that.
People treat them as a job now mostly in response to the rampant monetization that plagues the video game industry. They functionally are jobs because the fun has been monetized out of the game. It's disgusting and I wouldn't be sad if we ended up with another video game crash similar to the one that happened in the 80's because of it.
I don't think it's wrong that people treat them like a job, I think it's wrong that investors get involved in the development process and ruin the vision of a game for money.
A lot of e-sports initiatives try to force spectator SPORTS which isn't how they should be organized. Esports doesn't have the infrastructure and no one wants to gamble the steep price for that infrastructure to fall short on viewer numbers. Better to cobble together community initiatives and 3rd party platforms (twitch). Plenty of games are thriving this way, even decades old ones.
Nintendo makes such good competitive games that even when they are actively trying to shut down the esports scenes of their games they still have giant esports scenes
Nintendo don't make good competitive games they just make good games, whose popularity breeds a competitive scene. Their games are prolific because they're built to be fun rather than competitive.
@@stupidw33b52it was meant to be casual game but people find bugs in the game and call it a “tech” which is annoying because most smash players don’t put in thousands of hours to be competitive whereas people who do usually deterring other people from the online experience.
@@MoonThuliExactly. Games are meant to be one thing: Fun, Fun for everyone. Nintendo makes a lot of mistakes, but they knock it out of the park with some of their games.
TLDR: I think this can all be summed up by saying. MAKE the game fun and easy to play and understand. And you may find eSports success, but don't focus on that or you'll fail on the fundamental promise of the game.
I think that your point of how the community has to drive it is really well put. in team fortress 2 the tiny competitive scene there is entirely run by the community, everything from playing matching and joining a team to getting commentators. It's all just the community coming together for the love of the game
E-sport overfocus kills games. Like it or not, vast majority of players are not hypercompetitive people, many are not competitive at all and don't even touch multiplayer at all. So, if a company that made the game craves this competitive scene to be the face of the game, they effectively cater to a very tiny percentage of people at the expense of everyone else. You can often see this in patches - caring only about the very highest tip of the endgame content, nerfing and buffing based on strategies that only the very best of the players can use, making balance changes that ruin the fun. If you listen to only competitive scene, you will end-up either with just 1 winning strategy or you will end up with chess, eventually. Look at strategy games - why so many fail so miserably - you will find a massive common denominator - most of tried to be an e-sport, or at least tried to be the next StarCraft, Warcraft, Age of Empires 2 or Command and Conquer, maybe the next Supreme Commander - little to no innovation, or monstrous focus on multiplayer with every other aspect being and afterthought. You end up with games that may be mechanically sound but forget to be fun while at it.
The mod community is who will keep retro games alive. There will always be a dedicated fan with the skill to make something from the past that everyone loved. I agreed with everything in this video though.
Age of Empires 2 went through years of literally no devs and hun wars with its high level competitive scene basically being funded by very rich fans who just wanted to watch some players be really good at the game and its "regular" competitive being completely on a community site. Pretty much a testament to everything you said, even if things are much different now or if the game isn't as hot as things like LoL and CS.
I swear the second you brought up games with no dev support for competitive settings I immediately thought the smash community, glad to see you addressed it here, honestly very sad cause I play competitive smash to this day and wish Sakurai and his team supported it…
I think the most important point is, community, you cannot artificially create one, and that is the problem, like OW, just one year later and there was a league when hardly people were gathering togheter to create a scene, at the end we got just employees not players playing for companies not teams, and when you cater to these people who their 9 to 5 is playing the game, you will end up balancing the game in a matter that doesn't apply well to the average player which bitters them and end up killing a real scene.
Especially when all the balance changes affect everyone. Even physical sports don't do this. Little league baseball does not use the same rules as the MLB.
Companies really don’t seem to like the idea of letting their audience grow naturally, they only want to target a specific demographic. This is not related to video games, but I distinctly remember when Cartoon Network were dissatisfied that there was a large female audience for the original runs of both Young Justice and The Clone Wars.
Blizzard needs to take some HEAVY notes on how to grow a scene from what Riot did to Valorant. They let Valorant just grow on its own, now it has a healthy player base with heavy following. Valorant community itself just grew on its own with its content creators plus pros. Content Creators also heavily bleed into the ESports scene for Valorant as well and thats what made Valorant's Economy in NA that successful and it helped out the esports scene itself.
Yet another great video dude. I think your point on the game having balanced mechanics is definitely the most important one, because if the game isn't fun to play casually, how is it supposed to be fun competitively? I think it goes to show fun should be prioritized first over any other kind of meandering thing that is just there to get a game more attention. It's how a 30 year old busted Sailor Moon fighting game can have an active fanbase and tournaments while many battle royales and shooters have a hard time staying in public conscious for more than a week
That game is actually a great example, it literally has a move that does more damage on block than on hit cuz of a programming error, and people still practice it.
It's the same with Mahvel (MVC2 and UMVC3) they are busted at the core but overall fun as hell, even from a casual standpoint and maintain relevance even in today esports/pro scene. BR's are on the decline, like I wish it was a joke. Apex and Fortnite are in the shitters. Fun but not tolerable to play as time goes on. just remember, EVO did side tournaments for games like Catherine and GranBlue Fantasy (a gacha game to see who gets the most SSRS) and those shit was more entertaining than current games we got now on the esports scene.
@@shinmasterryu Wait, I heard of competitive Catherine, but competitive normal GranBlue? That sounds so stupid but so intriguing. Do you happen to have a video of a tournament?
@@chikomitata Oh lmao. I know about Versus, but I thought they were talking about regular Granblue because they were talking about gatcha and getting the most SSR's. I know Vs. has a very active community and I really wanna find sometime to pick it up and get into it as well
I think one of the most interesting competitive games out there is classic NES Tetris. You have a game that wasn't even designed to be played in multiplayer to begin with, yet it has *monthly* tournaments. Just goes to show how much the community behind it matters.
Overwatch 2 hasn't gotten larger because of changing the balance of the game or stun or tank meta, it got larger because it no longer costs $40 to play and because they upped advertising campaign budgets like they had in OW 1's release year.
I want to say that I really like this essay. My favorite esport is CSGO because its simple, super hype, and super tense to watch. It also provides a direct counter example to all three incorrect points you identified in the first half. I want to say that your third point sounds less like the game balance needs to be good, and more that the game itself needs to be fun to play. Maybe that's just my bias speaking though.
I wish so bad I could get into CS:GO, but I just can't. Getting good at the shooting is difficult enough, but the amount of smurf accounts and blatant cheaters in silver is gross. How am I supposed to ever get out of silver hell when every match is just a total stomp fest with zero hope of actually winning?
@@qu1253 If you feel like cheating is a problem you can try faceit or esportal with much better anticheats but be aware that even in low ranks there are many very very skilled players. Also looking up your stats on sites like Leetify can give you a rough idea in which areas you should improve and from there you can look up youtubers like VooCSGO or Launders (Lau on yt) or countless pro players who cover a lot of the problems in great detail.
I'd replace "mechanically balanced" with "mechanically interesting". Aside from how people love the game despite rage mechanic existing, Tekken 7 backdashing would also be considered degenerate in any other game, but it ends up still being interesting because it creates a tense game where every attack is meaningful when it does happen.
That is the thing that Blizzard does that pissed me off more than just about anything else. Their insistence on doing major rebalances many years later kind of kills any interest I have in going back to play the game years later.
good analysis! i def think the esports craze is a big reason as to why many recent multiplayer games have been lackluster. devs are putting the cart before the horse trying to create an esports scene rather than a game.
I don't think an Esport has to be easy to understand and watch to someone who hasn't played it. Both LoL and Dota 2 are incomprehendable to someone who hasn't put hundreds of hours into the game. The key distinction is that the knowledgeable viewer needs to be able to understand what is going on at all times in the game, what each player is doing, and how each player is reacting to it. BRs have this issue where the viewer is never able to get a macro idea of the entire map, as they can only focus on one area at a time (BR games also have issues with RNG but that's a different topic). Similarly in OW, you can't really see what all 10 players are doing at one time and it just turns into a clusterfuck of particles and ultimates. This is probably an issue with the camera being in 3rd person, or can only focus on 1 player at a time. In Dota, however, each ability is very distinct and you can usually process what is going on in real-time. Additionally there's often 1 or 2 ultimates that you want to focus on (Black Hole, Echo Slam), and you wait and see what impact those have on the fight. There's also significant downtime in-between fights so that casters can replay fights and talk about what was going on. Occasionally fights are really hard to follow and chaotic (such as "The Play") but often these fights highlight the players skills and are extremely exciting to watch in real time.
I wouldn't say they're incomprehendable, I've never played LoL and must have about 10 minutes of DotA on a relatives' computer a few years back, but I can still enjoy watching them. Sure I don't get everything, I won't see all the intricacies of the fighting system or whatever but I can still understand a fair bit of the general flow of the game, in that I know what the objective is and how to work towards it at a high level. I definitely miss a lot but to say I have no idea what's happening is an overstatement. In the end the macro side of it is rather straightforward.
I think speedrunning is more fun to watch, pretty obvious movement without anything super virginal or nerdy going on, same thing with fighting games. I don't care about stuff like rocket league because I could just watch soccer / football and all the fps and league type games are just super nerdy and virginal like I said earlier, and they look like shit to view.
kinda disagree. League like a traditional sport has casual appeal and I guess more hardcore appeal. For example, anyone can watch Steph Curry shoot and go that was a hard to make three. Someone a deeper level might appreciate the offensive set that opened the shot up. Someone on an even deeper level might appreciate the micromovements players were making without the ball to make the set effective. Similarly, anyone can appreciate a won teamfight. Some might recognize the individual mechanics, and on a deeper level you could appreciate vision setups and how they manipulated waves to get position first. In both instance there's the obvious that anyone can enjoy, and the not so obvious that those 100 hours make you privy to.
@@creatingvideostobreakmyspe6049 I actually want a speedrun tournament instead, especially retro games. Like for example, each player has to beat games like Resident Evil 3 in fastest time possible with additional condition like getting the best ending.
@@suiken3149 Those exist, they're called racing games. Trackmania is probably the best example of this while having a decently large playerbase and competitive scene. However if you want more traditional games you'll get into issues (and it has been tried before), either people can do as many runs as they want to get the best time, making progression very unclear, or you'll have one player running away with it over a long stretch of time which makes the viewing experience rather boring. Not to mention in most speedruns extensive knowledge is needed to enjoy them, which is also why channels explaining speedruns (and related drama) are very popular but actual runs don't come close to the same view count. It also doesn't help that most, if not all games, have only a very small pool of people that could be competitors. (which in turn also creates issues of creating leagues)
this was certainly an algorithm win for me. very nuanced and extremely good take (especially with mentioning the live service games that can just disappear with no way for anyone to re-access them)
The biggest problem with esports is that we stop caring about the game and start caring about the competition itself. That is why so many fighting games lives on competitively, the players and organizers want to watch and enjoy the game and their way of doing it happens to be by competing and sharing that. Esports like overwatch become so much about winning that you can't really enjoy the game but hate all of the issues with it that you see as obstactles for that goal
To pulling together some of your later points and adding a bit, I would say a successful esports also have to feel satisfying to win, and the outcome of the match needs to reflect the true (or as close as possible) mental and mechanical skill of each player (as few flukes as possible). People have to like the game inside and out (mechanics, format, and content) to want to play it for a really long time, and continuing dev support can only help (or hurt) it to a certain degree. Over a game's lifespan, especially in the case of longtime esports (Smash Melee in particular) with no dev support, new things are discovered, and the way the game is thought of and played changes too. And above all, it needs to be fun to watch, from how approachable the game is to understand, how easy it is to physically watch what is happening, to the storylines that develop between competitors.
