Forced eSports in Videogames
Every game nowadays seems to be released with the potential for eSports in mind, to the point where it’s become increasingly saturated – even killing off all hype surrounding it before the game is even released. Today we’re going to delve slightly deeper into the successes and (mainly) failures of forced eSports.
At the top of the list of failed forced eSports titles, is a classic game by Cliff Bleszinski, Lawbreakers. A tragic tale of a creator trying to dip his toes in an already saturated market, similar to Battleborn – which suffered an identical fate. The “Hero Shooter” genre is packed with many titles already, and adding to this list with one intention in mind, eSports, is almost a recipe or disaster. It shows you don’t care about the game, you’re only in it to get a piece of the pie. Don’t get me wrong, they are not bad games; they just failed it what they wanted to achieve. Cliff released the game in a joke of a state – trying to push it as the “Dark Souls” of FPS’s, and the game quickly died as a result.
Overwatch is a game that comes to many peoples minds when “forced eSports” is mentioned. They’re similar to the previously mentioned titles, except it succeeded since it had so much money for advertising thrown at it. Overwatch wasn’t as subtle when it came to forcing its esports scene, making an in-house league named the “Overwatch League”, where players who they picked would compete – named after cities & countries they did not come from (for some reason). With less impressive updates and additions to the game, and more and more Overwatch League shoved down peoples throat, it’s pretty clear where Activision Blizzard’s priorities lie. Would I call it a failure? Kind of. I don’t know anyone who plays Overwatch and a genuine interest in the Overwatch League. It’s too forced, and everyone knows it – It makes WWE look real.
On the “lukewarm” side of things, we’ve got titles such as Rocket League. An incredible release with an amazing amount of hype – It sold a substantial number of copies and a lot of people loved the concept and execution of the game. The developers soon decided to invest in ESL, which in my opinion, was a bit too soon and a bit unnecessary. The more people watched it in an “eSports environment” the more people realised it’s just not that fun to watch; only play themselves. So while unlikely the devs intended to invest in it so early, and may have got a bit carried away, the game didn’t suffer much as an end result… well, not until Epic bought them.
We’ve got plenty of other genres that could be covered, such as fighting games – but that’s a whole other can of worms that I might cover in the future. A bunch of ultimately pointless observations, but I felt like it’d be nice to write about and cover.
The moral of the story is – Make the game fun first, whatever happens after, happens.