Toornament Blog

Small fact, big trends, trivia… Here’s what happened this week in Esport

If you can’t beat, be it

The “Sports vs Esports” rivalry is slowly dying, as numerous traditional sports households are simply getting into Esports.

After West Ham, Sampdoria, Besiktas and Shalke, the Valencia Football Club just announced and introduced its Esport team. All these clubs came at the right time: Esports are both big enough to invest in and small enough to invest moderately.

Back at it again, Russia

Without any announcement, Russia has officially recognized Esports. To be more specific, Russia recognized again Esports. The country did it already in 2000 but then retracted in 2006.

Sixteen years later, it changed its mind again and hope it’ll stay this way. Virtus.Pro, Russia’s biggest Esport organization, will be able to spend its millions dollars with a lighthearted mind.

Killing the Fatality killer

That’s a first: a team forbid its Mortal Kombat player Scar from performing to displaying on stream any Fatality, these gory finishing move that made Mortal Kombat so (in)famous.

Facing the expected community backlash, team Panda Global U-turned and killed the clause. We’ll never know how they killed it, tho. More seriously, this little drama shows one the ongoing Esport debates about on-screen violence and the will to go mainstream. As the ESL always claims, “It’s a family show, guys”. But do we really want it ?

Play (of) the Game

Another player went into trouble. Talented but unstable LoL player Konstantinos “FORG1VEN” Tzortziou was just benched by his club Origen. The team cited “motivation issues” in its official statement. The player cited “Overwatch” on its Facebook post.

If this isn’t the definitive sign the latest Blizzard shooter is on its way to become a huge Esport… You won’t escape the hype, even on Facebook.

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This week is all about success and failures.

 

Revolution will (not) be televised

And the question is still open for the ELeague. The much-hyped Turner/WME-IMG $2.4M CS:GO league started last week and the numbers are in. With 0.21 rate, estimates are around 250,000 spectators on TV, with a additional 60,000 average viewers on stream.

Now, all the eSport “experts” have been trying to draw a comparison: Reruns of the popular TV show “The Big Bang Theory” brought 3 times more people. MLS, which yearly broadcast rights alone cost $75M, is 50% lower. CGS, the first attempt at bringing CS on television, wouldn’t even reach a few thousands.

It’s still hard to measure Eleague’s impact and we’d better wait for the end of the first season before drawing conclusions.

The cavalry’s here

Talk about a successful launch. The first Blizzard FPS and its first new IP since 18 years has already enroled 7M players in 10 days. CoD aside, it might be the biggest FPS launch ever.

Other indicators hint at a great response from the competitive community, like the Twitch scores, or the number of A-List teams and tournaments organizers already involved. Our favorite? The game has taken 2nd spot in South Korean PC Bangs, the battleground that make or brake new eSports.

The leading eSport country had moved away from Blizzard to Riot since the Starcraft II debacle and FPS were never the most popular genre.We’ll definitely follow Overwatch – we play the game everyday at the office anyway.

Battleborn … dead?

Where there’s a winner, there’s a loser. The MOBA-inspired FPS and TPS have been all the talk for the past few years: Paladins, Paragon, Law Breakers, Gigantic, Overwatch… Everybody wants to rule this new eldorado.

2K’s Battleborn was among the favorites, being produced by the guys behind Borderlands. Sadly, the game was met with average ratings and couldn’t survive the Overwatch’s hype. Battleborn was launched 3 weeks before, but its servers are already half-empty and its price tag has been slashed by 40%…

HoTS or Not

Talking about struggles and Blizzard games… What about Heroes of the Storm? The Blizzard MOBA is losing its casual bet in an over-crowded market. HoTS hasn’t been able to poach enough players from LoL and Dota 2 communities. It even feels like it acted as a great way to discover MOBAs… before moving to the big leagues.

As Blizzard is celebrating its game’s first anniversary, the publisher won’t share any numbers to the media. Not a good sign at all, and a call for a wave of articles, analysis and progamers posts claiming the game is doomed. Let’s never forget that Blizzard met with Dota’s creators… and ultimately rejected them.

 

Brazil’s got talent

And everybody wants them. This week Best Drama Award goes to SK Gaming and Luminosity. SK, running after its glorious past, tried to poach the Luminosity players from their Brazilian organization, a dirty yet accepted practice in the industry.

But when the players finally decided to stick up with their original team after signing with SK, things got ugly: lawyers, threats, tweet clashes… Until both parties sort all this mess, SK Gaming and WESA are everyone’s favorite bad guys.

Things got better for Immortals. One of the most impressive NA League of Legends team just added a CS:GO roster, buying the Tempo Storm squad. The deal came with no scandals and we can’t wait to see how these Brazilian imports, “raised” by Luminosity’s Fallen will perform. In the meantime, SK should definitely send a scout in Rio’s gaming centers.