Sometimes, there's a choice of Counter-Picking. This means if someone picks a broken character/weapon, the opponent has a chance of doing something else (which may not even be meta) to entirely counter the broken character/weapon.
This is what i find unique about Valve games like Dota, CS:GO, and TF2. All of these games are so simple in its core yet so hard to master and thats what makes them both a fun casual experience and a Esports tournament game
What's also unique about Valve games is when Valve would turn off servers it doesn't really matter, as they also released dedicated server tools for each multiplayer game they did. Sure, once servers go under you may lose some functionalities like skins, matchmaking or community functions, but core game is still very playable.
@@metaphysicalfuckYeah, but eSports didn't ruin Dota... Dota was quite literally built on the eSports scene that existed. It even ported over the bugs and exploits of the original game at the start, all the quirks and everything, to keep that competitive core playerbase.
Trackmania's Grand League tournaments is a good example of a healthy and non-toxic eSport. Its easy to watch and understand from a glance, the maps are always new and interesting, the developers support it and the community hypes it in a good way. Race results only depend you each player's skills, since the cars dont collide with each other, even though they play on the same map/server. This means there can be little to no hard feelings towards other players, since they dont affect your own performance.
As a lifelong gamer but now having more important prioritise like job, gym, girlfriend, etc... when I'm playing at the moment it's to chill out and I feel like there's a big hole in the market for casual games
Might I suggest Tears of the Kingdom? It boasts a pretty hefty price tag, but I'd say it's well worth the money. If you wish, you can look into others' reviews to see how they feel about it before making a decision of your own.
Omega Strikers is such a good game. I find that they nailed everything in its base that other games such as rocket league has for esports. its easy to understand to anyone and the objective. The only thing that is a negative is just the viewer experience which is a core issue you can't really fix. Its really slow and can get boring up until the last minute till Overtime. The Devs seem to know what to do and acknowledge the problems that arise in the open Beta. feels refreshing to see a team make consistently smart decisions and aim towards improvements. The second thing about esports is that they don't force it but support it, they see small tourney organizations and financially support prize pools.
I agree, when devs make a game "designed for esports" it doesn't really work because the game just needs to have great balanced mechanics and it will just end up being competitive. I swear some games are forced into it by the devs without said devs actually dont know what they are doing with it
This is why Rocket League is such a good esport. It's entertaining and doesn't have any of the flaws mentioned in the video. It's also very easy learn and understand for a first time viewer
Easy to understand, maybe. But for someone that just picks it up, it is basically a slaughter fest. And in RL, If you whiff more than, say, twice in the first minute, good luck, the text chat and emotes will ruin your experience. I’m lucky I’ve played so many driving games because I feel like that does genuinely make RL easier for me.
@@StainlessBike sure but I don’t think MOST people actually enjoy watching in the room. People are happy to watch others play a game on their phone or computer… but in person the other person just gets bored watching you play. but….Why don’t people play the games instead of watch???
@@paulcarmi8130 Some people just can’t do some of the things that pros can do. Rocket league has a high skill ceiling and it takes years to get really good at the game. It’s like watching the X-games; they are a lot better than what u or me can do. Your point is why watch anything when you can do it yourself 🤦
@@StainlessBike no, not anything, sorry, gaming specifically. Esports do kinda suck. I’m sorry. They just do. But that’s one man’s opinion. I guess because I have limited free time I’d rather DO the thing than WATCH the thing.
7:40 I like how devs use to make multiple game series in the same genre, they can then test different methods of what you can do with the game without risking much seeing as if players dont like it they will most likely play your other game, and sometimes ppl will quit your game to then spend money to buy your other game which seems hilarious to me
I have a personal pet peeve with Esports ebcause they are, in many ways, responsible for the death of the Real Time Strategy game. After starcraft 1 and 2 got incredibly popular as esports, especially in S. korea, the other big RTS series, especially Command & Conquer, chased this to their own detriment. C&C3: Red Alert was shoved into being an Esport and was good in spite of it, and the much Maligned C&C:4 was originally meant to be a Mobile Esport-like game for the Chinese market that got shoved into a box and sold as C&C:4. The attempts at sequels after rhat, like the Ill-fated Generals 2 suffered from being shoved into an Esports angle as well. Especially since they shaved off it’s more edgy angles because of it.
The problem with RTS games is not necessarily esports. It's more that RTS games are hard to monetize in general, they don't fit the microtransactions model well. Also, because of how ridiculously good some of them are, like SC2, even new RTS games have a hard time making a name for themselves, because people compare those games to SC2, C&C, AoE, and get disappointed.
@@pedrohenrique-db3xd Yeah, RTS are terrible for monetization, have a steep learning curve and have unfortunately been replaced by MOBAs, despite being superior games.
RTS is an evolution dead end at this point and it'll wither out like arena FPS did. The new IPs don't have anything new to bring on the table, they're literally just clones of either SC2, C&C or CoH. Why do you want to spend your time playing them while the legit franchises are still alive and perfectly playable?
I will say AOE 2 is still going strong, and even microsoft is pumping a lot of money into that scene rewarding peope to do it. I think it come down to what viewers can follow and enjoy mainly. But even aoe 4 the latest in the series were... bad I am an avid RTS player, even if I mostly do FPS these days. Recent RTS games in many years have been total garbage, I dont think that can be blamed on the Esports its blamed upon developers releasing games that are utterly boring or bad.
The other problem is when game developers or their studios shut down 3rd party fan created content or servers for older versions of their games. For a while there was a small independent team working on creating an "old school league of legends server" that would let people play the game in the way that they originally fell in love with it. But Riot Games went after them and sadly the project (that people had already spent thousands of hours working on) was axed. And while Riot Games had a right to prevent others from profiting off of their work, the fan-made servers were going to be free, but beyond that there was such a passionate group of fans supporting the project that Riot made a huge mistake in not deciding to partner with the project. Another more recent example were the fan made and free OG Call of Duty servers, where one could play COD4, WAW, MW2, and BO1. All people wanted was a way to play their favorite games back from a time before skill based matchmaking, bad netcode, bad connections, and other myriad issues began to suck the fun out of their beloved series. But instead of officially supporting the project, and basically having all the work done for them by the community, Activision torpedoed the whole thing. Incurring even more disdain and hatred from the community who just wanted to play the games that they loved, *and had previously paid for!!!*
Focus on making the game as fun as possible. Balance your game to ensure that the best way to play your game is the most fun and then provide enough tools for your community to create a competitive scene if it so desires.
I'm glad someone can recognize that a balanced roster isn't important to make a game fun. Though I'm surprised you didn't use Melee to make this point at all. Melee has like.... Maybe 6 competitively viable characters and it is still super popular. Plus, there's a number of mid-low tier heroes that do mad work with their characters
It's honestly shocking how someone can manage to talk for 15 minutes about Esports and not mention Starcraft. Both the original Starcraft and Starcraft 2 still have active large Global tournaments to this day. They have some of the best announcers that are fantastic at making you understand the game even if you've literally never seen it before, and it has ZERO dev support blizzard abandoned those games long ago
You are criminally underrated man. I love finding small creators that put so much passion and work into what they make. I look forward to seeing you blow up one day. Just a matter of time
Seriously. I should like eSports, I love games and eSports really pushes it into the mainstream more than they already are The issue I couldn’t out into words is this isn’t just making games visible, it’s making them _competitive._ I hate competitive games. I just wanna explore and have fun.
Well no wonder you dony like esports if you dont like competetiveness. Just because youre into this doesnt mean you should be into the other. Its like hiking if you like going at your own pace why would you wanna sign up for a marathon? A bunch of people competing should be the last thing youd want for someone who doesnt want competitiveness in your games no?
There was an awesome moment in professional SC2 where the game of terran vs. zerg devolved into total warfare across the entire map. The commentators were bouncing all over the screen, the pros were completely overwhelmed and just focusing on 2 or 3 pushes while forgotten units died or wrecked havoc on secondary and tertiary objectives... That was a cool moment, but I think it highlights how great SC2 was as an esport - not because that was the norm, but because it was so wild to see such a structured game devolve like that.
@@jaimeruiz7837 Oh man dude, this was so long ago... 2016ish? But honestly there's a lot of examples of these. Any game that outlives the resources on the map and players start getting more and more desperate gets to that point.
Good video with great points, but i disagree with the statement about Overwatch's E-sports. It is probably the most mind numbingly boring thing you can watch and would lose 60% of its viewership if they stopped giving league tokens for having it on in the background, and the increase in player base can just be put up to it becoming free (to a degree at least). Like the video though and i hope you do well!
I was moreso talking about playerbase with Overwatch 2 rather than its competitive scene. I also agree that Overwatch esports is boring af and incredibly hard to follow, and they should focus moreso on making it a more fun casual experience.
@@Ardrid_ I find it so interesting that you say that! For me, Overwatch is simply too high-octane to find boring to watch. Hard to follow, especially for new players, I'll absolutely give you that (but League and DOTA both have this issue too IMO, I don't think it's specific to OW - I couldn't possibly tell you what was happening when I watched Worlds). For me, I'll genuinely fall asleep watching the slow early parts of League, Valorant, and CSGO maps where they're poking and prodding for advantage, multiple long lurks/saves in Val/CS, etc. that just don't interest me as a casual player of those games, and I really only tune in for the nail-biter grand finals matches if I have time. However, Overwatch is always worth watching in my personal opinion - it's always exciting no matter if it's the start or end of a game/match, there's always something happening, and the push and pull of teamfights are extremely interesting to me, not to mention the diverse cast of heroes that allow for completely different playstyles like dive, rush, and poke to interact in different ways with the enemy's team based on the map or mode being played. As a side note, the Overwatch League is failing and it should be cut as soon as Microsoft has the keys and they should give the major tournament rights back to passionate 3rd party TOs like South Korea's APEX tournaments that were held pre-OWL (seriously, go watch some of those vods, it's peak OW spectating and gameplay and their passion for the game is clear - the game did have some great grassroots support before OWL).
@@Ardrid_ Also, I'd like to hear what you think would make Overwatch a more fun casual experience from your point of view! Personally, I feel that the best change OW has made is the 5v5 change going into OW2, as it made it a far more skill-based experience, more solo-carryable on any role, and really opened up the game to a point that makes old OW1 footage look claustrophobic in comparison. The thing is, I personally think that change was made for the benefit of the competitive community that had become disillusioned with double shield and the long queue times that mostly plagued higher ranked gameplay and didn't really affect the lower ranks as much. However, since the launch of Overwatch 2, no further changes have been made to cater to the high ranks/esports scene of the game. The dev team has repeatedly stated that they are balancing the game with the casual community solely in mind - problem heroes in higher ranks like Sojourn, Kiriko, etc. have been left untouched and high skill heroes like Tracer, Genji, etc. have been nerfed in order to placate and cater to the lower ranked players that have trouble using the former, and trouble countering the latter. Basically, as the game is catering to casuals at least on the balance side at the moment, would you be in favour of more balance changes along the lines of what we have been seeing, or do you disagree with the developers that their current method is the way to go about catering to casuals? I'd love to hear your thoughts! (also omg sorry I didn't mean for this to get so long lol)
Balancing is what killed Valorant for me. Because every character was shit at one point. They nerfed utility so hard that I’m the end it felt so steril
I've been having this on my mind for so long. Not only do so many games try to make themselves competitive when they have mechanics that don't facilitate competitive integrity, there's no content so the only real way to play the game is the main competitive format, which results in all the content creation around the game being just ranked highlights. That's another problem with modern "e-sport centric" games - the content that can be made from them is very limited. Compare the content being made around TF2 and CS:GO to the content being made around OW2 and Valorant, and the difference is night and day.
