How the culture of E-sports has changed the gaming industry
In this essay I am going to talk about how E-sports affect the games culture of the games industry in various aspects including how developers are effected, the difference between casual and professional and their influence on each other and how streaming platforms such as Twitch has changed how people watch and interact with games. The definition of the word E-sports is “Esports are the use of multiplayer video games by professional players to compete against one another.” Some of the most popular E-sport games are League of Legends, Dota 2 and call of duty with each of these making millions of dollars for each event.
Developers have had to adjust to the growing E-sport community by making games more challenging and require more skill to beat while also having them be more engaging in order to keep the games popular and to keep their playerbase. This is especially important when it comes to multiplayer games where even if you play the game casually you are still going to try out things you have seen in pro-games and what your favourite streamers do and because of this the developers are going to have to make it so that when you play you can see that there is room for improvement but that you are also doing well to try and keep you playing the game for as long as possible. “While you want people to have an easy time picking up your game, you also want them to stick around because there’s near-limitless room for improvement.” (GameDesigning written on oct 29/ 2020 no author name)
Typically, most casual players who play competitive types of games will have heard of or watched some form of E-sports during their time of playing games either from it being told to the player by the game like in League of legends where they advertise the current events to the players like in the image to the right where Riot games the people who made League of legends advertised what could arguably be called the largest E-sport event in the entire world which is coincidentally called Worlds. (source image 2)
Also when talking about casual players you must realise that 90% of gamers are people who just play for the casual aspect of playing with friends. As compared to the remaining 10% who play these types of games in a professonal position to make a living/careere from these types of games they influence the casual players by showing what could be called the highest level of play and as a casual player they would try to emulate what they see the pros do. And sometimes there could be some casual players who do something that the pro players might see as a possible break in the ‘Meta’ (a meta is what is considered the optimal way to play a game which typically shows the most results) making what the casual try being the new best thing thus changing the way the came could be played.
There are numerous platforms in which you can watch people play or communicate with the gaming community ranging from Twitch you tube and recently Facebook gaming all these platform shave influenced a new rise in party games such as popular games like among us and fall guys and with massive viewership hovering around 2.5 million viewers every week and with almost 2 million hours of viewership every month (twitchtracker.com) it is fair to say that online streaming has made a huge impact on the community and the industry that surround games
How the games industry has been affected by various factors 