June 29, 2009 – 1:39 pm
by Mike  If I asked you to name one professional gamer you might reply Fatal1ty, well how about someone else? Nothing? Me either. Professional gaming has been around for years now, but has yet to grab the gaming public’s attention. What seemed to be the next big thing 2 or 3 years ago has backpedaled as of late back into obscurity.
The World Series of Gaming was broadcasted on MTV in 2005 with mixed reviews, however it was enough to spark the interest of David Hill (an executive at Fox Sports and DirecTV) to pitch the idea for a gaming show and in 2007 the Championship Gaming Series was born. The series was broadcasted on G4 and pitted 2 professional gaming teams against each other in 4 games.
- Counter-Strike: Source
- Dead or Alive 4
- FIFA 07
- Project Gotham Racing 3 (season 1) & Forza Motorsport 2 (season 2)
However by late 2008 the Championship Gaming Series had failed and was taken off the air. As of 2009 the only major professional gaming league left in North America is Major League Gaming (MLG). In an article with the NYTimes in April, Matthew Bromberg, the league’s president and chief executive, stated that the MLG “would turn its first profit this year”. While it seems the MLG is doing well it’s far from breaking into the mainstream audience. I’ll admit I’ve never even heard of MLG until I wrote this article and I consider myself a semi-hardcore gamer. So if I’ve never heard of it, I’m pretty sure most people haven’t.
The problem with professional gaming is not that there isn’t an interest from companies to sponsor events or a lack of gamers willing to compete, it’s a lack of structure. What games should be included? How do we broadcast these events to make them more exciting?
I’m not sure if you ever watched the CGS, but it was retarded. You had a team of 10 players and a coach. Most of the time they wouldn’t even show what was going on the screen, instead they had the coach stand behind the player and yell stupid shit the entire time. I guess they were supposed to get the crowd going or trying to make it more exciting for the people watching it on TV, but if I was one of the players I’d just turn around and punch the guy in the face for being so annoying.
Another problem was that 30 mins was no where near enough time for 4 games. They would show a few mins of each game, some highlights and then move on. Why do I need to watch the show then? I’ll just go online and see the highlights and who won on my own time. What they needed to do is dedicate each show to 1 game and just show the gamers playing. That’s what I really wanted so see. I want to see how the best players in the world play, their strategies and how they react.
Selecting the right games is also a big decision and might end up being the real reason why professional gaming might never get into the mainstream. What games do you pick that people want to watch? No other sport or competition has to deal with this. While there are tons of variations of poker, Texas-holdem is the only one played at the World Series of Poker. So should professional gaming do the same? Select one game to be the sports official game? Would this work? What game should it be?
As professional gaming fades back to hardcore audiences only, it seems the first major attempt to break into the mainstream has failed. If professional gaming wants to make it big, they are going to need to make major changes to the way their leagues are setup.
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it actually wasn’t CS:Source. It was 1.6