Even the game Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, popular in the South-East Asia, starting to get boring, without trash talks (no bullshiting each other) and spicy banters between players in its community. For me, if the developers recognize players who are playing the game within years, that will be exciting!
I think the only thing not mentioned in the video that would've been a great addition would've been to mention that all the games you used all have a great degree of unpredictability to them. It makes the game all the more entertaining to watch in the long term.
"Having too little makes a game feel shallow and unfinished, sure, but adding too much can make a game feel bloated or even negatively impact the gaming experience if the new map or weapon favors a degenerate strategy." Unrelated to e-sports, but this is almost why I don't feel as compelled to play Warframe as I used to. Either way, I'm just passing by. This was a great video. Keep up the good work!
Not that I am ignoring the content of hte video BUT - man I really like that angry snowman as an avatar to talk through. A+ on that, its 3D and stands out a bit from the regular handdrawn avatars that do the same thing.
Total Biscuit (RIP) has said all of this back in 2016 and everything he's said still holds true every time. It's also very easy to spot an american in eSports discussion. They will never bring up Dota 2. Hell, even CS:GO doesn't seem to be as much of a point as Valorant of all games.
Yeah, i'm surprised DotA 2 wasn't mentioned, Americans are not fond of it but DotA 2 has literally the biggest Russian and Chinese player base to the point the game has voice actor translations in those two languages. And iirc Icefrog, on of the OG developers hired by Valve is Chinese.
Ive never understood these kind of caveman nationalism tbh. Its not even about geopolitics, its video game, but they always try to ignore credit where credit is due.
@@Amantducafe That just not true, at least for the Chinese playerbase thing, LoL has an estimated 10-15 times the playerbase of Dota2 and most of that is in China. Also if we're talking about voice actor translations, most big games have multiple language as options.
@@backpackpepelon3867 To be fair, you have to understand how over here, DOTA is really not a thing. I literally didn't know it existed till I saw it on Steams market when I went to buy TF2 cosmetics. I've never even seen a video on it. And another comment outlined how DOTA was kind of a paradox to his points. Its really popular (in Eastern countries) when most logic would state otherwise.
I don't think it was that, just so much that it didn't take off in popularity the way they hoped. LOL and DOTA just ended up beating out HOTS in the MOBA market, and once it became clear HOTS wasn't going to be a real contender, Blizzard abandoned it.
I was in an unreal torunament clan on ESL way before people lose the grasp how competitive works. Its a complete different universe back than we had clans and a huge friendly community now its all rigged company spawns and stupid epeen diamond and grand master ranks lol
This channel is going to become super famous and I am here to say I started to watch from the beginning. Love your videos they are super deep sometimes things are not so simple and needs getting deep into the waters of why are failing or succeeding
Was gonna say the exact same thing. I thought video games were played for fun, not for getting all swesty and frustrated while doing the same thing over and over again. If I wanted that, I'd just play a traditional sport.
I can see from my analytics that the video is being picked up by the algorithm a bit. Hello to all the new people! I'm working on the script for my next video right now (taking a bit to come together, but its getting there).
lmao I was about to write up a comment about how the video was good, but the title was complete garbage because the title had basically nothing to do with the actual content, but then I got to the very end. I'd still say that the title isn't great, but it certainly works as clickbait, so fair play to you for that. Still a good and thought-provoking video essay nonetheless.
Glad it did, you earned a sub from me for such a balanced and well done video essay.
I kept a close eye on your smash evaluation and you nailed the "imbalanced mechanics" issue with smash 4 perfectly. You definitely know your stuff and made informed arguments.
It's pretty refreshing compared to videos that clearly are made to pull views and generate discourse for engagement. (I'm not bothered by clickbaity titles, the content is what matters)
I'll be looking forward to your next vid!
@@DseanSupreme The clickbait titles/thumbnails are just there to get people to watch the video/help algorithm, i always make sure to make the content more nuanced and interesting that just a simple "this game bad".
Also Smash 4 was pretty much my intro into the FGC/competitive games in general, so I remember it quite well and even have a bit of a soft spot for it, although I know it wasn't a very good game and there's a reason why it died (not just ultimates release). I knew Smash 4 was perfect to bring up in this video when I literally picked a random moment in the first smash 4 set I looked up and saw someone run up spam sheild and then try to grab LOL.
@@Ardrid_ Sad that the algoritm (and people that enter just for the title) work like that but Its the best way to get a video views.
@@erak7 It is what it is, man.
ngl, companies need to stop making their games "competitive" and make a mechanically sound and fun game in the first place, the community will get competitive on its own anyway
Tbh for street fighter that was apart of it's design as a 1 vs 1 arcade game
Evo moment 37.
THANK YOU it need to be said more.
you can have both
This is what none of these companies understand.
Esports will be born naturally if there's people that want it. It will NEVER work if it's forced.
Shocked that StarCraft 1 and 2 weren't mentioned as a prime examples of games that got little support but maintained massive playerbases
And also for the balance bit. Especially BW.
Thats largely due to the community. A lot of players work full time behind the scenes to make the events happen. Many events are also now crowd funded, too.
BW had balance patches, not sure how this myth gets perpetuated
@@wdililn I don't see anyone saying it never had any in this thread. My reference to the balance isn't that it never was patched, just the state of balance it reached (though in large part by map design as well), and has had for most of its lifetime.
Same with tf2. 5 or something years without a single update💀
Watching this 6 months after it was posted and listening to how OW 2 was seen as a success story is wild
ow2 dead
I mean, the argument was stupid to begin with
OW went free2pay, obviously it gets more players
Thank god I wasn’t the only one who thought this, anyone who was inside the overwatch esports community during the transition would easily disagree with this guy’s point on it.
While I wholeheartedly agree on the stun problem, to say the looming “2 tank meta” is a game killer, when it was clear both rein+Zarya and winston+dva were beloved 2 tank combos, in addition to so many other tank combos that were fun to watch. No one had a problem with two tanks, EVER. People were scared of the problem of two *shield* tanks
Edit: also the too much on screen is a 100% agrre for outsiders, and I’m not sure how it could’ve been fixed. But at the same time I think league of legends suffered from this same issue and they’ve done very well, but there’s always outliners
Yeah, that argument kinda made me question the whole video.
Yeah, that’s the point I stopped watching the video, I think the pursuit of esports did more to kill overwatch then his examples.
A competitive scene isnt something you create, its something you support
amazing way of putting it
Too right! Well said it's the competitors translation of the "field" that IS the play. Not some perfect reaction times and predictable patterns. Good point.
The way you put it was amazing
You put it in such an amazing way
Screw that, competitive scenes need to die.
I still find it fascinating that, with most fighting games, the beloved eSports scene was just like a byproduct of people loving the game. I think companies are failing to see that you can't just pump millions of dollars into 'competitive' eSports and watch it grow. the game has to be good first, and somewhat competitive by nature. Halo 5 and how they tried to push eSports with that game is like a perfect case study.
Yeah i wonder what will happen with Project L as it seems its designed as a competitive game in mind
@@lyutsy888 im sure it'll be the new standard of what the general public will think of fighting games, given riots such huge presence between valorant and LoL. whatever project L ends up being, outsiders are gonna think that all fighting games are like that.
@@LizaPlz i have high hopes for project l as it will atleast let the new players not have to face all the fighting games bullshit that you have to go through to get into the genre. If veterans dont like it they will just play whatever they have always played
@@lyutsy888 elaborate on bullshit
@@LizaPlz paying 60$ for a game and 100$ for dlc on a game they might not even like that has shitty netcode and like only 20 people online who are way better than you. And only singleplayer modes are training and generic arcade mode
My personal opinion is that ESports has bred generations of clip hungry, stat addicted, no personality players who only use that the “pros” or influencers use, nobody does their own thing anymore, like you said in the beginning, the announcers try to keep the lights on but nobody’s home, nobody but the top tiers
Personally, I don't mind this particular aspect. It's made the average player's strategy extremely predictable and gives me easy wins. It's hilarious to stomp people into the ground as their brains short circuit because you're not playing "the meta." My bigger issue is the "competitive balancing" bullcrap games do these days. They'll absolutely crunch the skill ceiling into the skill floor as hard as they can, noobifying the whole experience and say "look how balanced it is now, no one can do any better than anyone else." That shit makes for a boring to play/watch experience like the video talks about.
@@ChromeDaimao I absolutely love stomping some metahead with a “trash” character/weapon and have their minds blown. Like in Brawlhalla, I absolutely love playing Dusk, nobody plays him and oh boy the amount of thumbs downs I get after beating a scythe player lmao.
exactly my thought! the part that nobody does their own thing anymore hits me hard !
TH-cam and twitch are also part of the problem
It's really sad, honestly, it's getting incredibly difficult to spend time with friends in a casual F2P game like you could back in the day in Team Fortress 2 for example.
I'm trying to enjoy some time after exam season with some colleagues in a free to play game (cause not all of us own the same games) so we hop on OW/League and are met with hyper competitive players running esports level strats and champs with insanely delicately picked comps and people dodging if you don't play the meta in champ select, all of that in NORMAL QUEUE, sometimes even blind pick! Not to mention all the flaming that happens after the game ends or during it, for seemingly no reason. Not like we care what the enemy team says but why are they taking a normal queue game so seriously? It makes me feel second hand embarrassment that they base their worth so much on whether they win a video game match in a non-ranked gamemode against 5 washed up casual gamers lol.
It's insane how bad F2P games have gotten for casual players, even Team Fortress is suffering the same fate, can't join a normal game without 3-4 people in a premade just destroying everyone on the server with 2 pocket medics and soldier/demoman combos, at that point just go play Highlander or UGC, stop polluting casual play and leave the new and casual players alone, the game already has a userbase problem as it is. I don't see why I have to search for community servers where I can get a chance to relax when quickplay is right there in the main menu but it's so bad I'd rather play against bots.
Back to Red Dead Redemption 2 for me I guess..
i was surprised when Blizzard announced their ambitious esports scene when Overwatch came out.
I always thought that the competitive community of the game needed to grow and test out the game more during ranked seasons.
Before that, making huge commercialized events out of the game was gonna be a huge gamble as the balancing issues and core gameplay problems started show.
I personally feel it also affected the ranked experience negatively as people took the game too seriously.
I think Blizzard is putting all their money in esports in recent years because of the whole Warcraft3/DotA fiasco. Their executives saw that a game that was literally born out of one of their own games was profitting bazillions of money and none of that was theirs, so they thought that they could have it for themselves and have since made the devs focus pretty much all their manpower in esports. But they skipped the most crucial part that is mentioned in the video and you said it yourself: the fun and engaging gameplay backed up by an active community.
I remembered that Jeff said that if there is an esport scene for Overwatch, he hoped that it would grow naturally in one of their old videos.
the overwatch esport was never fully realized until like a year into the game's lifespan. and when it eventually did, a big portion of the community already quit because the metagame was complete nonsense because they forced the "esports" element to it. early overwatch was one of the must fun experiences with a multiplayer game, and now even if OW2 is significantly better wouldn't match the overall experience I had back then
@@lloydpatam4189 I haven't seen this video, but I can believe that Jeff was telling truth from his perspective, however the higher-ups may not have shared the same idea as him and we got Overwatch league as we know it now regardless of what he wanted.
