A strange day to be sure. I spent the evening catching the riots unfolding outside from where I was staying in Birmingham, watching the local Sainsburys get decimated. There was no rhyme or reason to any of it, just an excuse to grab some booze and fags with only a moderate chance of being prosecuted. Round the corner the same thing would happen to an Adidas store and bizarrely a Primark. The first good piece of civil disorder we get in years and it’s all for nothing, a complete waste of time… It should have been parliament, instead it was Tescos.
Such lamentations made me think of ESWC (it didn’t really, but fuck it, once a week I have to try and find some sort of connection between the real world and e-sports) and how when something good comes along it’s important for it not to be wasted, for it not to fall under the control of the wrong people. While most of the titles they have on their list of games anyway have stable pasts, the majority don’t have futures that are linked to their inclusion in a tournament of this stature.
For example, Starcraft 2 is – inexplicably – undoubtedly the e-sports title for the next ten years. Everyone wants a piece of it and it is included in tournaments now simply because to not include it would be to ignore its huge popularity. That and the cynical way that it generates both interest and cash wherever it appears. At the other end of the scale you’ve got the likes of DotA and Counter-Strike 1.6. The former is all but dead with DotA 2 round the corner, a game set to become perhaps as big as Starcraft 2 in stature, and the latter is on its last legs because it is simply too old and ugly to appeal to a new generation of competitive players. Even so, these winds of change have little do to with whether they’re on the ESWC ticket or not.
Not so with CS:S… What started out as a potentially huge announcement for the game now feels like little more than an attempt to boost the ailing popularity of the new-look ESWC by tapping into another popular title. And why not? A French company funded by French investors, French sponsors for an event held in France and currently the best CS:S team in the world is French. They love it don’t they, the flag waving and patriotism, even in the strangest of places, sort of like Americans but with a marginally worse grasp of English.
So far on the list of CS:S qualifiers we know that France are on board and Portugal looks likely. The rest of the people who could make these qualifiers happen are sat around with their dick in their hands for the most part and that comes down to the fact that given the current climate, combined with the apathetic userbase and people who have treated sponsors with all the same courtesy as those looters did my local shops, it just simply can’t be made profitable.
I mean, I’ve never really liked the system. You call yourself the Electronic Sports World Cup and then sell companies based locally the license to run a qualifier in any way they see fit, for whatever games they are willing to do it for. This means you end up with the UK having representatives for whatever gimmick mobile phone game is being heavily promoted that month because the marketing department will happily throw money at whoever hosts it, while the big e-sports titles go neglected because it would simply cost too much – or rather, it could cut into the potential profit too much – to make it worthwhile. As such you get representatives for countries not in all games but in whatever ones the organisers assign priority to. This isn’t a “World Cup” then, but rather a sort of self funded invite competition where people are out hustling for the support needed to attend, sort of like almost any other tournament. It might seem something of a moot point but a large part of the prestige of the ESWC name is the size and scope of the competition, a quality that they themselves seem to do little to promote.
The other problem is of course the rumours currently circulating that they will go down the invite route if they don’t get enough qualifiers through legitimate means, something that has encouraged the inactivity from those in a position to do something about it and leaving a lot of organisations saying nothing but keeping fingers crossed.
In short, it’s a bit of a fucking farce and as each day goes by there’s still a complete lack of announcements of any kind that we actually want to hear. Yes, the rulebooks are all very nice to read but I imagine the vast majority of people have no confidence that the tournament will even go ahead at this stage. If the invite route is a genuine likely outcome then its one that needs to happen sooner rather than later. No doubt teams will be expected to fund themselves and as we’ve established it’s not cheap, being in the region of £1000 per player for the entirety of the competition. Given that it’s in November and we’re now in August a bit of notice would help organisations rustle up the funds or at least declare themselves out.
All the talk at the moment in the UK is about an online qualifier, likely being run through the SGL, that is pay to enter. Not a terrible compromise if we were talking back in 2006 / 2006 but this is 2011 and the community is very different. Teams that have no chance of winning a competition with no potential prize funds for failing to win will not pay their own way. There’s maybe two or three teams that could win the event outright and the rest would just be a comparison of who bagged the best talent for their mix, or who forked out for cheats that bypass SGLAC. It is unlikely to generate enough revenue to send a team and the higher the entrance fee the more true this becomes.
So what options are we left with? From a UK perspective not much. Still, given that this situation is the same across Europe, even in countries that have thriving scenes such as Denmark, someone’s going to have to do something soon, Maybe the Danes could lobby Jens Christian Ringdal to use some of the money from e-sports ventures past that he owes to send a team to the event. That after all would be a very Christian thing to do, like keeping your word over paying out prizes. Just a thought.
But after all is said and done the reality is we’re no further forward if we just sit around and wait. I would propose that now is the time to break the e-sports code of silence and actually come forward and say not only what you’re doing but what you’re not doing. For example, given that running one of these things is almost certainly a recipe for disaster and anyone taking it on would have to look at it like a long term investment (i.e. they run one or two successful ones that are propped up by finances from elsewhere and then they can maybe think about bringing in partners that can help them turn a profit) there are some who are rightly reluctant. They want it to happen for the sake of the game, for the sake of e-sports, which is after all where their livelihood comes from, but they don’t want to fork out unless they have to and probably know someone else could do it better.
With all that in mind why not say what you’re NOT doing. The handful of UK companies that could conceivably put on an event need to just come out and say if they aren’t going to. This at least gives someone else a chance to try something that will likely be a glorious failure, but it’s something at least.
And that’s what I hate the most about it. Everyone made such a big deal about ESWC picking the game up and yet no sensible coalition came together to make sure we utilised the opportunity. Now we’re left staring a washout of an event in the face, something that’s likely to only have a handful of teams, or even worse a French team awarded the trophy by default. Fingers out of arses, channels of communications open and actually do something. Either that or just fuck off and wait for CS2, which we know is perhaps closer than we ever thought it would be thanks to the Seattle meeting.
Anyway, fuck this noise. I’m off to bag me a plasma television.