Hello I am a law student who recently found out that Esports is serious business and lawyers are involved. I even saw the website of a guy who exclusively does Esports law. I have been dissapointed to find that the FGC is not largely involved in the Esports scene (for a variety of reasons). As a Shooting Game fan (games like touhou and battle garegga) and a 2d Fighter fan (games like Guilty Gear and King of Fighters), I have very little interest in Esports. I would like to know if a modicum of the success afforded to the Esports industry can be replicated among in the FGC.
So a couple of questions.
If the FGC were to grow/ get healthier/ become more profitable, what would that look like?
Are there reasons outside of corporate sponsership / money in general that contribute to the tournaments in the FGC not being as big as the Esports events?
Could the consolidation of entities that organize tournaments help in the overall structure and reliability of the FGC’s tournaments?
Is it possible to host a strictly online tournament (eliminating the cost of the venue and travel for people) that fans watch via stream? Is this already being done?
I am trying to find out how I can lend my legal talents to the FGC and help it flurish in the same way that Esports has. I may not be able to, but I would love to try if its feasible. I have myown ideas, but I would love to hear your ideas.
If this is the wrong place to post this, I would kindly ask the mods to place it where it belongs.
It would depend on the tournament. Some “official tournaments will probably be very different. Things like Poongko’s shirt moments probably won’t happen.” Smaller and local tournaments will probably remain the same with the active focus on the community aspect. Higher prize pools will probably be a thing though. And more rules about people taking showers.
Well in general, fighting games are a niche genre compared to other genres. You don’t really see a large casual playerbase in fighting games like you do in other games. We are opening up though and with more games providing content, things can change. The FGC is growing. Evo was streamed on ESPN. SFV went to the White House.
Can you elaborate on this?
Yes it is possible. A few conditions need to be met first though. The game needs an active online community obviously and it must have solid netcode that allows online play to feel like offline. Killer Instinct is a great example of this. The 8 Bit Beatdown tournament series is an online tournament series for Killer Instinct. It is made possible because of the games amazing netcode.
there are things that are easily explained in shooting games and visually that fighting games would have a hard time replicating
yes street fighter was shown on ESPN but its hard to delve into the nuances in it to show why fuddo was winning with mika
or why inflitration decided to take a more zone based /runaway approach
i supposed some mentalities you could relate to boxers like floyd or something but
thats a small part of the answer to your sponsorship/ viewing question
If it were more profitable, then it would have more big publishers/investors trying to get in. There is talk about Riot Games making a fighting game with Seth Killian and his team, so keep an eye out for that. But honestly, the FGC as we know it and the FGC that comes from a LoL Fighter with millions of casual players would be very different. It would be extremely toxic and full of scrubs whining endlessly about stuff that would have been laughed at before. And they would bleed over into other fighters for sure, which would increase their numbers and popularity, but also cause a lot of conflict. Basically, if a fighter gets that level of mainstream esports appeal, I see the FGC becoming less healthy and very unpleasant. I mean, I already see this with SFV all over the place, and SFV is small potatoes as far as esports goes.
The big names in esports are big because they were popular PVP games. MKX sold pretty well, but many people just bought it for the casual offline experience and the fatalities. SFV sells okay, but not enough to be a serious esports contender.
I don’t see why they would go through so much trouble. The FGC already has quite a few structured, reliable tournaments. The question is really about how to get the big names out there. It’s not worth the plane ticket or gas money to go after a $300 pot in a lot of cases.
Yes, but fighters online are different than they are offline, and people in the FGC usually consider the online experience to be second rate and flawed. Online tournaments do exist, but I personally don’t take them seriously.
My idea is to not focus on esports for fighting games. I just see people getting greedy over it, and that leading to more crap that I personally don’t want to see in the FGC. I think Smash being allowed at EVO is an example of that. Tournament operators get more money and the rest of us have to lose EVO spots to Smash games. And now there is a bunch of resentment between smashers and us because of how the last EVO went down.
Hey guys, thanks a bunch for the thoughtful responses. I will keep them in mind.
Sure.
So instead of one person having to learn how to operate a tourney everytime they want to start a new one (lets say in podunk where tourneys are rare), there is a sharing of information, business connections, and experience by tourney organizers. If we asked tourney organizers to band together and still have their events, but work together for the betterment of the FGC under a common organization, would that have a positive effect on the FGC?