Ranked gets taken too seriously? Well it's ranked. You play for something. Casual mode? Mfers are more competitive in a casual mode than competitive, that's where my issue lie. You wanna try something whacky in a "casual" environment? Not allowed, you gotta play the strongest hero or else you're trolling. Wanna play for fun and see where it goes? Nope, not allowed, you only play to win, no matter what.
I always thought the biggest issues were trying to force casual and hardcore into the same servers. I remember when OW came out, and the hardcore gamers screamed at every little non-meta thing you did, while the casuals would borderline throw matches with their Hanzo picks, not caring at all about what the outcome of the match was. Putting them together is an explosive combination.
@@wombatgirl997 It really, really isn't. Games figured it out years ago, server browsers. That's all you need
@@wombatgirl997 No, we found an older gamer that remembers when joining a specific server was a choice and you could view who you would be matching with before the game.
Absolutely. Separating the two is a necessity but they need to first be together to make a good experience. Not to mention the metas that happen that can absolutely be avoided with apt hero changes but the devs dont ever make enough changes at once to matter and eliminate metas, just change the metas.
@@wombatgirl997 I'm typically the seal lol
Not even a relevant comment.. Why do retards like you comment?
The best way I've heard it put is "pros are supposed to be good at the game, not change the game so they can be good at it"
Problem with esports that too many people think they are worth to be in it while being complete crap, or for that matter cheat and cry when they are busted.
Even without the cheating thing, such people still ruin the gaming community
Coming from a coach, best way to get into esports is start now no matter what game or rank you are, join low-tier teams/tournaments and get the improvement/team mindset over everything else
@@natanprzybylko7227 right, let's play mobile legend then
Esports will surpass irl sports and how scripted and rigged those games are
No cause I thought I kinda suck but I still joined an eSports team for Overwatch 2 for my school and then I get to actually play with my team and I realized I'm not actually that bad because Jesus Christ my team sucks😭
They're fairly good on their mains but our sponsor wants us to branch out and play other characters so we can counter better, and so far I'm the only one he hasn't gotten to💀
I miss when games were made to be fun to play, and not made to be as competitive as possible.
Yea the competitive scene ruined melee for me back in the day because you could not just have fun with it and it just became a tryhard fest. It was always final destination/battlefield no items 3 stock. It got so boring that all the players at the local table top game store only wanted to play like the competitive melee players instead of just playing for fun.
Single player games (especially by RGG Studios) are more my thing now. Retro fighting games too
@@tmma1869 I do kind of get why studios prefer multiplayer, it's something that makes it easier to milk games for many more years than if they had to create all the content themselves, but some people just want to play on their own. I completely stopped paying attention to Quake after Quake 3 completely ditched the singleplayer campaign and similarly that dumb move by Blizzard to make Diablo 3 only multiplayer was even dumber. I mean seriously, I'd only been gaming for decades before that polish turd was released, it's not like I know whether or not I want to play online.
Yea hilarious i said "smash can have items turned on" and i got my head chopped off or cause i mentioned the "smash is a party game" and forever will be to i'm guessing some got a hate boner for that.
But i miss games were fun back then, now their lame full of nothing that stands out to those who don't play games as games but a "career lane" which the TTV culture come in to play. Comp smash looks zero fun to me holy shit on top of the way too many grooming that just seems to never end and the cringe but funny controller spike videos lmao.
@@M4TTYN
yeah, the competitive smash community is really toxic entitled manchilds where petty drama arises every once in a while
I treat it like this. I can show my grandfather a grand final match of street fighter and he can instantly recognize one person is getting his ass beat. I show him Overwatch and he has not a single clue of whats going on so he wants to turn to something else.
also people naturally get better at fighters out of time in the game. most other games its people using aim trainers and busted tactics in order to be better instead of just playing over time.
That’s funny because people usually say the opposite about fighting games (regarding how you learn them)
"You cannot force esports"
Blizzard, after many failed attempts: That won't stop me cause i can't read!!
they succeded for years though, overwatch was topping on twitch and xqc who is the most viewed streamer on twitch started on overwatch.
r34 keeps them alive and they know it.
@@nathanjokeley4102 those views are inflated by twitch drops. Xqc was first noticed because his gameplay but his personality is what blew him up.
@@nathanjokeley4102 Calling overwatch league successful.. I am not sure if it was successful. Half of the roster left to Valorant for more fame and exposure (possibly more money in the future). Overwatch League players were traveling more than NBA players in United States... viewership has never been that good, every esport during a tournament should be topping the viewership. The failure to implement their league system of "regional base" esports.... i mean they had to limit how many koreans can be in each team... wahts the point of this when we call it Los Angeles w/e or New York w/e when the teams are all korean or half of them are. Complete utter failure to engage with the audience with the whole "team" system they were trying to emulate from Real Sports. They did a big shift on Overwatch league moving this to TH-cam which was a bad move at the time. Overwatch League is far from Success and everyone really knows that. Compare OW to even a new game like Valorant. Valorant has been soo successful not just for their esports but the GLOBAL economy for Valorant Content Creators that HEAVILY bleeds into the Esports Scene for Valorant... OW just didnt really have that due to Blizzard being god awful at taking care of their content creators and their pro gamers.
@@jeppong Pro sports teams recruit players that come from different cities or countries. That's what happens when you look for the best players. It just so happens Korea has a lot of very talented esports players, so yeah a lot of koreans. It's not like you can look at the NFL and say that the majority of the players on the Buffalo Bills are locals from northern New York and the surrounding region. Pro sports just don't work that way, esport or otherwise.
HOTS was something I wish Blizz had let grow naturally instead of trying to force an Esport to make bank.
They should have just went wild and implement all the fun mechanics even if it’s imbalanced
Sgt hammer’s siege mode is such a unique mechanic and there should be more of it
Oh yeah definitely. HotS had so much potential to be a timeless classic…
@@wombatgirl997 Games are in some way, art. And in those failed games, the developers lost their vision. They basically copied someone's art. No wonder the magic is lost if your attitude is like that. But in other art domains, you'd get inspiration from others, BUT you know you want to do something creative for yourself. You are your own intrinsically motivated person, because you want to make good art. Then comes the profit, the recognition. Do good work to get good praise, not the reverse.
@@wombatgirl997 Abathur. Good hero. Very fun. Evolved to perfection.
Well, HoTS was Blizzard's desperate attempt to take even a share of what LOL and DOTA was earning a year. This is especially hilarious to me as a Warcraft 3 Dota fan.
One thing I hate about "esport" games is how the companies starts to balance the game around "esports".
While esports can be very popular regarding to the game, the esport players are the definition of a vocal minority. 200 players can be the voices of the entire game and its balance when there's literal millions of players who will hate the changes because it ruins the fun of the game.
Kinda weird that the games that have listened to their casual audience died while games that cater to their pro players are usually successful and popular.
@@dudocainecan you give me one example? 😂
@@АртёмТор-к2ю he just yap and left 😂
@@dudocainelol. Ive seen many games driving itself to its grave because they were trying too hard to be competitive. In their pursuit they drives out the casuals and the result is that they just leave.
For example i left marvel snap because the devs keep changing cards, meta is so hard to catch on, the deck i like suddenly become weak af. Like i just wanna have fun man
My son loves these videos even more than breakfast, keep it up
when you gettin back into the business?
@@Ardrid_ soon. Very… soon
@@Walterhartwellwhite07 Its saul goodman here i have a new gig for your return i signed up to navi i need a guy who can have good chemestry with me so i think your good with the job and if you on with this. well better call saul!
Damn that's some high praise
@@Walterhartwellwhite07 Breakfast here. Hope Flynn gets well.
I will say as a soulcalibur 2 nut; it’s actually a very balanced game. You constantly see the worst character hold his ground against the best character in the game played by multiple different people.
It’s roster is simply balanced around 1. The strong defensive universal mechanics allowing everyone to prevent a steam roll and to approach, 2. Damage isn’t that high on average meaning there’s no easy way to steamroll or rob and invalidate the other players work up to that point, and 3. (For the most part) having a move that would on paper be bs for them to have, but because everyone sans yun-seoung has a contender for the best move in the game you have to respect what everyone brings to the table.
These three things combined means anyone can play the game unlike 12 in 3s or king in t4 who just don’t play the same game as even the mid tiers because of how deficient they are, and that every character can be viable because the game doesn’t allow anyone to get obsoleted by other characters or prevent them from competing with what makes a character meta.
God I need to go out and pick up another copy of this game
Thank you for providing this info about Soulcal2, it's given me some ideas for a fighting game concept ive been working on
@@MastaGambitThank you for standing up for Berserker mains
I think that a major issue that most game companies miss these days is the fun factor. A lot of games these days focus so hard on being cutthroat competitive they forget that a game, at its core, must actually be fun to play.
At this point I basically don't play any multiplayer games unless they are strictly co op. And I refuse to play any live service games because they are designed to eat my time just to keep up, let alone get ahead.
fun isnt as profitable as addiction
@@dab88 True the addiction eventually eats up the source. The more people show all their money into one picular game the less money the other games have to make and there's a lot of people like me who straight up refuse to spend money on any kind of game aside from the initial purchase price. There are actually a lot of games that I refuse to play just because The Only way to enjoy them or keep up with other people is by spending Money. I eat to live, I don't live to eat.... Is substitute food for video games.
@@0potion I used to play so much multiplayer 10 years ago but nowadays I just can't be bothered anymore. they're always such a grind and even co-op games suffer from this.
The thing is, you exactly trade out fun for balance, and you can't make a competitive game fun without making it imbalanced for another side
So competitive games are stuck between either being incredibly fun to play and foregoing most of balancing, or being the new "e-sport" and trying to be as balanced as possible to not make people too angry about losing
Single player games don't have this issue, which is why I just stick to these, but it's kinda sad that a lot of MP games with great potential sucked bc of this factor..
I feel like these days a big problem is that some devs only want to make their game competitive they forget about the casual audience or at least the ones that aren’t at the top level
Bingo. Splitgate could've been so much more than what it was but only focused on its esports aspect and completely killed the majority of its community the moment it got one
I'm glad there are still fighting games like Mortal Kombat who cater to casuals. I was so pissed when Bamco completely removed single player content on Tekken. Don't even start with the Story because that was so ass.
This is pretty much exactly what call of duty has turned into. I can't even compete anymore. It's become a sweat show
@@ViralWatchMedia DMZ is pretty fun. But yeah, i hear you.
Exactly
As a person who's played competitive games for awhile. I'm so damn tired of people forcing games to be competitive. Just make a fun game please and let the players decide what they wanna do with it
Let the people decide if the e-sport will be born or not
Yeah for real I remember when knockout city came out me and my friends were super excited to play it but the game quickly got way to competitive and quickly became boring
They won't stop convincing players to have competitive scenes in their game, whether it from the game design perspective or marketing. Competitive scene has a shit load of business opportunity. Yes, it's always that one executive, investor or publisher that prevent us from having a good stuff.
Honestly thats a major reason why I dislike Halo Infinite, couldn't even get a lobby without like 20 sweats ready to ruin the experience.
I want to play Halo, not get railed by the entire team for 20 minutes, I wish more games had tf2's mentality of being able to have an actual game or just make a game last like 3 hours because everyone is just messing around and having fun.
@@harvetwound1234you mention Halo Infinite. Don't forget rainbow six too how it become shit since Siege.
I've been saying this for a lot of time.
