Photo by ELLA DON on Unsplash
In the early months of 2020, after decades of relative obscurity at the periphery of the burgeoning video game industry, the international esports community finally broke through to achieve a modicum of mainstream appeal and acceptance.
Now this market is growing at an extraordinary pace that has it fit to break the $3 billion mark by as early as 2027. Likewise, OddsChecker — which provides odds and offers on esports events — has found esports to be the fastest growing sport by betting volume it covers globally. In so doing, it significantly outpaces rival legacy concerns such as T20 cricket and MMA.
Esports Boom Was Timely and Inevitable
Analysing the why of esports’ emergence is relatively simple to track. After all, a generation of young professionals who grew up during the golden age of the 90s console wars now have ample discretionary income to back their favourite form of media. Nor do they have the hang-ups around accessing and enjoying online content, or competition, that non-digital natives remain burdened with.
If anything, a more apt question to unpack is ‘why not sooner?’ Simply put, one can say that the technology simply wasn’t there before. Esports requires reliable and widespread high speed internet connections. It also depends on the use of powerful gaming hardware, the costs of which only came down to an accessible level in the 2010s.
From 2015 to 2020, Google Trends searches for the query ‘esports’ grew by over 500%, demonstrating a sustained organic growth and buzz surrounding the industry.
The economic obstacles that hampered the smooth operation of many conventional sporting schedules just happened to play neatly into the hands of esports and its remote-format, but the ‘boom’ was going to happen sooner or later either way.
Keeping Pace With Technology Essential
As the market continues to grow, a spectre is looming over the biggest and best established esports today. This is the challenge of age and competition. Unlike soccer, for example, an esport can progressively fall behind modernisations and features gamers find crucial to keep playing.
Photo by Alexander Jawfox on Unsplash
This is not to suggest that classic esports lack longevity, one need only look to the well attended Street Fighter II tournaments happening around the world today—a game released some 32 years ago — to put the lie to that assessment.
But headline esports increasingly need to keep pace with advancements that safeguard their validity as competitive platforms. This is precisely what happened in 2016, when Dota 2 was ported to a new engine to bring its underlying design up to date without compromising the front-end user experience. Now Valve are at it again, this time with the world’s most popular tactical-FPS, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.
Counter-Strike 2 Enters Public Beta After Three Year’s Development
News of a major overhaul or even sequel to CS:GO has been circulating for years, thus the arrival of CS2 did not, in itself, surprise fans of the series. What did strike some though, was how far Valve went to safeguard the integrity of the Counter-Strike esports experience, while simultaneously going above and beyond in adding new modernisations and quality of life improvements to the game.
These include the introduction of new dynamic smoke grenade effects. In CS:GO, smokes are a crucial area-control utility. However, issues with smoke effects clipping through walls, and even rendering differently for each player, made them unreliable at the top flight of the game.
In CS2, smoke grenades are now dynamic — they interact with, and are shaped volumetrically by the environment they expand into. What’s more, players can now shoot through, or even clear smoke using conventional grenades, changing the meta significantly.
Another key advancement is the release of new ‘sub-tick rate’ servers. These refresh much faster than CS:GO’s antiquated 64hz servers, and are thought to update the game state at a frequency in line with the current standard of 128hz. This ensures that CS2 is adequately future-proofed and can continue as the gold standard for high speed, accurate twitch-based gunplay contests.
These changes, which may on the face of it seem subtle, have in a single stroke largely fixed all the issues and criticisms players and analysts alike levelled at the decade old title. Suffice to say, news of CS:GO’s inevitable demise before newer challenger titles, such as VALORANT, may prove to have been greatly exaggerated.
This article was provided by Ryan Joseph G. Medalla
