Hell they are not making it even feel like a job… just sounding crazy.
A hobby I will say has been lost… the spirit of competition has been lost. Yet what strikes me odd is this:
Only a SELECT few ‘top players’ fueled by some onlookers, pot/stream monsters are actually making gripes and rants… all the while STILL remaining at the top of the standings. Essentially in my eyes continuing the distraction from the big picture an that is BEATING THEIR ASS and REALLY eliminating prizes of any sort.
A point I think Viscant missed on was if those select few (cause other top players havent spoke out/trolled) gripes can be easily eliminated if they actually speak to their ‘sponsor’.
On commentary - there are very few commentators worth listening to. Turn it off and watch.
On big egos: real sports, football, basketball, etc also have big egos. I think the difference is that they have agents to tell them to shut the fuck up.
It depends on what perspective you are looking at things from. From the standpoint of someone who wants the community to be more professional that simply isn’t an option because you can’t go to a sponsor and tell them to just ignore the commentators and watch the broadcast on mute. If you want sponsorship and partnerships then you need to be aiming for good or great commentary. If you don’t care about sponsorship then watching on mute is just fine, because from your view the only version of the stream that you are worried about is the version that you are watching.
I feel like the key to making any kind of peace/progress in this gridlock is for the different sides in this argument to consider each other’s point of view.
Because I’d love to see the scene come to the point where people can dedicate their lives to that which they love (playing fighting games) and make a living for it.
I mean, doesn’t it bother you that I may actually be making more money of fighting games by writing on the front page then people who dedicate their whole lives to mastering them?
Considering I’ve never seen any person who posted in here every get top 8 at a (modern) major, I don’t understand why anyone cares about sponsors. Sponsors don’t bring in casuals.
You shouldn’t work to expand a community for people who are just trying to sell sticks, shirts, and games.
It sounds like you are only talking about sponsors for individual players. Growing the community also involves increasing the number of event sponsors. The desire for streams to be more professional isn’t just so that one person can get a sponsored and have more money, it is so that fighting game events can be sponsored and people benefit all around, from the event staff, to the attendees, to the viewers at home.
selling sticks and shirts is the limitation of the current FGC because the on camera image is so unacceptable to outside sponsors that the only sponsors it gets from companies or people who are personally connected to the community. And you should support the people selling sticks, shirts and games, because they are supporting the community even when common sense says otherwise, and other sponsors would have left long ago.
Here is a example of why I care from a conversation a week before I posted this, I was talking to someone about higher production value and video at FGC events, and the person that I was talking to basically said that he was capable of doing the type of work that I was describing, but that there wasn’t enough money in doing work for the FGC. It’s not expanding the community for people to sell shirts and sticks, it expanding the community because people are still coming out of their pockets to cover basic expenses when they wouldn’t need to in non FGC situations, and because there are bigger things sitting just out of reach because people just can’t afford them out of pocket.
Also to say that more sponsors won’t bring in casuals is to ignore the jump in new player posts that happens every year after Evo.
Its funny how up in arms everyone is to save the FGC, yet there has been ample opportunities to grow the sustainability of competitive gaming in the FGC spectrum. There has been just as much backlash to keep the “grassroots” scene alive and thriving because we are scared that if grassroots scenes become eSports that blah blah blah insert bullshit reason here.
It’s funny how you guys think CEO, EVO and all these other tournaments have a long term of sustainability with little to no sponsoring from any notable company, acting like you can suck all the money out of Madcatz (who has the most to gain from the success of these tournaments through sells)…anyway I digress. TOs don’t make a profit worth noticing, and even funnier that if they do make a profit, it’ll most definitely all be put into making the next event! Which means they are trapped in an endless cycle of struggling to put on an event, that grows and grows, yet players get the same payouts COUGHEVOCOUGH
Sponsorship is determined by the professionalism of the top players. The better the player, the better the following, which means that sponsors will look to the top players to market to that following. It’s a simple equation. IF the top players aren’t professional, than sponsors won’t want to be attached to them, meaning if they go to those tournaments, the TOs will have a harder time to get those sponsors on board. Not only that, but bad tournaments make it rough too. Even worse is, the nature of the FGC already makes it difficult because of the stigma that we are racist, sexist, and a ton of other things. I highly doubt the FGC will grow in terms of paying the players, but I think the grassroots scene will be the trap the FGC is stuck in.
Let’s admire DOTA 2 and other games, where the number of professional top players does not out number the number of top players who are pricks.
So you should turn off the commentary if you’re viewing it from the perspective of someone who likes good commentary. What is the other perspective? Having FGC commentary be a unique blend of slang and super-fast information is pretty cool, but that’s rarely what you get. It’s becoming uncool very fast. I’m pretty sure the FGC is the only corner of humanity left that still says “Yolo”.
We just don’t take commentary seriously. If there is someone in the room who is bad at the game, but wants to be part of the action, just have them grab a mic and tell the stream that Ryu is a regular guy a few times.
It’s not only about appearance or attracting sponsors, our commentary does a really shit job of informing viewers of what’s happening in the match. If you want to pull the “I’m too cool and unique to conform for sponsors” card, you have to deliver extra hard on the actual product. I think there is a distinct difference between players and commentators in this sense, cause FGC players are really damn good at what they do.
I’m at work and I had a meeting turn into a discussion on why some FGC commentary is so unorganized and I didn’t start that topic. Which now leads me to an odd new conclusion that normal conversations on fighting games are drifting to how bad the commentary is to people outside of the community.
Well this was the most interesting part of my day until my car broke down on the highway.
