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Comment by tomc1985 | Hacker News Reader

tomc1985

E-sports is this funny thing where everyone on the internet seems to talk about but I have yet to find one person IRL who actually gives a shit about it. Like seriously, where is the interest??

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Online e-Sports are talked about on the internet because...wait for it... they are nearly entirely based on the Internet. I've been watching pro Starcraft matches for 10 years from Korea - it's an online game, the games are streamed online. Some things like fighting games or console games, yes you do hang in person at an arcade or a tournament.

You're looking in all the wrong places. Maybe start by comparing yourself to average esports fans/players. What's your age, who are your friends, what are their hobbies?

I used to be very into professional SC2. Stopped watching after realizing Protoss was always going to be a gimmicky race.

But yeah, I very rarely ever ran into others who watched professional SC2.

It's an interesting phenomenon with Protoss, certain players are highly strategic like sOs, herO, and Classic. Part of that is the tri-partite tech structure, you go from cyber core to 3 different techs, and scouting which 1 or 2 it is is HUGE for opponents, thus the hiding/masking. Compare that to Terran, who will not have a Starport without a Factory, or Zerg, who is by its nature the least gimmicky race IMO.

You might want to check out some Brood War, it has its gimmicky strats but IMO it's less strategic than SC2...there is more "counter-play" with a "countered" unit composition/strat, especially if your early-game micro with workers and low unit counts is top notch. I'll link a great match from recently, hope you enjoy :)

https://youtu.be/oPLSoFyVjes?t=5776

It is pretty big online, but I still think it didn't take off as people expected it to. I think that is probably a thing in general that it is hard to get critical mass for new big things. The Internet hasn't really come to that yet, maybe it never will. Its hard to have ownership of something when FAANG owns everything.

That's just your personal experience. It's reflective of your personal surroundings.

Nobody I know is into baseball. Either I assume there is no real interest, or I assume it might be a reflection of my surroundings.

(I live in London, where nobody cares for baseball)

I'm in the segment of people who think baseball is extremely slow-paced and impossible to watch on TV, and yet I go to the occasional game. It's a social event more than anything else, and a way to be outdoors with friends and have a shared experience with (sometimes) thousands of other people.

I know some esport tournaments take place in sports arenas, but everything else has always been on niche TV channels and online, so the social factor is very much absent.

Well it's also a sport in it's infancy, not a more-than-a-century-old sport that's literally called "America's Pastime". Maybe when it's older than a couple of decades, the social factor of the sport will be more present. I was into eSports as a teenager, but it was very, very niche at the time, as you say. Nowadays, gaming is so commonplace with teens that a streamer like Ninja is able to reach a level of pop stardom.

I have friends who travel to the e-sports events in Sydney when it comes to town, or get together to watch DoTA TI (online, why would you rely on TV channels for this?) with their gamer friends. It's very much online, and very much a social event.

I'm not into e-sports enough to travel for it, I've considered it purely for the social aspect, but they do and have a blast.

I think Baseball is excellent to watch while in the background, e.g. in a restaurant. There is a lot of build-up when you can continue eating and during the few seconds of action you can watch the TV. And if you missed, there is enough time to show replays.

Sumo is similar to this.

174,000 people attended the most recent Intel Extreme Masters tournament in Katowice over the entire 10 day event. Nearly 1.2 million people watched the CS:GO final on live streams. Esports are legit.

https://iem.imgix.net/season-13/katowice/wp-content/uploads/...

https://news.unikrn.com/article/esl-iem-katowice-most-attend...

https://escharts.com/tournaments/csgo/iem-katowice-2019

My circle of friends are all into e-sports in one way or another; or rather high level gaming to the point they follow pros to keep up

-One has competed in multiple State-level Smash Bros Tournaments -Another has competed in some of the big SF4-SF5 and DBZ Fighterz Tournaments (Going to CEO in Orlando) -I have several friends who have achieved Master and Grandmaster in Overwatch (top 1%/ Top 500) and have played public matches with pros

I personally have gone to TI8 (Dota 2 international tournament with $25 million prizepool, the largest of any esports tournament ever) and it was the most fun I had in any live event, including traditional sports.

I don't know what to say, the interest is there, you just have to go find it.

Unless you mean "Where are the competitors" and to that I say the pool is very small since you need a combination of the following:

-A lot of free time to play

-Access to tournaments / Local community of players

-Ability to sustain your hobby / lifestyle

The third point is what kills most up and comers. Most tournaments are top heavy and you end up losing cash for participating and not getting out of pools / qualifiers and some winners only get a few thousand dollars at most for winning. Most companies have different approaches to solving this issue with League offering some form of Base salary to players, Overwatch having a Franchise system similar to Traditional sports, while Fighting Games and Dota are very much grassroots with some official tournaments sponsored by the developers.

