Business reason?
Having an audience and having the e sports be popular ist much better for marketing than s e sports noone cares about.
But as i said before my post was never about that. It was about why it fails as an e sport.
So if you want to discuss something else find someone who wants to talk about your subject instead of interjecting yourself into something different.
Doing that costs money. Which has to be balanced with the perceived returns. Which is why its important, even if you don’t realize it.
I hate to break it to you but noone cares about an obscure mediocre war video game. Its a very niche game where 70% of its users provide zero revenue and have limited engagement with it. They aren’t going to sit for hours and watch other people playing the game. It doesn’t matter how much they make it into something you personally want to watch.
How is hosting a tournament with 50 viewers profitable if you can just sell camo packs instead?
Both true and not true. Lots of people DO watch their favorite Twitch streamers just play WT for hours and yap, far far more than the eSports stuff. So there is evidence there is a latent market there.
I do think the current eSports version of the game is pretty unwatchable. I don’t think trying to form the audience into camps around a few elite semipro teams (their most recent approach) is working well. They don’t have the third-party corporate sponsorship to make that model work, for reasons beyond their control, and it’s very hard for a game company to keep going if it’s self-funded.
Ideas they could try and haven’t tried yet:
A grudge match series between twitch CCs. Just put them in in a 1v1 or 2v2 format in a little annual ladder.
Focus the streaming on the wacky events that people intuitively get: tank football and Talespin and Halloween races. Make actual content about the apex-level events of those. I’d much rather watch a good Po-2 race than play one, which I can’t say for regular tank RB, and I don’t think I’m alone.
Restructure other tournament events to all have progressive stages and open qualifiers at accessible times like Apex Predator did, to benefit from the bottom up, never-played diamond in the rough personal stories, Ready Player One style, as opposed to pulling up the ladder to promote the elite teams. They made a start of this before with Rankings Challenge, and again with this weekend, I think they should basically only do stuff like that now.
Focus the streaming on historically themed contests for the military history buffs. Make it like a Time Commanders, maybe, but with those established teams but giving them novel lineups they’ve never seen before… “Team, your challenge today is… Sink the Scharnhorst with Swordfish” and have them come up with a plan for that in real time and see if it works. Or “Mig vs Sabre, watch top players refight the Korean War” Or whatever.
More live spectacle to reach outside the niche and less about the regular gameplay, which yeah, likely will never broaden their audience. All this eSport skin loot crate and twitch drop stuff, if that’s all it’s supporting, is essentially wasted money they could be spending elsewhere.
So let’s talk about the economics of this a bit, which is the real reason they don’t do something different here, like I suggested above. They keep this going so it’s obviously close to self-sustaining at this point.
The key revenue generator here is the Twitch ads on their channels. That generates enough revenue to pay for a guy to run the Discord and an artist to do some slipshod fictional camoes. They generate the audience to drive those numbers up with in-game currency and other items, for both players and viewers. So it’s converting in-game goods to a real currency stream. Basically we the viewers get goods for pretending to be Twitch viewers they can then sell to advertisers.
The only way this falls apart is if the fiction is blown and actual advertisers realize everyone’s only watching this on a spare computer or another browser tab to get the two days premium and boosters. Which is why they have to make it into a very formulaic, advertiser-understandable bog-standard eSport event, with fixed team identities and other eSports tropes, and can’t really do anything creative with the format. Don’t ripple the waters, just take the money from the dupes (who are mostly social media advertising specialists who know the deal and are duping the companies they take money from, to be fair). The perfect self-licking ice cream cone that is WT eSports.
That only works if the advertises won’t wise up or if they all get spots in the twitch drop time window.
The question us, if it is. More lucrative than just selling the drops for GE? Since opportunity costa are a thing in economics. This model doesn’t just have to be better than nothing. It needs to be more profitable than just selling the items.
It relies on the fiction/illusion that the internet you gift to them by watching their Twitch is totally free. I’m not ever going to pay real money for the GE to buy 2 boosters, a day or so of premium and a few WB for a fictional skin (which is what I will get for “watching” the esports this weekend). There is no way they could ever incentivize me to do that. I will however, burn whatever quantity of MB it takes to get the same thing this weekend, because of my “unlimited data plan” or whatever hiding the real costs of the gift of my notional eyeballs for them to resell.
Again, they wouldn’t keep doing if it wasn’t self-sustaining, and produced a real revenue stream for them today. In that sense it has been a small success for them, as mid as it seems to you and me. But it’s not meant as an audience-broadener, which would involve spending money to reach new markets. It’s meant to monetize the captive playerbase they already have by reselling our engagement.
Which was my point. They need to find players who have “character” and can be entertaining.
Just like on UToobs. There are hundreds of CCs who post vids of gameplay, but only the ones who make it interesting to watch like OddBawZ, DollarPlays, etc. to make it entertaining to watch. People with that “gift” can get 10K ppl to watch paint dry.
I was talking about the opportunity costa of gaijin.
Yes not everyone would pay for the drops. But some would. How many?
Also advertiser do know how many people reacted to their ads especially online. so if there is little engagement, these advertisement spaces will devalue.
This assumes they are being logical and effective. Since gaijin even screws up simple math, i highly doubt they will go the optimal way.
Watching these missile combat matches is incredibly boring.
I want to see dogfights, with pure gun combat.
Isn’t anyone confused by the nazzi symbols on the IS-3, which the Russian army is now using as a symbol of aggression? 🤦
Umm… where do you see those???
Are you blind or the big letter V on the entire tower is not visible at all, in the SS it was the chevron of an old soldier and also had several additional designations, read the history. Now it is a symbol of aggression.
Lmao! Yes, it could stand for that, but it’s also a part of the English alphabet. And that’s much more likely what that is for XD. V also stands for victory XD
I highly doubt that Gaijin added it for that purpose…