If there was a Non-profit organization, or a benefit corporation that was made specifically to oversee the health of the FGC, would organizers buy in? So the organization is like Game Corp, a non-profit organization with the purpose of spreading and sharing the culture of the Fighting Game Community. Game Corp has volunteers/ employees that work together, tournament organizers, to ensure that the FGC culture stays strong by constantly putting on events. So instead of 15 different people independantly going to a sponser like nintendo of america and soliciting money, they now have the power and legitimacy of a collection of organizers all approaching nintendo of america at one time with a … somewhat united front. So instead of 15 different organizers trying to vy for attention of people to attend their individual tournaments, we have a collection of organizers all promoting for 15 different tourneys all put on by Game Corp. Instead of a gal in Jacksonville Fl trying to learn how to set up a tourney by herself she literally starts a franchise of Game Corp and can hit the ground running with a reliable name behind her and a blueprint she can use or not use to bring gaming culture to the masses. People can still make money, employees / volunteers can still be paid, but because they are under one banner they share the risks and benefits.
Now my biggest problem is I have never hosted a tourney, so I have no idea what the problem of organizers are. I do not know if consolidation will help or hurt the FGC, I’m just a filthy casual. But I do know that most people do not love fighting games because they have never seen them. Bring the people B. Jenet, Dio, Ken, Jago, Johnny Cage, Haomaru, Shermie, Devil Jin, and Captain Falcon and let them come to their own conclusions. I’m sure they will love theses characters and more. I am just curious if this is something that is worth trying.
This is a really quick answer. There are more things rolling around in my head, I just tryed to pick a couple examples of how the consolidation of organizers might help strengthen the FGC.
Honestly we are where Football and Pro Wrestling were before they got big but there are a few big obstacles that will take more creativity to overcome, many of you big professional sports are for the the most part the same game they have been for decades with only minor differences and the sport of Chess has been the same for hundreds of years. Each brand of Fighting Game reinvents itself every few years Street Fighter 2, 3 ,4 and 5 are all vastly different games. This will always be the case with Fighting video games because the company want to stay in business and sell copies of the games. Football sells access to watch the game not the game itself. Every attempt to collect money from viewers has failed so far.
As far as getting the different TO’s to work together Capcom has been working on that with Capcom cup, and other companies are starting the same thing, but on the level I am at with as a tournament organizer (I do two weeklies (Walraven Weekly Detroit:Mitten Masher Monday’s & Walraven Weekly East Lansing:Lanbats) a Monthly (Midwest Monthly) and a new Two Day annual event (Michigan Masters) and there is not a lot of money in it at our current level. We would need a real reason to submit to the leadership of another entity.
There’s good and there’s bad that comes with e-sports. The good is more sponsors, more players, more money, and more games with more support. The bad is that you’re looking at maybe losing out on a lot of what made the FGC the FGC before big money rolled in with its corporate image. The thuggery meme only happened because Capcom decided to clean up the FGC for the cameras, with mixed results.
Personally, I think we’re doing way better as a whole post-09 than we did when people played 3rd Strike for a decade, so obviously eyes on the scene is a good thing. But at the same time, you don’t want e-sports telling us we can’t have shit like Viscant vs. LTG or SonicFox vs. Perfect Legend on big streams because it’s too much thuggery and would hurt the brand.
As for organizing TOs, it’s probably a good idea for the larger ones to create more of a unified ruleset, but for the smaller ones it might be more hassle than its worth.
It sounds like a good concept but it might have some unintended consequences. Let’s say some random guy just wants to host a tournament. He would have to deal with the hassle, paperwork, and all that other stuff to get into Game Corp and there is a chance Game Corp might not agree. He might start the tournament no one might show up because they question the legitimacy of the tournament. Legitimacy might not be the right word but you get the idea. It benefits established tournaments but ruins ones just for one and set up for fans. I think that online tournaments are the future. The main factor is netcode. I’ll bring up Killer Instinct again. It is on a console that everyone hates, only there, and had a shaky start. It had insanely solid netcode though. One of the best in fighting games. This allows the average player to join a tournament from their home. This opens them up for the experience. It isn’t the exact same but it can hook people. As a result, some might even want go to the real deal with offline tournaments. I feel that things would be nice if online tournaments have incentives that encourage people to go to offline tournaments. Think of, each time you win a tournament, you get a certain amount of points depending on where you place. If you have the highest amount of points at the end of [insert time], we will sponsor you to go to [insert big tournament here]. If you are 2nd, we will give you 50% of a trip to go to said tournament. And so on. Maybe even some other prizes. Maybe make points a type of currency where you can redeem for rewards like gift cards.