Esports is something that, if you develop a game focused on it, you will alienate the vast majority of casual players. Dooming it from the beginning, because if only the best players find it fun, you'll find yourself without an audience.
Spot on about the community aspect. Look at speed running. No teams, no sponsors, no million dollar prize pools yet some of the most dedicated people I’ve ever seen and a whole chunk of them speedrun for charity in things like Games Done Quick too. These companies always want the short cut to the big payoffs but they don’t want to put in the work and players see through that and drop em like a rock.
At least speedrunning doesn't typically affect the rest of the playerbase. (Although there are exceptions like Kingdom of Loathing doing a bunch of unfun things to kill the one day speedruns that had become relatively common)
On one hand, companies don’t want to sponsor speed runs because they often showcase the shortcomings and vulnerabilities of those games.
Its not a sport. Its like playing darksouls except the game is easier and you've played it a million times.
@@verycalmgamer4090 it could very much be a sport. Sports like swimming, running or javelin throw are all about extremely small changes to well developed techniques which are the results of countless amounts of practice. A speed runner replays the game a million times simply because it is their discipline. Beating the game is easier for them in the way that kicking a ball is easier for a football player.
I imagine there was no mention of DotA 2 because it is the paradox to everything stated here.
-It is hard to understand, watch and high skill ceiling
-It is unbalanced because if everything is broken then nothing is
-The game itself has a modding community that allows you to play previous versions of the game with other people using the same servers
- Community is passionate but toxic
-More than a decade old
I'd say it's a pretty well balanced game in terms of the roster in a weird way. There's always a few highly contested picks each TI, but they all seem to fill a niche that makes them viable. Iirc there were less than 10 unpicked heroes in TI11 and even less in TI10.
im asking say question
@@Guah00 yeah but as tournaments progress some heroes goes aside and new ones are picked
Even LoL is more than a decade old now. You're old.
Not to mention, the game received extraordinary 1st party support from Valve. I would say of any successful, modern esport, Dota 2 has received THE MOST intensive developer support out of any of them, simply because of the gargantuan task of transitioning Dota from its underpinnings as a WarCraft3 mod to the Source Engine, and then in turn transitioning the game from Source Engine to Source Engine 2. To say nothing of the entire uplifting of the Dota tournament infrastructure by standardizing larger prize pots with the inception of The International.
I think Melee is such a gem in the eSports world. It wasn't meant to be competitive and it only became super competitive because people basically broke the game through insanely well-timed moves and turned it into something completely different. The community shaped it into something competitive.
Melee player thinks it only applies to their fighting game
@@noakinnMy FGC knowledge is about a 1 out of 17 but aren't most fighting games designed with competition in mind? I thought that was a major reason why the genre struggles to bring in new and in comparison smash was made to be a casual party game players
Only for the smash players to consistently sabotage their own Esport. Usually when this happens, its the company fault but smash Esport is a special bred.
@@absqrbi wouldn't say it's because the games are made for competition in mind, in the way "esports" are, but more like the games are just fundamentally harder to pick up, alongside little to no fun and engaging tutorials which worsen this problem. But yeah, it is a good point. In my case, I've always viewed fgs as party games too, because of how my friend group played them in between classes (smash was one of thode games, too)
Melee definitely isn't a gem or some eSports unicorn. CS was an ultra-casual mod for HL before people took it seriously.
Esports needs to happen naturally because of the community not forced by the company
I can't help but cringe every time I see a game come out where it's so blatantly obvious that the game was created specifically to be an esport instead of just letting it be something that happens.
You forgot to mention toxicity. Guilty Gear Strive is a very hard game, but I never raged from losing at online fights with it. The fights are fast, and I always feel like I learned something new from it. The opposing player can break you to pieces and still be nice to you.
guilty gear is easy. try playing smash at a high level
Interestingly enough strive is the only game I've ever played where people don't do that 1 and done shit. Sucks it doesn't have any real ping based matchmaking though
@@notmyrealname4488 yeah. It is hard to find matchmaking these days.
@@felixputz2130 i mean strive is relatively easy but smash ultimate is not a hardcore game
@@felixputz2130smash overrated
Reminds me of when some guy at 343 said Halo is a competitive shooter.
Meanwhile fans always loved that it was a fun game to play with buddies.
They saw the hype and money other shooters got from being an e-sport and decided the 20 year fan base wasn't important.
Honestly it's both, if an online game is released, there will be people who play it occasionally and people that'll play it full time
Halo was always a competetive shooter i mean it was the biggest game in the MLG days. its just doesnt need to be balanced like one and should be made for the peoplr who want to play it for fun
I disagree. Fans complained massively about the loadouts and random item pickups in halo 4 and 5 because they added RNG and made the game more casual. The majority of vocal halo fans always call for the games to be conservative (i.e. similar to when they started playing by not adding new features like sprint or ADS), and competitive by focusing more on gamemodes like ranked and swat that aren't easily approachable to casual fans.
In fairness it was one of the first for console games with mlg.
I never played Halo "competitively", usually just custom games with friends. When Halo became more competitive, I stopped playing. Too tedious, frustrating, and monotonous.
"Nobody wants to play a platformer where running and jumping are slow" The NES Castlevanias would like a word. I played them for the first time last month, and they are now my second favorite 2d platformers.
I meant unbearably slow, Castlevania is built around it being slow (the whip attack is even slow so that you have to plan your movements and attacks). The difference is that if a 2d Mario game had Castlevania movement, then it would suck because the levels and enemies of Mario aren't designed around those mechanics.
@@Ardrid_ Thanks. I would recommend trying to be clearer with your wording in the future. Love your content, hope you make it big.
I'd even argue that my favourite multiplayer shooter is slow - Steel Diver Sub Wars. It all comes down to how the game is designed around it and ironically, they would probably be a pretty readable eSport though Nintendo have their hands full with Splatoon which is on console at least.
If I had to say one thing about it... You have to chat by typing in morse code.
@@thelastgogeta Why are you bringing that up? My favorite multiplayer shooter is probably Battlefield 1, Overwatch, Insurgency Sandstorm, or one of countless others.
@@hudsondeweerd3910 I was half asleep, saw that you justified a slower platformer. Saw an excuse to talk about a slower shooter. Good morning.
my favorite esport example of all time has always been melee, but fan made inspirations of that game such as Prpject Plus and Rivals of aether been left into the wayside to other more modern takes of the genre... brawlhalla and smash ultimate being more popular in the esport showcase then these games ever will be.
To be fair, part of this can be attributed to those projects trying very hard to reflect the same competitive nature of melee, which does shorten the scope of people who would be interested. Previous melee fans who decide to give games a shot, but most who hear its "like melee" will either go "its like an old game? That doesnt sound good" (ignorance or the view that old games=less fun, which is annoyingly common) or "why not just play melee isntead"?
I love Rivals of aether, but it took me time to get into it because it was simply too close to Melee. It took me time to see where it was different and worth investing over Melee to play it, and i lnow im far from the only one. I do agree with the idea that a game's core mechanics need to be solidly refined, but i think games made to be competitive, and that ignore a casual side, are doomed to fail.
A good example of how being easy tp get into mechanically, hard to mast is important is Skullgirls. Its easy gor a newcomer to pick up, do the tutorial, and do the single player arcade and story, the combo trials, etc. But when you see its depth, you realize the game has a shit ton of small things going on, but you can mostly follow it. Its casual side can be easily embraced and uou can understand the vast majority of the game on surface level, but it has insane depth to dedicate to, such as what does each character taunt do? How many to train with for your rooster (you can make a team of 1, 2 or 3 characters, with smaller teams getting some stat boosts, but lacking the flexibility assists can bring.) And much more.
@@hellfrozenphoenix13 Your example of Skullgirls resonate with me. It is the first fighting game i've ever taken seriously, simply finding it from a random video and youtube and 15yo me saying "This game looks COOL" so i grabbed my pocket money for the month and bought the game. It was worth the 2 weeks of not buying snacks at school lmao.
You can pick up the game, learn a bit about the controls, seeing every attack just seem to flow into a simple L-M-H combo for both punches and kicks and then decide which character you want to pick up. Finished all the story while piecing the lore together (I remember telling this one friend of mine who's interested in the game all the juicy details of the story while in cram school) and then trying to learn my favorite team combos (Peacock, Ms. Fortune, Robo Fortune) for hours while at home.
The game allows for flexibility and i think it's the greatest point. You can go solo Parasoul and do some sick 1v3 setup or go for a Double, Cerebella and Beowulf for that hard hitter tag teams. Either pick-up and play characters you like with the universal L->M->H combos that works on almost everyone or spend hours labbing even the most intricate setups you can think of. It's one of those competitive fighting games that doesn't ignore their casual fanbase, and that's why the game and it's community is going strong even now.
wait so do you like melee? also i dont think that comparing them to smash ultimate is a great comparison for the reason that Project + and Rivals of Aether were made with significantly less money and people. project + and rivals were def created to be competitively viable games but personally i think they are more about trying to recreate the innovative gameplay of melee that a slightly more niche audience of people really enjoy rather than purely "trying to be competitive." thats not even getting into the fact the Nintendo has actively been killing project + for years and how modern takes of the genre are much easier to get into and dont require the same amount of dedication to feel like you know how to play.
@@cyrus4285 uhh if ima be honest, I've only followed melee, a game that was almost completely made by its community.
The whole meta founded upon in game discoveries not intended by the devs, so many local tournaments and hosts, funded by the fan base itself, and the dedicated pro scene isjust incredible.
Me myself however, I found the intense requirment of many of the interesting tech options in that game to be too hardcore. I'm not into precise mechanics... aside from csgo, for for fighting games it's not really something I find to be interesting.
Thought Rivals of Project M gave me a bit of a break and allowed me some lee way. It's alot easier to wave dash in Rivals, and a bit faster in a few other ways.
One could say the skill gap being lower in that game is a bad thing, I won a few of my university locals, and some diamond level online ranked games, but I still consider myself a casual as I only play the game on occasin.
@@danramirez8553 Oh ok, in context with the video I thought you might not like melee/rivals/project + or only like melee/ultimate and not like rivals/project +. But reading your second comment Im thinking your initial comment was a more general statement than I thought it was and you know about/have played the games your talking about. Alot of people will argue that games being modern and popular makes them the best without ever giving projects like Rivals or Project + a chance.
Watching this video made me realize that I really want rhythm games to have a larger competitive scene as by design they can't be unbalanced (unless if they have characters for some reason but I can only think of like 2 games where that would be an issue).
osu!:
Gd too I guess
DDR has basically gone global.
This was a great video!
One thing i also think is really important is basically all games with a big e-sports scene didn't design their game with the thought in mind that it's gonna be a big e-sports thing, they just made a really fun and deep game.
Tekken, street fighter, smash, cs:go, fortnite, rocket league, league of legends etc. all got such big competitive scenes cause they built up big fanbases by being fun games with very high skill ceilings.
On the flipside you have games specifically designed to be an e-sport (halo 5, dead or alive 6), and most of those just never catch on, cause there just isn't the fun factor and creativity of the others
Well said! It's also why so few games feel one-and-done to me nowadays, but I will always have interest in going back to classic games. In a way, they *had* to get to the fun part quickly because that's all the time you got.
You didn't have the peer pressure of a game that all your friends have been playing for the past six months, so you have to catch up on the mechanics, find recent videos because old videos are out of date due to balance changes, keep staying up to date because by the time you're caught up the meta has changed...
It's a chore rather than your downtime.
