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The recent launch of the UKeSA hasn’t gone unnoticed by the mainstream media. There is a blog post on The Guardian website asking “could competitive gaming finally be entering the mainstream?” - something to which the answer is ‘yes’, if they keep covering it!

I’ve just posted the following musing in response:

I’m all for “eSports” breaking into the mainstream. I myself have enjoyed watching a number of very close matches between extremely talented teams, with professional commentary bristling with the kind of enthusiasm you would get from Murray Walker in Formula 1. It was a very enjoyable experience and was equally as entertaining as watching a football match. What’s more it’s not a patch on the ‘rock star’ status and high production values seen for eSports in Korea (@Greg Howson: where PC gamers are sexy!).

Personally I think what eSports needs to succeed though is consistency. Traditional sports are familiar, they have rules which are infrequently changed and the games stay the same.

As it stands each year a publisher has a different title released and wants to push that, as a result the games seen in competition vary largely from year to year (CS and WC3 being pretty much the only ones to stand the test of time). The UKeSA is already talking about changing the line up and, whilst this will keep publishers happy (and give them somewhere to spend their marketing budgets), it will continue to be frustrating and confusing to Joe Bloggs sat at home watching ‘the match’.

Imagine trying to follow ‘football’ year on year if the game changed from football the first year to something akin to rugby the second, then hockey the year after that.

Once a stability in the games (and players) is established the perhaps significant leaps and bounds can be made to turn it into a ‘real’ sport the likes of football, cricket or any of the many traditional sports with televised matches and the like. 

On a separate note, and perhaps I’m being overly cynical, but I’m not sure about the people behind it decreeing they are the UK’s official governing body of eSports. It gets interesting if you do a bit of digging around on companies house. The director of the UKeSA, Spyro Korsanos, is also the director of TNWA Ltd (the company behind EnemyDown) who have, surprise surprise, been award the rights to host the first year.

UKeSA’s charter outlines it as a “not-for-profit” organisation, but I wonder how much TNWA is charging UKeSA for running the operation? It’s a cunning plan: name yourself the official UK body, which gains you credibility, generate income to a very noble ‘not for profit’ outfit, then slide the ‘profits’ out the back door to your sister company.

If it ends up being beneficial to industry and eSports in general, then fine, but I’ve seen a couple of “your questions answered” articles on UKeSA where they’ve been a little cagey about revealing the ‘hidden connection’ between the two outfits and it seems to me like there is a hidden agenda and something to hide.

Here’s a direct link to my comment.