I just got a new position and with it I have a lot of training and new things to learn. So they have someone mentoring me through the process and we had a sort of getting to know you meeting today. I mentioned earlier to someone that I was involved with gaming events so he asked me what kind of games during the meeting and I said fighting games. He said that he watched fighting game event matches on youtube and that he liked Injustice. He couldn’t remember the events of the videos or the names of the players playing in them but the two things that he did remember were the characters used how bad the commentary was. In particular how much a particular commentator wasn’t talking about the matches and how much profanity he was using and eventually the guy I was talking to said he just put the stream on mute. Keep in mind that I didn’t mention my level of involvement with the events, all I said was fighting games and it lead down a trail that ended with profanity laced commentary and him muting the video. At the time all I was thinking was “is this really happening right now? Did FGC stream commentary just come up in a work meeting?”
He didn’t remember players; I think the person he was describing was Chris G, but I threw that name out and he said he didn’t think it was him. He didn’t remember the sponsors; he was trying to remember which which team the players were on, I threw out some names but he couldn’t remember. He didn’t remember who the commentators were. He did say that the main commentator was good but that at some point a new guy jumped on and that the new guy just turned him off completely. What he did remember were the characters used and that the commentary was so bad that he had to mute it.
If you are a person who wants more sponsorship for the community then you have to realize that events where one of the only thing a viewer from outside the community remembers is how bad and profanity laced the commentary is will never attract major sponsorship.
I really think there should be a few people who are sort of “licensed” (can’t think of a better word) to do the commentary. I don’t have a problem with cursing when it makes sense to do so, but sometimes I hear commentators curse, and it’s like they’re doing it just to do it, and it makes me feel embarrassed for them. Their ability on the mic should be considered, their knowledge of the game, etc. Finding people who know about a game and can speak a few coherent sentences without a bunch of profanity in them shouldn’t be that hard to find should it?
Commentating should be a way to point out things that people who don’t play the game wouldn’t notice if they were watching, and a way to describe the action. It should be almost EDUCATIONAL! But many times, i get the sense that they just put someone on the mic because they were there and had a pulse, not because they know that much about the game in question or because they have something to say.
Jim Ross is an excellent example of great commentary. He’ll throw in anecdotal stuff here and there, but he doesn’t go off on tangents a lot of the time about things that don’t have anything to do with the match. But instead of being Jim Ross, a lot of the FGC commentary sounds more like Jerry Lawler. And Jerry Lawler style is fine if you have someone like Jim Ross to balance it out, but a lot of times, we wind up with two or more Jerry Lawlers.
It depends on what you want. Maybe you want UltraChen if you’re trying to grow the scene and get sponsors. but there’s nothing wrong with having a Dr Sub Zero if you don’t care so much about those things and the commentary reflects the community that its for.
So who are the John Madden, Pat Summerall, Marv Albert…etc of commentators. This is the third time I have heard this complaint/preference of who commentates etc.
EVO is the largest fighting game event in the world and there’s no profanity laced commentary during the broadcast. So where’s the big name sponsors dropping cash at? This is why I don’t agree with the notion that companies are going to start raining money on us once the community is squeaky clean. It’s more complicated than that, and it’s really up to the organizers to attract those sponsors.
It’s also up to the broadcasters to control who is on the mic, which they usually do for the most part. Or an event organizer will fly in someone like UltraChen to just do stream commentary.
But it’s not like we need to get rid of one for the other. Both can coexist. Let the viewer decide what they want to watch.
The community needs to unify before we even get anywhere. The “FGC” is comprised of many communities following certain games or developers. It really doesn’t surprise me of the state the FGC is in now because of this fact.
EVO is one event once a year, but it is setting a course for itself. EVO is on a track to better sponsors than anything else in the community. It’s not going to be an instant reward. You don’t get sponsors the day you stop cursing, you get them on the day that people are finally convinced the cursing won’t start back up. I don’t think even EVO is at the point where it has been separated from those things for a long enough period to gain sponsor trust yet.
Which is why I am saying that other people who want to pursue this road need to get started now, because it won’t happen after one tournament, it is going to take a string of consecutive and consistently professional tournaments to gain trust. You need that buffer between what you are asking someone to sponsor now and what you used to do that no sponsor would get near; and if you are only doing one event a year that buffer could take years for you to achieve.
Actually unification seems to be what is screwing this community up. Read through the responses to this thread. Neither side is wrong, but a person thinks who every sponsor the FGC loses is a good thing and a person trying their hardest to attract sponsors clearly shouldn’t be working on the same events if they are actively working to hinder the other person’s goals.
I feel like I have made a bunch of posts in a row about being more professional, but I really don’t think the opposing view is wrong. I went to an unstreamed casual session last week and everything I mentioned at in the beginning of the article was true. It wasn’t anywhere close to being professional, it was loud there was a ton of cursing, and trash talk and I had a great time. That stuff is great and I have no desire to get rid of it, but at the same time I also realize that if you keep putting that on stream, we will be still have pots that are mostly entry fee, and still not be able to pay for the things we need to grow in 5-10 years.
Why not have a criteria for being a commentator. Seems like now if you’re a top player or an OG you can hop on the mic for free as long as Yipes or some other VIP don’t need to be on it.
I think the problem is that too many folk wanna copy Rockefeller without realizing that he was more than just dirty jokes. Push cone to shove, Rock could talk technical about 3rd Strike if he needed to.
And that’s what I had to explain to this person in the meeting at work yesterday, and on numerous other occasions. People outside of the community don’t realize that people can literally just walk up to the stream mic and jump on in certain cases. They are under the impression that the people on the mic are all professionals who have been certified in some way as qualified to commentate because that what they are used to from other broadcasted events. FGC commentary looks so much worse when you compare it to professional paid commentary than it does if you look at it for what most of it actually is, which is regular guy talk with a camera pointed at it. Again it is matter of prospective and the perspective that someone coming in blind has is that a broadcast event will have professional commentary, and then they are disappointed by what they see based on what they expected to see.