DoA's appeal is just by being fanservice wank material
@@epicotakugamer4930 it has fanservice and solid gameplay. But 6 screwed up the gameplay and did other dumb stuff.
@@CyoteBongWater87 Wasn't DoA 6 the *only* one that didn't lean into fanservice? I remember that being why OP's example was it as a "made for eSports game".
@@moldyshishkabob yeah, DOA6 tried to get into the Esports scene. They toned down the normal outfits... then had the more suggestive outfits as DLC packs... and some of the DLC packs cost way more than the game. Can't have the game be "too sexy" for public esport events. Just like Street Fighter 5 censored Mika's butt slap when she does her super.
But issues with the gameplay was they did the "make it easier for new players" appreach, and sidestepping was braindead easy, you can't hit people off of the floor, neutral is constantly reset. And they put in a meter, with "combo-breaker" holds, and supers... yes, take a game that's already guessing and mind games, and add MORE guessing, and let people panic press supers when you come at them.
This is the first time I agree with a TH-camr that thinks some aspect of gaming is "dying". You truly exposed the problem, all of us who actually grew up playing counterstrike, halo ce, fear combat online etc, couldn't care less at the time for eSports as long as we were having fun, but today everything seems to be only successful if it's trending on some reddit trash hole by kids screaming for nerfs or buffs. Loved the vid man, keep it up!
They definitely cared bro you just weren't in a circle where they cared that much. Yes it may have not been the companys intentions back then but gamers on their own crested tournaments with cash prizes and companies saw that and decided to capitalize on it. Just look at most other hobbies that exist today that have tournaments like football , basketball , pool ,chess and others, you probably dabbled in them for some fun too but just didn't decide to be too competitive about it and you just need to find other with the same mindset and play with them in gaming. I am pretty sure all those sports became so big now because of similar situation that you see in gaming now
@@Assassin5671000 Playing video games isn't a sport. It's a waste of time unless you're having fun.
@@aaronerickson8878
Video games are a sport, wether you like it or not.
@@DatAsianGuyno it's just an excuse for morons to sit inside all day trying their hardest in a supposedly fun game. It makes them money, sure, but video games are meant to be fun and enjoyable and not necessarily a hub for professional competition. If a game focuses only on being competitive and not fun, it dies. Taking every iteration of its eSport potential with it.
@@cesj1 I can agree on that a game shouldn't just focus on the esport, but any game that has some competitive angle to it, can become an esport. every sport is also just a game.
God shivers when the youtuber animated mascot crosses their arms
Team Fortress 2 is a perfect example how good a game can be if you are not worrying about competitive pro balance while creating it. The genius behind the concept of spy class is something competitive games can only dream of. I mean seriously, in what world could that be balanced for pro play? This things are why a 20 year old game is up and running with a living community while brand new games are dead after a month. That and hats i guess.
Team Fortress 2 thrives a lot from its casual enjoyment to the point where you can spend a long period of time in this shooter game without actually shooting anyone.
A lot of people call it a "war-themed hat simulator" and I would also call it "the world's greatest cryptid video game." It, of course, also has a competitive scene.
@@t-qb1sq any community-made competitive mode is better than one made by the developers. Community competitive allows for the players in the community to directly alter the game rules, stats of weapons or apply bans in order to make the game fair. A niche example of this would be L4D2 versus competitive, the base L4D2 versus is already a VERY balanced and competitive mode with a lot of gameplay depth, the community-made competitive mode simply makes the game more balanced in the Infected side's favour in order to accommodate for high-level play.
Thing is, in today's age developers don't give their community the tools to host their own servers anymore, because it would ruin their "live-service" model.
i still can't find any multiplayer game, that gives full total invisibility...
@@niks660097 There's a good reason for that. It's extremely difficult to make invisibility fun to play against. There is no fun to be had in trying to fight somebody who you literally cannot see, especially if they are still able to see you.
Often times the invisible player is having fun at the expense of everyone else.
@@arstulextf2 made invisibility fun to fight by making spy everyones punching bag
I'm watching you for the first time and I really like the Commentary channel OC expressions but executed in a model with texture shaders in a more 3D enviorement. It looks so detailed but yet also so simple that it works beautifully
Fr
The main issue in my opinion is that the fixes needed by competitive players and casual players usually are complete opposites, because they don't play the same way. But game devs appeal to the smaller, comp community even though they play a different game from the causal audience and usually fix their own problems anyway. Like with 6s in TF2.
I hate 6v6, I hate 6v6, I hate 6v6
rainbow six siege
@@PineappleDealer37 Whoops was busy meatshotting enemy soldiers to hear what you said, could you repeat pls
@@tappajaav no
@@PineappleDealer37 Fak
I miss when videogames were just about having fun. It honestly feels like most people treat them as a job now, and company-made E-sports is the perfect manifestation of that.
People treat them as a job now mostly in response to the rampant monetization that plagues the video game industry. They functionally are jobs because the fun has been monetized out of the game. It's disgusting and I wouldn't be sad if we ended up with another video game crash similar to the one that happened in the 80's because of it.
I don't think it's wrong that people treat them like a job, I think it's wrong that investors get involved in the development process and ruin the vision of a game for money.
Yep
A lot of e-sports initiatives try to force spectator SPORTS which isn't how they should be organized. Esports doesn't have the infrastructure and no one wants to gamble the steep price for that infrastructure to fall short on viewer numbers. Better to cobble together community initiatives and 3rd party platforms (twitch). Plenty of games are thriving this way, even decades old ones.
we can all thank Everquest for this crap
Nintendo makes such good competitive games that even when they are actively trying to shut down the esports scenes of their games they still have giant esports scenes
Nintendo don't make good competitive games they just make good games, whose popularity breeds a competitive scene. Their games are prolific because they're built to be fun rather than competitive.
@@MoonThulismash is a good competitive game
@@stupidw33b52it was meant to be casual game but people find bugs in the game and call it a “tech” which is annoying because most smash players don’t put in thousands of hours to be competitive whereas people who do usually deterring other people from the online experience.
@@MoonThuliExactly. Games are meant to be one thing: Fun, Fun for everyone. Nintendo makes a lot of mistakes, but they knock it out of the park with some of their games.
TLDR: I think this can all be summed up by saying. MAKE the game fun and easy to play and understand. And you may find eSports success, but don't focus on that or you'll fail on the fundamental promise of the game.
I think that your point of how the community has to drive it is really well put. in team fortress 2 the tiny competitive scene there is entirely run by the community, everything from playing matching and joining a team to getting commentators. It's all just the community coming together for the love of the game
Just like melee, which has had zero support from day one and the community have to make their own online and patches to fix the game
Yeah, damn Valve.
E-sport overfocus kills games.
Like it or not, vast majority of players are not hypercompetitive people, many are not competitive at all and don't even touch multiplayer at all.
So, if a company that made the game craves this competitive scene to be the face of the game, they effectively cater to a very tiny percentage of people at the expense of everyone else. You can often see this in patches - caring only about the very highest tip of the endgame content, nerfing and buffing based on strategies that only the very best of the players can use, making balance changes that ruin the fun.
If you listen to only competitive scene, you will end-up either with just 1 winning strategy or you will end up with chess, eventually.
Look at strategy games - why so many fail so miserably - you will find a massive common denominator - most of tried to be an e-sport, or at least tried to be the next StarCraft, Warcraft, Age of Empires 2 or Command and Conquer, maybe the next Supreme Commander - little to no innovation, or monstrous focus on multiplayer with every other aspect being and afterthought.
You end up with games that may be mechanically sound but forget to be fun while at it.
The mod community is who will keep retro games alive. There will always be a dedicated fan with the skill to make something from the past that everyone loved. I agreed with everything in this video though.
Age of Empires 2 went through years of literally no devs and hun wars with its high level competitive scene basically being funded by very rich fans who just wanted to watch some players be really good at the game and its "regular" competitive being completely on a community site. Pretty much a testament to everything you said, even if things are much different now or if the game isn't as hot as things like LoL and CS.
Suprised to find an aoe2 fan in the wild on an unrelated channel 11
I swear the second you brought up games with no dev support for competitive settings I immediately thought the smash community, glad to see you addressed it here, honestly very sad cause I play competitive smash to this day and wish Sakurai and his team supported it…
I think the most important point is, community, you cannot artificially create one, and that is the problem, like OW, just one year later and there was a league when hardly people were gathering togheter to create a scene, at the end we got just employees not players playing for companies not teams, and when you cater to these people who their 9 to 5 is playing the game, you will end up balancing the game in a matter that doesn't apply well to the average player which bitters them and end up killing a real scene.
Especially when all the balance changes affect everyone. Even physical sports don't do this. Little league baseball does not use the same rules as the MLB.
Companies really don’t seem to like the idea of letting their audience grow naturally, they only want to target a specific demographic. This is not related to video games, but I distinctly remember when Cartoon Network were dissatisfied that there was a large female audience for the original runs of both Young Justice and The Clone Wars.
Blizzard needs to take some HEAVY notes on how to grow a scene from what Riot did to Valorant. They let Valorant just grow on its own, now it has a healthy player base with heavy following. Valorant community itself just grew on its own with its content creators plus pros. Content Creators also heavily bleed into the ESports scene for Valorant as well and thats what made Valorant's Economy in NA that successful and it helped out the esports scene itself.
@@J-manli Lol you make that sound like its inherently evil. Not everything needs to cater to women ya know.
Yet another great video dude. I think your point on the game having balanced mechanics is definitely the most important one, because if the game isn't fun to play casually, how is it supposed to be fun competitively? I think it goes to show fun should be prioritized first over any other kind of meandering thing that is just there to get a game more attention. It's how a 30 year old busted Sailor Moon fighting game can have an active fanbase and tournaments while many battle royales and shooters have a hard time staying in public conscious for more than a week
That game is actually a great example, it literally has a move that does more damage on block than on hit cuz of a programming error, and people still practice it.
It's the same with Mahvel (MVC2 and UMVC3) they are busted at the core but overall fun as hell, even from a casual standpoint and maintain relevance even in today esports/pro scene. BR's are on the decline, like I wish it was a joke. Apex and Fortnite are in the shitters. Fun but not tolerable to play as time goes on. just remember, EVO did side tournaments for games like Catherine and GranBlue Fantasy (a gacha game to see who gets the most SSRS) and those shit was more entertaining than current games we got now on the esports scene.
@@shinmasterryu Wait, I heard of competitive Catherine, but competitive normal GranBlue? That sounds so stupid but so intriguing. Do you happen to have a video of a tournament?
Granblue player here.
I think they mean GBVS, granblue versus, made by arc system works. A fighting game
@@chikomitata Oh lmao. I know about Versus, but I thought they were talking about regular Granblue because they were talking about gatcha and getting the most SSR's. I know Vs. has a very active community and I really wanna find sometime to pick it up and get into it as well
I don't think "love and passion" should be used for OW2, game is as stale as bread
I think one of the most interesting competitive games out there is classic NES Tetris. You have a game that wasn't even designed to be played in multiplayer to begin with, yet it has *monthly* tournaments. Just goes to show how much the community behind it matters.
Overwatch 2 hasn't gotten larger because of changing the balance of the game or stun or tank meta, it got larger because it no longer costs $40 to play and because they upped advertising campaign budgets like they had in OW 1's release year.
Not gonna lie it is kind of funny that they turned gaming into a sport.
I want to say that I really like this essay. My favorite esport is CSGO because its simple, super hype, and super tense to watch. It also provides a direct counter example to all three incorrect points you identified in the first half.
I want to say that your third point sounds less like the game balance needs to be good, and more that the game itself needs to be fun to play. Maybe that's just my bias speaking though.
