“Sportification” Will Destroy Competitive Gaming

"In a culture that's poised between finding its own identity and being subsumed by the movie and comic book geekdom, there's a third outcome for games: That it becomes co-opted by broadcasters keen to market, package and brand gaming exactly like pay-per-view sports events." says CalmDownTom

[-Gespenst-]

Yeah, we're already seeing the effects of this with how toxic and confrontational multiplayer communities are becoming. The competitiveness within videogames has been introduced to money in a world wherein money has come to rule everything.

League of Legends and Starcraft are at the forefront of this. It's just despicable.

[Gnarles]

What is despicable? I have not seen an LCS match with any toxicity. Any players who have been caught being toxic on stream during practices have been punished.

If you are talking about the community as a whole then fair enough but it has little to do with eSports using the same model as traditional sports which is what the article is about.

[Dover8]

What I have never understood is how it is not Sports based games such as FIFA, NFL or NHL that have ended up as "ESPORTS". But I guess then they'd have to call it "EA ESPORTS"

[GABRIEL1030]

If you want to practice an sport and shooting at the same time, then you must go to the army.

[FanboyCrusher]

The whole sport integration into gaming is just awkward, it just doesn't fit. Watching great MLG games of Halo 3 back in the day was great. Now you can't watch anything without it being "cod casted" and it's painful to listen to. They make it sound as if every detail needs to be announced and we just don't need that. Competitive gaming has lost it's soul, it was much better 4 years ago, now money has a death grip on it, and lets anything with an audience in. Even games like Call of Duty somehow have "competitive" leagues, which is outright ridiculous. If things go back to the way they were, I'll be happy. This new turn for competitive gaming isn't fun to watch, listen to, or even be apart of.

[adorie]

Money has tainted nearly everything good about gaming.

[FanboyCrusher]

What hasn't been tainted at this point? Even development budgets have be bloated ten fold for zero reason. Honestly losing hope in a lot of the games industry, it needs to crash again. That way all of the developers that put passion in their games will be able to thrive, while the EA's and Activision style companies go bankrupt.

[russy91]

i like where halo 4 sits right now i was dropped from mlg so along comes agl a small town set up running it they took input from the community go ex pros in to cast and this year have went from 16 teams showing up to 64 on average for 4v4
the casters and agl itself had a lot to do with the push to make the halo 4 updates to make the game more competitive because the fans would just not let it die. now we have a lot of old pros from 2/3 coming back to play and its not for the money its for the glory as AGl only has a prize pool of 10K compared to cod and MLG nothing