Esports Gets Olympic Torched
The esports industry is on fire. Not fire as a metaphor for acceleration mind you, fire as in conceivably burning down to the foundation. Layoff after layoff has swept the industry on the back of investor money pulling back from the ecosystem, leaving journalistic coverage stripped to nigh absent and high-profile cracks in the management of marquee esports organizations becoming all the more apparent.
For an industry concentrating on playing video games, it has never been without a fair bit of drama.
While things are not yet so dire as previous industry crashes just a little over a decade ago (~2008), the industry has fallen on some hard times, or at the very least in desperate need of a win. The announcement of long-percolating plans for the next stage of Olympic esports events could have been just the ticket, and yet the actual reveal had all the appearance of being perfectly designed to drive your standard esports enthusiast absolutely insane.
The 2023 Olympic Esports Series was designed to build off of the Olympic Virtual Series which debuted in 2021 just ahead of the 2020 Olympic games in Tokyo (recall that the Tokyo games were offset due to the pandemic). The virtual series were proposed as part of larger strategic plans to continue “collaboration with the gaming and esports communities to create new opportunities for players and fans alike.” The potential misstep in terms of reception of the “Esports” series is that these very fans are the type that will load the word “esports” with a lot of meaning.
The 2021 “Virtual Series” was just that - virtual versions of physical sports (motorsport, cycling, baseball, sailing, and rowing) one might see at the Olympic level - the IOC has not been unclear about their intentions to largely focus their efforts on virtual analoges of more “traditional” forms of competition. Perhaps the single biggest cause of misaligned expectations with the “Esports Series” was staking a claim in the broader world of “esports,” and yet the competitive lineup for the “Esports Series” fall very much in line with previously established “Virtual Sports:”
Archery (Tic Tac Bow)
Baseball (WBSC eBASEBALL™: POWER PROS)
Chess (Chess.com)
Cycling (Zwift)
Dance (Just Dance)
Motor sport (Gran Turismo)
Sailing (Virtual Regatta)
Tennis (Tennis Clash)
Taekwondo (Virtual Taekwondo)
It may seem like a small thing to nitpick on the usage of “esports” rather than “virtual sports,” but the competitive landscape of esports has social and cultural anchors in competition within video games that are most decidedly not always “virtual sports.” It’s entirely likely that had this series been labeled as the “2023 Olympic Virtual Sports Series” it would have been regarded with the same disappointed yet hopeful viewpoint more traditional esports fans had towards the previous virtual series: A potential step in the right direction for codifying virtual competitions within the Olympics (with some potential for a medaled virtual event as soon as the 2028 games), but nothing that was esports.
The announcement of the “Esports Series” has essentially confirmed that this distinction between “virtual” competition and “esports” was non-existent for the IOC. And yet the reaction among the “gaming and esports communities” the IOC was looking to collaborate with has been swift and profoundly negative. Notable voices within the esports industry lambasted this series as yet another example of “suits” who don’t understand esports looking to capitalize upon the industry, with more than a few landing on the assessment that “the Olympics needs esports more than esports needs the Olympics.”
It is true that viewership of the Olympics, like most traditional sports, has been falling off in recent years. The most recent Winter and Summer games were some of the least viewed ever - some of this can be chalked up to media fragmentation and linear TV rights holders attempting to craft streaming options to appeal to the growing legions of “cord cutters/cord nevers” who eschew traditional TV/cable broadcasts, only to yield an extremely poor viewing experience. These media behaviors tend to fall along generational lines where younger audiences are consuming less traditional sports content because this content is only available through media channels which they don’t use. From a business of media standpoint, the superpower of esports has always been the capability to reach young audiences on their terms, in ways that are uniquely and natively digital.
In this sense the Olympics could certainly benefit from the injection of young fans that esports could provide. And yet, it would be a step too far to say that esports is doing just fine on its current trajectory - if we take the selection of games by the IOC on good faith (a stretch, given some questionable ties between the developer of some of the titles selected), we have a pretty good accounting of known challenges facing growth in the modern esports industry:
Viewability: While esports fans might have been delighted if, say, League of Legends (LoL) was part of the Olympic Esports Series, games like LoL (if not most popular esports) are damn-near unwatchable by those who are not already invested fans or who play the games in question with some regularity.