I wish so bad I could get into CS:GO, but I just can't. Getting good at the shooting is difficult enough, but the amount of smurf accounts and blatant cheaters in silver is gross. How am I supposed to ever get out of silver hell when every match is just a total stomp fest with zero hope of actually winning?
@@qu1253 If you feel like cheating is a problem you can try faceit or esportal with much better anticheats but be aware that even in low ranks there are many very very skilled players. Also looking up your stats on sites like Leetify can give you a rough idea in which areas you should improve and from there you can look up youtubers like VooCSGO or Launders (Lau on yt) or countless pro players who cover a lot of the problems in great detail.
I'd replace "mechanically balanced" with "mechanically interesting". Aside from how people love the game despite rage mechanic existing, Tekken 7 backdashing would also be considered degenerate in any other game, but it ends up still being interesting because it creates a tense game where every attack is meaningful when it does happen.
That is the thing that Blizzard does that pissed me off more than just about anything else. Their insistence on doing major rebalances many years later kind of kills any interest I have in going back to play the game years later.
good analysis! i def think the esports craze is a big reason as to why many recent multiplayer games have been lackluster. devs are putting the cart before the horse trying to create an esports scene rather than a game.
I don't think an Esport has to be easy to understand and watch to someone who hasn't played it. Both LoL and Dota 2 are incomprehendable to someone who hasn't put hundreds of hours into the game. The key distinction is that the knowledgeable viewer needs to be able to understand what is going on at all times in the game, what each player is doing, and how each player is reacting to it. BRs have this issue where the viewer is never able to get a macro idea of the entire map, as they can only focus on one area at a time (BR games also have issues with RNG but that's a different topic). Similarly in OW, you can't really see what all 10 players are doing at one time and it just turns into a clusterfuck of particles and ultimates. This is probably an issue with the camera being in 3rd person, or can only focus on 1 player at a time.
In Dota, however, each ability is very distinct and you can usually process what is going on in real-time. Additionally there's often 1 or 2 ultimates that you want to focus on (Black Hole, Echo Slam), and you wait and see what impact those have on the fight. There's also significant downtime in-between fights so that casters can replay fights and talk about what was going on. Occasionally fights are really hard to follow and chaotic (such as "The Play") but often these fights highlight the players skills and are extremely exciting to watch in real time.
I wouldn't say they're incomprehendable, I've never played LoL and must have about 10 minutes of DotA on a relatives' computer a few years back, but I can still enjoy watching them. Sure I don't get everything, I won't see all the intricacies of the fighting system or whatever but I can still understand a fair bit of the general flow of the game, in that I know what the objective is and how to work towards it at a high level. I definitely miss a lot but to say I have no idea what's happening is an overstatement. In the end the macro side of it is rather straightforward.
I think speedrunning is more fun to watch, pretty obvious movement without anything super virginal or nerdy going on, same thing with fighting games. I don't care about stuff like rocket league because I could just watch soccer / football and all the fps and league type games are just super nerdy and virginal like I said earlier, and they look like shit to view.
kinda disagree. League like a traditional sport has casual appeal and I guess more hardcore appeal. For example, anyone can watch Steph Curry shoot and go that was a hard to make three. Someone a deeper level might appreciate the offensive set that opened the shot up. Someone on an even deeper level might appreciate the micromovements players were making without the ball to make the set effective. Similarly, anyone can appreciate a won teamfight. Some might recognize the individual mechanics, and on a deeper level you could appreciate vision setups and how they manipulated waves to get position first.
In both instance there's the obvious that anyone can enjoy, and the not so obvious that those 100 hours make you privy to.
@@creatingvideostobreakmyspe6049 I actually want a speedrun tournament instead, especially retro games. Like for example, each player has to beat games like Resident Evil 3 in fastest time possible with additional condition like getting the best ending.
@@suiken3149 Those exist, they're called racing games. Trackmania is probably the best example of this while having a decently large playerbase and competitive scene. However if you want more traditional games you'll get into issues (and it has been tried before), either people can do as many runs as they want to get the best time, making progression very unclear, or you'll have one player running away with it over a long stretch of time which makes the viewing experience rather boring. Not to mention in most speedruns extensive knowledge is needed to enjoy them, which is also why channels explaining speedruns (and related drama) are very popular but actual runs don't come close to the same view count.
It also doesn't help that most, if not all games, have only a very small pool of people that could be competitors. (which in turn also creates issues of creating leagues)
this was certainly an algorithm win for me. very nuanced and extremely good take (especially with mentioning the live service games that can just disappear with no way for anyone to re-access them)
My issue is that a lot of studios focus on making their games for esports and seem to ignore making it fun to play.
The biggest problem with esports is that we stop caring about the game and start caring about the competition itself. That is why so many fighting games lives on competitively, the players and organizers want to watch and enjoy the game and their way of doing it happens to be by competing and sharing that. Esports like overwatch become so much about winning that you can't really enjoy the game but hate all of the issues with it that you see as obstactles for that goal
To pulling together some of your later points and adding a bit, I would say a successful esports also have to feel satisfying to win, and the outcome of the match needs to reflect the true (or as close as possible) mental and mechanical skill of each player (as few flukes as possible). People have to like the game inside and out (mechanics, format, and content) to want to play it for a really long time, and continuing dev support can only help (or hurt) it to a certain degree. Over a game's lifespan, especially in the case of longtime esports (Smash Melee in particular) with no dev support, new things are discovered, and the way the game is thought of and played changes too. And above all, it needs to be fun to watch, from how approachable the game is to understand, how easy it is to physically watch what is happening, to the storylines that develop between competitors.
That's why TF2 is the ultimate shotter that NEVER dies
Edit: *I created a fearsome war...*
th-cam.com/video/p5CjmHLUQQI/w-d-xo.html
TF2 may be the ultimate shotter, but is it the ultimate shooter?
@@Radical_Larry I Will let the community decide for you.
New games genre: Ultimate Shotter 🤑🤑🤑🤑🤑
This man writing english in Australian accent
I am also tired of the forced E-sports trend.
Sometimes, there's a choice of Counter-Picking. This means if someone picks a broken character/weapon, the opponent has a chance of doing something else (which may not even be meta) to entirely counter the broken character/weapon.
This is what i find unique about Valve games like Dota, CS:GO, and TF2. All of these games are so simple in its core yet so hard to master and thats what makes them both a fun casual experience and a Esports tournament game
What's also unique about Valve games is when Valve would turn off servers it doesn't really matter, as they also released dedicated server tools for each multiplayer game they did. Sure, once servers go under you may lose some functionalities like skins, matchmaking or community functions, but core game is still very playable.
Dota is certainly not simple in its core ;9
dota is not very simple, but yeah cs and tf2 are simple
@@SioxerNikita but it's well and alive. Amazed it wasn't used as an example
@@metaphysicalfuckYeah, but eSports didn't ruin Dota... Dota was quite literally built on the eSports scene that existed.
It even ported over the bugs and exploits of the original game at the start, all the quirks and everything, to keep that competitive core playerbase.
Trackmania's Grand League tournaments is a good example of a healthy and non-toxic eSport. Its easy to watch and understand from a glance, the maps are always new and interesting, the developers support it and the community hypes it in a good way.
Race results only depend you each player's skills, since the cars dont collide with each other, even though they play on the same map/server. This means there can be little to no hard feelings towards other players, since they dont affect your own performance.
I've never been competitively inclined. I just wanted to have fun with friends.
When i was 12 and saw csgo clips, I wanted to become an esport player, now 4yrs later, I just wanna build my house in Minecraft peacefully
As a lifelong gamer but now having more important prioritise like job, gym, girlfriend, etc... when I'm playing at the moment it's to chill out and I feel like there's a big hole in the market for casual games
Might I suggest Tears of the Kingdom? It boasts a pretty hefty price tag, but I'd say it's well worth the money. If you wish, you can look into others' reviews to see how they feel about it before making a decision of your own.
Evo moment 37 is humanity's peak of competitive match
That kinda ruin fighting games all together
@@humaneshadow300 never
First a very good fighting game analysis video and now this? My man you gonna be BIG if you keep it up like this
Thanks :)
Nah, what’s killing the gaming scene is competitive play. You can make a fun game competitive, you can’t make a competitive game fun.
Omega Strikers is such a good game.
I find that they nailed everything in its base that other games such as rocket league has for esports.
its easy to understand to anyone and the objective.
The only thing that is a negative is just the viewer experience which is a core issue you can't really fix. Its really slow and can get boring up until the last minute till Overtime.
The Devs seem to know what to do and acknowledge the problems that arise in the open Beta.
feels refreshing to see a team make consistently smart decisions and aim towards improvements.
The second thing about esports is that they don't force it but support it, they see small tourney organizations and financially support prize pools.
Loved the art in the intro! Great work once again 👏
Thanks bro :)
that comment about overwatch aged very well
Insert that one toy story gif
I agree, when devs make a game "designed for esports" it doesn't really work because the game just needs to have great balanced mechanics and it will just end up being competitive. I swear some games are forced into it by the devs without said devs actually dont know what they are doing with it
This is why Rocket League is such a good esport. It's entertaining and doesn't have any of the flaws mentioned in the video. It's also very easy learn and understand for a first time viewer
Easy to understand, maybe. But for someone that just picks it up, it is basically a slaughter fest. And in RL, If you whiff more than, say, twice in the first minute, good luck, the text chat and emotes will ruin your experience. I’m lucky I’ve played so many driving games because I feel like that does genuinely make RL easier for me.
@@paulcarmi8130 I meant watching and not as playing
@@StainlessBike sure but I don’t think MOST people actually enjoy watching in the room. People are happy to watch others play a game on their phone or computer… but in person the other person just gets bored watching you play. but….Why don’t people play the games instead of watch???
@@paulcarmi8130 Some people just can’t do some of the things that pros can do. Rocket league has a high skill ceiling and it takes years to get really good at the game. It’s like watching the X-games; they are a lot better than what u or me can do. Your point is why watch anything when you can do it yourself 🤦
@@StainlessBike no, not anything, sorry, gaming specifically. Esports do kinda suck. I’m sorry. They just do. But that’s one man’s opinion. I guess because I have limited free time I’d rather DO the thing than WATCH the thing.
I don't like the term "esport" anyway. It's a video game competition. It's not a sport and the people who play them aren't athletes.
Anything you can do while smoking is not a sport.
7:40 I like how devs use to make multiple game series in the same genre, they can then test different methods of what you can do with the game without risking much seeing as if players dont like it they will most likely play your other game, and sometimes ppl will quit your game to then spend money to buy your other game which seems hilarious to me
I have a personal pet peeve with Esports ebcause they are, in many ways, responsible for the death of the Real Time Strategy game. After starcraft 1 and 2 got incredibly popular as esports, especially in S. korea, the other big RTS series, especially Command & Conquer, chased this to their own detriment. C&C3: Red Alert was shoved into being an Esport and was good in spite of it, and the much Maligned C&C:4 was originally meant to be a Mobile Esport-like game for the Chinese market that got shoved into a box and sold as C&C:4. The attempts at sequels after rhat, like the Ill-fated Generals 2 suffered from being shoved into an Esports angle as well. Especially since they shaved off it’s more edgy angles because of it.
The problem with RTS games is not necessarily esports. It's more that RTS games are hard to monetize in general, they don't fit the microtransactions model well. Also, because of how ridiculously good some of them are, like SC2, even new RTS games have a hard time making a name for themselves, because people compare those games to SC2, C&C, AoE, and get disappointed.