Here's what I think -- if you work in tech you probably know multiple people who enjoy watching video-games (i.e. twitch) and at least one who has watched at least on esport-level thing (be it speedrunning, a tournament, whatever). I think those people haven't brought it up to you because they are afraid of being judged.

I think it's just not quite over the hump where it's "cool" yet. Give it 5 years, and talking about videogames at work will be as normal as talking about basketball, at least in tech sectors.

I haven't met anyone who cares about watching sport. The only times I hear about sport are when the person is actually playing it.

"E-sports is this funny thing where everyone outside of my bubble seems to talk about but I have yet to find one person in my bubble who actually gives a shit about it. Like seriously, where is the interest??"

The answer is "outside your bubble".

Pretty poor sample size; I've never met anyone interested in baseball.

Do you know anyone interested in field sports?

Me: pole vault

Most gamers don't use the term "esports" in the same way the press does. You likely know many people IRL that play or watch esports, but they just consider themselves "gamers".

A person that watches Ninja play Fortnite every once in a while while eating is participating in what the media considers "esports", but they're not going to go say it like that.

It doesn't matter if your friends are part of the audience or not.

The numbers are big enough:

https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/twitch-stats/

I'm not particularly into e-sports, with the exception of the man-vs-machine matches in Chess, Go, and now StarCraft II. Yet I did go to a few in-person livestreaming e-sport events at bars, mainly for big SC2 matches, and there were lots of people there. You just haven't seen it because you haven't sought it out, but there are e-sports Meetup groups for major cities that have thousands of members.

https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/Philadelphia-Prof...

I've never met a person IRL that gives a shit about Nascar, Tennis, or Golf, and I'm 39. Doesn't mean there isn't serious interest. This isn't new. It also doesn't mean I haven't met someone who doesn't give a shit about those sports. Just that it never came up.

http://www.espn.com/espn/story/_/page/instantawesome-leagueo...

There is massive interest world wide, and it's growing in the US. I've been several esports events, and they were filled with people, and it was a blast.

This is just an inflammatory post. eSports is already here, twitch got bought for 1b, but it's no big deal/ not real since "tomac1985" doesn't know about it.

I'm a mid-20s male e-sports fan and I promise you there are tons of us. Perhaps a big thing is lack of visibility - you might see traditional sports on TV in passing at bars, restaurants, etc, but that isn't the case for e-sports. It's a community that organizes by event and livestream schedules shared online with up to hundreds of thousands of people tuning in on twitch.

Having been through the recent birth e-sports and its growth since, to me it's remarkable the social aspect of regular sports. Especially here in Boston, big game days are a major IRL event for half the city. Jerseys walking around on the sidewalks, everyone talking about it, etc. The biggest e-sports events in contrast are in convention centers, hotel ballrooms, theaters, etc, where only if their lucky will there be any noticeable external sign.

I'm assuming your username indicates your age, 34. The average age of someone who watches e-sports in my experience is sub-25, i.e. generation Z.

There are a few coworkers at work that I talk to about e-sports, they're around 24-26 years old and grew up playing video games and not playing traditional sports.

I was in the UK recently and my Youtube recommendations showed me a live FIFA 19 tournament hosted by Sky TV. 75% of the screen showed the gameplay, while the other 25% showed PIP camera angles focused on the players.

I checked it out for a few minutes; it wasn't as boring as I thought it'd be, but after ~10 mins there really was no need to watch further. The appeal of real sports isn't just the action on the field, it's also the noise of the crowd, the in-game drama (fouls, occasional fights, bad ref decisions) and the personalities of the players.

In e-sports, the last factor is completely non-existent. Each time I looked at the PIP screens, I saw two barely moving figures with hoods over their heads blankly staring at a screen. I know, they're playing video games, what did I expect?

Went ahead and closed the tab.

Strongly disagree, but depends on the game I guess. Dota 2 players' popularity is often heavily influenced by their personality, even if that personality is largely on display between matches, and even outside of tournaments if they stream. The tournaments (the big ones at least) have a live audience (which is sometimes piped in to the stream via a mic) and commentators who help contextualize the energy of the situation. When they cut to the players in the booths, they can often be seen celebrating and full of energy.

I think the real issue is you watched competitive FIFA, which (to my knowledge) doesn't have a very big community who cares about it deeply.

since you don't know anyone into esports, it must not be popular

What's your age range? I've met a number of people interested in them in university and I haven't been going out of my way to do so.

Some of the streams of the tournaments I've encountered have millions of people watching them. The younger generation seems to like it.

Sampling bias is an even funnier thing

I've met at least one person IRL who is way more into it than I am.

Go to twitch.tv and look for a game you like to play.

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