Esports are not ultra friendly to new fans, and in many cases rely on the pipeline of game players converting to game viewers. Had the IOC selected more standard esports titles they might have attracted established esports fans, but would almost certainly have not minted new esports fans out of existing Olympics enthusiasts (and its questionable whether existing esports fans would have conversely converted to Olympics enthusiasts). In short, it would have yielded an Olympic event exclusively for esports enthusiasts as they currently exist - such an outcome is not without value, but likely not the goal of the IOC in the long-term.
Alignment with Traditional Sports: Which begs the question…what is the long term strategic goal in aligning electronic entertainment with the most prestigious level of physical competitions? The push towards titles which have comparable, physical/traditional outlets makes some degree of sense in terms of comparability to the core competitive aspects of the Olympics. However, like F1 races being run virtually in lieu of actual F1 races in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s not clear whether fans of the more “traditional” competitions will readily onboard to the virtual equivalents simply because the physical variants are unavailable.
Meanwhile, it’s fairly well known that the IOC has pushed back on so-called “killer-games” (e.g. first person shooters) which are “contradictory to the Olympic values and cannot therefore be accepted,” thereby obviating some of the most popular titles and genres in modern esports. Not entirely unlike some of the first forays of taking esports to traditional TV circa 2006 (which, not coincidentally, immediately preceded the industry crash), trying to adapt traditional competitive sensibilities to esports has the potential to yield a product which alienates the existing fanbase of virtual competitions, doesn’t have a clear path to creating a new fanbase by appealing to fans from the traditional side of media, and ultimately leaves open the question to whom the offering will appeal to.
Representation: If nothing else, the inclusion of mobile titles in the Olympic Esports series put a small feather in the cap of the emerging mobile esports scene while addressing a persisting issues with esports. Many of the titles in the professional scene requires access to high end equipment which may not be available to all competitors, leading the dominant scene to be historically entrenched around those with privilege and exclusionary to any who don’t conform with the typical “gamer” profile (e.g. excluding minorities, non-males, etc.). As noted, while the selection of titles is somewhat suspect, some have pay-to-win mechanics, and not all are as universally accessible (Grand Turismo, Just Dance, Zwift, etc.), the emphasis on mobile games tends to fit with how media like video games are consumed through a global lens better than most mainstream esports competitions.
Licensing: And finally, on the note of mainstream esports, suffice it to say that the landscape is basically defined by the complex patchwork of rights holders across a variety of games, organizing entities, competitive teams, and otherwise. No one owns the rights to the game of (say) tennis, but legions of entertainment lawyers are very much standing by to assert rights against any number of popular esports titles. The modern esports scene doesn’t have anything like a joint Olympics for precisely this reason - it’s near-impossible to unite a fragmented business landscape towards a common event or cause when incentives and motivation for doing so are profoundly varied.
In no way should it be interpreted that I’m defending the approach of the IOC - like, yes, the assumption that the Olympic Esports Series was almost certainly put together by a group of folks who didn’t have a lot of experience or knowledge in what might otherwise be considered esports is almost certainly correct. I’m also firmly in the camp of folks who believe that esports needs to stop basing its potential for legitimacy on being analogous to traditional sports, and have noted that the predominance of traditional sports business practices within esports has been a mixed bag, at best.
However, I also believe that the response to the IOC from the esports industry, ranging from arrogant to flippant, is shortchanging what should otherwise be a great opportunity for self-reflection. Esports, as an industry, is not doing great - revenue models are being pressured by viewership growth that isn’t scaling to the extent that investors had promised (hence why many of them have since cut-and-run). Understanding some of the broader challenges within esports almost makes the decision by the IOC seem reasonable - if we’re spending more time lamenting about the old fashioned approach of the IOC rather than thinking about why that was the preferred approach, these same challenges and blockers will exist in perpetuity.
If the reveal of the Olympic Esports Series was not the win the esports industry was wanting, it might just be the mirror it has been needing.