@@pedrohenrique-db3xd Yeah, RTS are terrible for monetization, have a steep learning curve and have unfortunately been replaced by MOBAs, despite being superior games.
RTS is an evolution dead end at this point and it'll wither out like arena FPS did. The new IPs don't have anything new to bring on the table, they're literally just clones of either SC2, C&C or CoH. Why do you want to spend your time playing them while the legit franchises are still alive and perfectly playable?
I will say AOE 2 is still going strong, and even microsoft is pumping a lot of money into that scene rewarding peope to do it. I think it come down to what viewers can follow and enjoy mainly. But even aoe 4 the latest in the series were... bad I am an avid RTS player, even if I mostly do FPS these days. Recent RTS games in many years have been total garbage, I dont think that can be blamed on the Esports its blamed upon developers releasing games that are utterly boring or bad.
@@taragnor MOBAs are RTS with RPG elements at core. Except you're only focused on a single unit
The other problem is when game developers or their studios shut down 3rd party fan created content or servers for older versions of their games. For a while there was a small independent team working on creating an "old school league of legends server" that would let people play the game in the way that they originally fell in love with it. But Riot Games went after them and sadly the project (that people had already spent thousands of hours working on) was axed. And while Riot Games had a right to prevent others from profiting off of their work, the fan-made servers were going to be free, but beyond that there was such a passionate group of fans supporting the project that Riot made a huge mistake in not deciding to partner with the project.
Another more recent example were the fan made and free OG Call of Duty servers, where one could play COD4, WAW, MW2, and BO1. All people wanted was a way to play their favorite games back from a time before skill based matchmaking, bad netcode, bad connections, and other myriad issues began to suck the fun out of their beloved series. But instead of officially supporting the project, and basically having all the work done for them by the community, Activision torpedoed the whole thing. Incurring even more disdain and hatred from the community who just wanted to play the games that they loved, *and had previously paid for!!!*
Focus on making the game as fun as possible. Balance your game to ensure that the best way to play your game is the most fun and then provide enough tools for your community to create a competitive scene if it so desires.
I'm glad someone can recognize that a balanced roster isn't important to make a game fun. Though I'm surprised you didn't use Melee to make this point at all. Melee has like.... Maybe 6 competitively viable characters and it is still super popular. Plus, there's a number of mid-low tier heroes that do mad work with their characters
Furthermore, Fox was meant to be super good at 1v1 (the game says it itself in the trophies description)
You sure?
Fox, falco, Marth, puff, peach, sheik, yoshi, pikachu, captain flacon.
And if you're pushing it a bit Samus.
So 8 or 9 viable characters
It's honestly shocking how someone can manage to talk for 15 minutes about Esports and not mention Starcraft. Both the original Starcraft and Starcraft 2 still have active large Global tournaments to this day. They have some of the best announcers that are fantastic at making you understand the game even if you've literally never seen it before, and it has ZERO dev support blizzard abandoned those games long ago
You are criminally underrated man. I love finding small creators that put so much passion and work into what they make. I look forward to seeing you blow up one day. Just a matter of time
Seriously. I should like eSports, I love games and eSports really pushes it into the mainstream more than they already are
The issue I couldn’t out into words is this isn’t just making games visible, it’s making them _competitive._ I hate competitive games. I just wanna explore and have fun.
Well no wonder you dony like esports if you dont like competetiveness. Just because youre into this doesnt mean you should be into the other. Its like hiking if you like going at your own pace why would you wanna sign up for a marathon? A bunch of people competing should be the last thing youd want for someone who doesnt want competitiveness in your games no?
Then don't play competitive games. Play exploration games.
Making anything mainstream 9/10 times makes it worse because the creators and devs start to pander to the tourists and sweats
You somehow completely ignored the original competitive esport: Quake.
There was an awesome moment in professional SC2 where the game of terran vs. zerg devolved into total warfare across the entire map. The commentators were bouncing all over the screen, the pros were completely overwhelmed and just focusing on 2 or 3 pushes while forgotten units died or wrecked havoc on secondary and tertiary objectives...
That was a cool moment, but I think it highlights how great SC2 was as an esport - not because that was the norm, but because it was so wild to see such a structured game devolve like that.
it seems fun. Could you send a link to this match, please?
Just leaving a post to see if he ever posts a link or the name of a player to try and search it up myself.
@@jaimeruiz7837 Oh man dude, this was so long ago... 2016ish?
But honestly there's a lot of examples of these. Any game that outlives the resources on the map and players start getting more and more desperate gets to that point.
@@victoriacecilia3926th-cam.com/video/9yOw-hYMbDY/w-d-xo.htmlsi=oYpyeKvO5XvJFPPp
Idra vs MMA; Great Match
Good video with great points, but i disagree with the statement about Overwatch's E-sports. It is probably the most mind numbingly boring thing you can watch and would lose 60% of its viewership if they stopped giving league tokens for having it on in the background, and the increase in player base can just be put up to it becoming free (to a degree at least). Like the video though and i hope you do well!
I was moreso talking about playerbase with Overwatch 2 rather than its competitive scene. I also agree that Overwatch esports is boring af and incredibly hard to follow, and they should focus moreso on making it a more fun casual experience.
@@Ardrid_ Ok, Thank you for clearing that up!
@@Ardrid_ I find it so interesting that you say that! For me, Overwatch is simply too high-octane to find boring to watch. Hard to follow, especially for new players, I'll absolutely give you that (but League and DOTA both have this issue too IMO, I don't think it's specific to OW - I couldn't possibly tell you what was happening when I watched Worlds).
For me, I'll genuinely fall asleep watching the slow early parts of League, Valorant, and CSGO maps where they're poking and prodding for advantage, multiple long lurks/saves in Val/CS, etc. that just don't interest me as a casual player of those games, and I really only tune in for the nail-biter grand finals matches if I have time. However, Overwatch is always worth watching in my personal opinion - it's always exciting no matter if it's the start or end of a game/match, there's always something happening, and the push and pull of teamfights are extremely interesting to me, not to mention the diverse cast of heroes that allow for completely different playstyles like dive, rush, and poke to interact in different ways with the enemy's team based on the map or mode being played.
As a side note, the Overwatch League is failing and it should be cut as soon as Microsoft has the keys and they should give the major tournament rights back to passionate 3rd party TOs like South Korea's APEX tournaments that were held pre-OWL (seriously, go watch some of those vods, it's peak OW spectating and gameplay and their passion for the game is clear - the game did have some great grassroots support before OWL).
@@Ardrid_ Also, I'd like to hear what you think would make Overwatch a more fun casual experience from your point of view!
Personally, I feel that the best change OW has made is the 5v5 change going into OW2, as it made it a far more skill-based experience, more solo-carryable on any role, and really opened up the game to a point that makes old OW1 footage look claustrophobic in comparison. The thing is, I personally think that change was made for the benefit of the competitive community that had become disillusioned with double shield and the long queue times that mostly plagued higher ranked gameplay and didn't really affect the lower ranks as much.
However, since the launch of Overwatch 2, no further changes have been made to cater to the high ranks/esports scene of the game. The dev team has repeatedly stated that they are balancing the game with the casual community solely in mind - problem heroes in higher ranks like Sojourn, Kiriko, etc. have been left untouched and high skill heroes like Tracer, Genji, etc. have been nerfed in order to placate and cater to the lower ranked players that have trouble using the former, and trouble countering the latter.
Basically, as the game is catering to casuals at least on the balance side at the moment, would you be in favour of more balance changes along the lines of what we have been seeing, or do you disagree with the developers that their current method is the way to go about catering to casuals? I'd love to hear your thoughts! (also omg sorry I didn't mean for this to get so long lol)
Balancing is what killed Valorant for me. Because every character was shit at one point. They nerfed utility so hard that I’m the end it felt so steril
I've been having this on my mind for so long. Not only do so many games try to make themselves competitive when they have mechanics that don't facilitate competitive integrity, there's no content so the only real way to play the game is the main competitive format, which results in all the content creation around the game being just ranked highlights. That's another problem with modern "e-sport centric" games - the content that can be made from them is very limited. Compare the content being made around TF2 and CS:GO to the content being made around OW2 and Valorant, and the difference is night and day.
9:08 - “eSports for the most part is not a very profitable industry” 🙀
Even the game Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, popular in the South-East Asia, starting to get boring, without trash talks (no bullshiting each other) and spicy banters between players in its community.
For me, if the developers recognize players who are playing the game within years, that will be exciting!
I think the only thing not mentioned in the video that would've been a great addition would've been to mention that all the games you used all have a great degree of unpredictability to them. It makes the game all the more entertaining to watch in the long term.
"Having too little makes a game feel shallow and unfinished, sure, but adding too much can make a game feel bloated or even negatively impact the gaming experience if the new map or weapon favors a degenerate strategy."
Unrelated to e-sports, but this is almost why I don't feel as compelled to play Warframe as I used to.
Either way, I'm just passing by. This was a great video. Keep up the good work!
Not that I am ignoring the content of hte video BUT - man I really like that angry snowman as an avatar to talk through. A+ on that, its 3D and stands out a bit from the regular handdrawn avatars that do the same thing.
Total Biscuit (RIP) has said all of this back in 2016 and everything he's said still holds true every time. It's also very easy to spot an american in eSports discussion. They will never bring up Dota 2. Hell, even CS:GO doesn't seem to be as much of a point as Valorant of all games.
Yeah, i'm surprised DotA 2 wasn't mentioned, Americans are not fond of it but DotA 2 has literally the biggest Russian and Chinese player base to the point the game has voice actor translations in those two languages. And iirc Icefrog, on of the OG developers hired by Valve is Chinese.
@@Amantducafe Whole Europe is playing Dota 2. It's way more popular than Overwatch for one.
Ive never understood these kind of caveman nationalism tbh. Its not even about geopolitics, its video game, but they always try to ignore credit where credit is due.
@@Amantducafe That just not true, at least for the Chinese playerbase thing, LoL has an estimated 10-15 times the playerbase of Dota2 and most of that is in China. Also if we're talking about voice actor translations, most big games have multiple language as options.
@@backpackpepelon3867 To be fair, you have to understand how over here, DOTA is really not a thing. I literally didn't know it existed till I saw it on Steams market when I went to buy TF2 cosmetics. I've never even seen a video on it.
And another comment outlined how DOTA was kind of a paradox to his points. Its really popular (in Eastern countries) when most logic would state otherwise.
The push for e-sports is one of the biggest factors in the killing of Heroes of the Storm. Rest in peace, sweet prince.
damn... I used to play that game.
I don't think it was that, just so much that it didn't take off in popularity the way they hoped. LOL and DOTA just ended up beating out HOTS in the MOBA market, and once it became clear HOTS wasn't going to be a real contender, Blizzard abandoned it.
No shot this man actually said overwatch two has a larger happier playerbase than 1
I was in an unreal torunament clan on ESL way before people lose the grasp how competitive works.
Its a complete different universe back than we had clans and a huge friendly community now its all rigged company spawns and stupid epeen diamond and grand master ranks lol
This channel is going to become super famous and I am here to say I started to watch from the beginning. Love your videos they are super deep sometimes things are not so simple and needs getting deep into the waters of why are failing or succeeding
Thanks, my man :)
ultra factual
Overbalanced games are sterile
Was gonna say the exact same thing. I thought video games were played for fun, not for getting all swesty and frustrated while doing the same thing over and over again. If I wanted that, I'd just play a traditional sport.
@@FieldMarshalFeels Yeah, it busts the power fantasy.