Saturnine Saturday

Friday was a blur.

Global Kids year end project.

GTA IV Trailer 2. Shows more in-game footage.

The Imagineer discusses machinima.

Amped talks about the recent WSVG in Louisville. Some good news (Guitar Hero II) and some bad news (poorly organized CS event and WoW arena events).

Esports - Bigger And Better?

Some interesting news recently on the eSports front.

The CPL (Cyberathlete Professional League) has partnered with Sierra Entertainment for the 2007 World Tour, bringing two games: Fear on the Xbox, and World in Conflict on the PC with stops in Europe, Australia, and South and North America and a total purse of $500 K (GotFrag, Amped). After years of supporting games like Quake and Counterstrike the move was routinely ripped apart by the eSports community and GotFrag had a satirical post announcing the demise of the CPL. Interview with Angel Munoz at Amped.

The reason is likely the 800 pound gorilla in eSports now, the CGS (Championship Gaming Series) which has sponsors with big pockets, TV coverage via DirectTV, and $5 million in salaries and purses. The suite of games are more along the lines of what is typically found, although their league structure (each team will have players for each of the games - selected by a draft) is rather bizarre. Competition from CGS and WSVG is putting severe pressure on the CPL.

Gaming News announces a dedicatedUK eSports television show XLEAGUE.TV. Not sure yet if this is part of a league, tournament, or just free for all competition. There's a large selection of games there, including some for PS3.

Personally I think having 20 or more games spread across four or five leagues/tournaments is not going to do a damn bit of good for eSports. Games like Counterstrike require some dedication on the part of the audience (and the broadcasters) in order to get up to speed on the complexities of the game. Changing the games every year in order to make the sponsors happy
is just short-sighted. In a few years I suspect there will only be a single league with a monopoly on eSports.

WSVG Brings WoW To Esports

Hmmm...massive multiplayer roleplaying online esports game?

WSVG announces one of their games for the upcoming year will be World of Warcraft 3v3 arena battles (best of 5 - via Amped). Interesting choice, but so are the others on their list: Q4, Guitar Hero? and Friday Night Round 3 (a boxing game) as primary games with $750 K in prizes. I suppose they are really differentiating themselves in the somewhat crowded esports scene. This announcement comes hot on the heels of MLG's PR on their $1 million prize structure for Halo2 and Rainbow 6.

In fact along with the olympics of esports, the WCG, and the newcomer CGS, there's actually not a lot of overlap in the games selected. Is saturation about to hit? How many video game tournaments and different games can the public actually support?

eSports Update

What's going on in the world of eSports lately?

Not a lot really. Many shakeups in the major clans as they realign themselves for the DirecTV Championship Gaming Series.

GamingJunky asked where are the major tournaments awhile back? That post and this one on VideoGamesBlogger list most of the events for 2007.

Announcements from WSVG (World Series of Video Games) and WCG (World Cyber Games) about their tournament schedule followed (via ESreality and GotFrag). Expect more announcements from the other events soon.

Major League Gaming also announces a TV deal.

Global Gaming asks if eSports is even spectator worthy? If people can watch poker, cricket, bowling, and darts, then I say yes, if it's done right.

Final WSVG

Some mainstream coverage on cnet:

But the Counter-Strike match wasn't easy viewing for a live audience. If competitive gaming is going to gain more footing as a sport, at the very least there's going to have to be a scoreboard of sorts.

It's too bad that with such exciting matches that the coverage was so poor. I mean 3D tied the match and it went to OT in the CS final. I was reminiscing about NiP vs 3D on de_nuke oh so long ago.

More info on the live audience experience on eSplat.

All I can say about being in a studio audience is that it sucks. Spectators are not allowed to do pretty much anything during the match except cheer for the player you want to win. Sure it makes for good TV but damn it really sucks having to sit there for an hour not being allowed to go to the bathroom while the crew are trying to fix a technical problem and they won't let you out because they don't know when the'll be able to fix it and start the filming.

Nice to see that they actually knew what they were doing. I can just imagine during an NFL game not allowing the audience to go to the bathroom. Can you say riot?!

