{"id":23738,"date":"2014-07-20T15:05:31","date_gmt":"2014-07-20T20:05:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=23738"},"modified":"2014-07-21T04:37:59","modified_gmt":"2014-07-21T09:37:59","slug":"dota-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=23738","title":{"rendered":"DOTA 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last weekend I watched a Starcraft 2 tournament where players were competing for about $24,000 in prizes. Note that the money was spread out over the players. The champion<\/a> only won like 8,000. A lot of people went home with just $200. It’s sort of sad how small the payouts are. The tournament was held in Atlanta. These players came from all over the world, and they only get a few hundred bucks? That won’t even cover the airfare, much less hotel, food, and general pain-in-the-assery of long-distance travel. The vast majority of the contestants practiced for months, traveled thousands of miles, fought hard, and ended up with almost nothing to show for it. <\/p>\n

(Even if airfare, hotel, and food were all paid for by the event, $200 is still a ridiculous payout for a tournament that takes that kind of investment of time. And yes, there are other tournaments. But if you look at the number of tournaments and the typical payout to mid-range players, the numbers still look pretty sad.) <\/p>\n

starcraft2_redbull_battlegrounds.jpg<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

It’s not that I think anyone owes these kids more money. I mean, you have to make do with the sponsorship you have. If sponsors only want to give $24,000, then the players can decide for themselves if that money is worth fighting over. It’s just that this seems like bad news for the sport. This isn’t a viable career path for someone, even short-term. Not in the way that traditional sports are. Regular sports make pretty good money. (The league minimum for a rookie NFL player is in the neighborhood of $400,000.) And even if you don’t go pro, playing sportsball in college often means you don’t have to pay for tuition. But StarCraft 2 players? Nobody is paying for their schooling, and it looks like everyone but the top players will probably struggle to attain minimum wage status. And you’ll likely get “too old” and wash out at 27. This suggests that StarCraft 2 pro league will never be more than a niche sportWe’re not going to argue about calling this a “sport”. That’s the most convenient word to use in this context, and I don’t care if it matches your mental or dictionary definitions of the word. Take it easy.<\/span> pursued by people who love the game enough to put up with the extreme opportunity cost of going pro.<\/p>\n

But this weekend I saw a bit of the DOTA 2 tournament The International<\/a>. Ten million dollars in prizes? Now that<\/em> sounds like pro-league money! This feels like a REAL e-sport.Whatever that means.<\/span>. <\/p>\n


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dota2_1.jpg<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

I’m having a miserable time making sense of it all. They even had a newbie stream<\/a> to help out scrubs like me, but it wasn’t enough. I still spent a lot of time lost. The presenters really did try to stop and explain things to newcomers when the game was slow, but once combat started they would often slip into excited jargon and I’d lose track of what was going on. <\/p>\n

I can’t believe this<\/em> game is the big strategy esports title. With Starcraft 2 you at least get some kind of frame of reference: You can probably figure out what marines do. You can look at a unit that looks like a jet and figure out it probably flies. Same goes for units with flapping wings. While you’ll have no idea why siege tanks are bad against zerglings, you at least know what tanks are<\/em>. The concept of Harvest raw materials » build units » fight war » crush enemy base » win<\/em> is an abstraction of real-world activity that’s familiar to all of us. If nothing else you can look in the corner of the screen and note that since the blue player covers half the board and the red player is fighting to hold their little patch in the corner, red probably isn’t winning. Sure, you might not know why<\/em> red is losing, but at least you have some kind of framework while you figure out the units. <\/p>\n

But DOTA 2? I don’t understand how anyone can learn this game. I mean, people clearly do, but it must be a long road. Sure, the lane-pushing idea is a little less obvious than warfare as a gameplay concept, but the big problem here seems to be the number of units. There are over 100 heroes<\/a> available in the game, each with their own abilities and quirks. Each game features 10 of the heroes (5 on each team) and you have to understand how they work, how they’re used, and what their powers are before you can make sense of any particular match. I watched several games, and it was all confusion to me. What makes a Beastmaster different from a Brewmaster? Why would one run from the other? And hang on, which of these jumbled shapes is which? I can tell a space marine from a space bug in Starcraft 2, even if I don’t know which one is stronger. But in DOTA 2 I literally can’t even tell the units apart, which means I can’t follow the commentary, which means I can’t learn. <\/p>\n

dota2_2.jpg<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

I’m not demanding that DOTA 2 players justify their game or anything. There’s nothing wrong<\/strong> with the game. I’m just surprised that something this complex has risen to such prominence. It’s clear that if I’m going to get into this game, I’m going to have to put some work into it. <\/p>\n

I do wonder if this isn’t partly Blizzard’s doing. A few years ago, Starcraft 1 was THE esports game. Then Blizzard locked down their platform for Starcraft 2. Steep retail price. No Steam versionOr better yet, a version that’s just disk based and not tied to any DRM. But why demand a unicorn when you can’t even find a horse?<\/span>. You must be logged in to play the single-player content. No more LAN games. Meanwhile, DOTA 2 is free-to-play. It’s just easier for the uninitiated to discover DOTA 2 on Steam than for them to get Starcraft 2 through Battle.Net. Sure, Battle.Net is popular, but nothing is popular like Steam. It’s the difference between charging $60 for something at K-Mart versus giving it away at Wal-Mart. There’s no way that doesn’t end up crushingly one-sided.<\/p>\n

It’s easier for people to discover and play DOTA 2 in a consumer sense. Which means both the audience and the pool of potential players is larger. Which makes it more attractive to sponsors. Which makes the payouts bigger. Which makes the sport more famous, attracts still more players and viewers, and elevates the production values of the tournaments. Which makes them more fun to watch and even more attractive to more sponsors. DOTA 2 is enjoying a feedback loop where it’s succeeding due to its success, which will make it more successful in the future. I can’t prove it, but I really do think this glory and cultural ubiquity could have belonged to Starcraft 2 if Blizzard had done things differently. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last weekend I watched a Starcraft 2 tournament where players were competing for about $24,000 in prizes. Note that the money was spread out over the players. The champion only won like 8,000. A lot of people went home with just $200. It’s sort of sad how small the payouts are. The tournament was held […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[120],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23738","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-videogames"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23738","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23738"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23738\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23738"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23738"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23738"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}