The net coverage was horrendous. On the first day nothing worked. On the second day the coverage was spotty, laggy, and often down. On the last day, with the biggest CS matches on the line, the technical details still had not been worked out. Not only that, but the producer (or technical director, or whoever was in charge) obviously had no idea how to broadcast the show. Although the TSN shoutcasters did a decent job covering the games, the camera kept cutting from in-game footage to a view of a player staring into a computer monitor. Wow, exciting! And not just during the slow times in the matches (say at the end of a round or during buy time) but when critical moments such as one team attempting to penetrate a bomb site were taking place, or when it was 1v2 in the final seconds of a round. Brilliant! More problems like a poorly shown scoreboard, epilepsy-inducing in-game camera changes, and station/commercial breaks that were announced but never taken (we'll be right back after a word from our sponsor, I think I heard that twice, but the break never happened?). Whoever was in charge should have been fired.

Additional notes on Amped and GotFrag.

Hopefully the CPL Winter event will have better coverage (Q3 and CS 1.6).

eSports and Drugs

The Cyberathlete Professional League is going to start testing for performance-enhancing drugs in 2007. Perhaps they should just pay attention to the map exploits that some teams use (how is eSports ever going to become popular when you have map exploits, and shooting through walls - try explaining that to your grandmother).

Update on WSVG.
1. The MLG WSVG controversy has apparently been resolved.
2. Fatal1ty vs. Toxic was probably the best set of games I've seen in Quake in a long time. Fatal1ty came from the losers bracket to beat Toxic in the first best 2/3, but lost in final map.
3. The CS series continues. The Scandinavian domination of CS is not going to continue at WSVG as both NiP and fnatic are out of the tourney. That leaves Team 3D and ALTERNATE aTTaX to play in the final match. Maps 1 and 4 were especially entertaining, while the rest were lessons in domination in the first few minutes.
4. Grubby won the WC3 tourney in a 2-1 win over Sweet.
5. Str8 Rippin won the Halo2 tourney.

WSVG Finals

Filed under eSports:

The World Series of Video Games is taking place this weekend in New York. There will be tournaments for Halo2, Warcraft3, Counterstrike, Quake 4 as well as some other games. There are supposed to be live streams from CSTV and TSNCentral, but of course CSTV is not working, and TSN is down. Big surprise there. Almost every tourney I've tuned into has had technical problems. You don't see this crap on ESPN now do you? If I was a sponsor of the event I would make make sure that the technical infrastructure was there in order to meet the audience demand so that the sponsorship dollars were being well used. Otherwise, what's the point?

Since we're on the subject of the WSVG, there was recent news of a cash infusion from a venture capital firm to the tune of $4.8 million (read PR, not news).

Also, there is apparently already some controversy brewing. This comes from a disupute between Major League Gaming (MLG) and WSVG. Some of the teams qualifying for WSVG are under contract with MLG. WSVG requires a waiver form to be signed to appear on CSTV as part of the tournament, and MLG is advising its players not to sign, a move that would surely prevent the teams from playing at WSVG. Hmmm...interesting...as MLG not only represents the players and teams but is also a rival with WSVG. Conflict of interest perhaps?

Well, I guess I won't be watching this.

IRS taxation of online game virtual assets inevitable | CNET News.com

Terra Nova's State of Play Symposium took place this weekend. Apparently the most interesting session was the one discussing the taxation of virtual goods, services, exchanges. It has been covered here, and here). Are there any H&R Block offices set up inside of Second Life yet?

In other news, the World Series of Video Games will have extensive TV coverage on CBS, CSTV, and Voom HD (from AmpedSports and NYT). Unfortunately, it sounds like it will have to be edited so that the 'violent' parts are not shown. Wow, how exciting.

More Machinima Festival Coverage

On machinima.com and machinima premiere there were links to two articles about the 2006 machinima festival. Gamasutra has a fairly comprehensive article, with two short interviews, one with Chris Burke from This Spartan Life and another with Matt Dominianni from Trash Talk (Ill Clan) tacked on to the end. The article on Renderosity is written by guest columnist gToon (Ricky Grove) and is shorter than the one on Gamasutra but covers the major topics.

On a completely different note. There is a short clip about the World Series of Video Games made by MTV. It's fairly superficial, and definitely does not get into any depth when talking about the players or the games being played competitively, but it might be a decent introduction to someone who has never heard of or seen anything with regards to the competitive scene.