Is Australia professional enough to game professionally?

Opinion from Starks - Friday, 13 February 2009 @ 9:05am

This is probably a question a great deal of you would be asking me. Frankly, my entire time with AustralianGamer.com has been one focussed on the competitive gaming scene in Australia. I’ve written a few articles on professional gaming and as many of you know, game reviews written by me for specific titles are generally with a competitive gaming perspective at the fore.

Between competing, commentating and coverage, I’d say that I’ve got a pretty keen eye on the community itself. Add to this my efforts with assisting tournaments from an administration point of view and I think it’s fair to say that I’ve got a handle on the community itself.

And frankly, I’m beginning to think that the competitive community in Australia just doesn’t have the right mix to take professional gaming to the next level.

Yes, I said it. As heretical as it might seem, I honestly don’t think we have the right elements to make Australian e-Sports gaming more than just a blip on the competitive map.

I’ve been running competitions over at GotGames.com.au for over a year now, and despite my best efforts I’ve noticed a few things that are stunting the growth of the professional scene.

1. Teams just can’t keep it together.

Like a teen soap opera where couples get together before breaking up in the space of a 21 minute episode, clans have issues retaining a consistent line up. And frankly, this is killing the community. Not just from a cohesion point of view, but from a spectators perspective, a sponsors perspective, a tournament perspective and finally a practice point of view.

Teams who have a high turnover of players simply aren’t as well oiled as a squad that has stuck together for a long period of time. Point in case, and I take a U.S. and Aussie example here, are the clans Final Boss and Team Best BR.

Final Boss, with the famed lineup of OGRE 1, OGRE 2, Walshy and Saiyan, were a Halo team that stuck together for 4 year period, spanning two different games and resulted in one of the greatest era’s of console gaming.

Team Best BR, otherwise known as Encore under their current sponsorship deal, have been together for roughly 2 years. In similar fashion to Final Boss a strong, consistent line although granted with less competition than their US counterparts, has solidified their reign at the top over that time.

The connection is the players develop greater insticts in relation to how they move across the map, they understand the strengths and weaknesses of their fellow team mate and so move to compensate for that, and develop strong friendships that not only drive them to a greater degree of excellence but allow them the chance to enjoy their gaming also.

The outcomes of this is a solid team that looks, from a sponsors point of view, a whole better of an opportunity to throw money at than, say, another equally talented team that has in fighting, continued roster changes and the mixed results that will follow.

2. Too small and too big

Australia is a large country. Almost as long as the United States and again almost as wide. Yet we have less than a tenth of the population our Septic cousins possess. And it counts for something.

The smaller the population, the smaller the pool of competitive players that exist in the ‘Land Down Under’. Which then means that the smaller the rewards for corporate sponsorship are should a business look at investing into the demographic.

So it’s simply a case of our market is insignificant in comparison to the other e-Sports mad nations in the world. We take a back seat in comparison to countries like China, Korea, the United States and the various European nations that have a significantly greater interest in professional gaming.

This makes trying to do anything in our end of the world a great deal harder. This alone makes anything we try to do a great deal harder from the outset. However, combine this with large travel times in between capital cities and the cost of flights, and even if a nation wide circuit were available to the community, the comparative scenario of paying for flights, accommodation and the time off work verse the prize money rewards mean many teams take significant losses with only a chance to break even or possibly scrape a little in profit should you take first place.

The scenario is even worse for those who place 2nd and onwards. Add into this the loss of wages for time off, and most of the 16-25 age demographic simply can’t afford to travel even if they’re dedicated. Which leads me to my next point.

3. Burn baby burn!

The community itself is a volatile, demanding, clicky, abusive, often cheating and always hormone driven environment. Beginners to competitive games are often forced to run a gauntlet of fire that at best is wrong and at worst is the self destructive force that could destroy the e-Sports community.

Elite players who have zero social skills, even less patience to help tutor those up and coming and ego’s that make Napoleon look humble, making the competitive community one that bites the hand that feeds. Whether it be paid coders sourced from the community who simply won’t finish updating various softwares for sites, teams (And in most cases it comes in a wave) who simply implode, disband and leave a vacuum of shit to be cleaned up by administrators struggling to finish competitions or cheating scumbags who would sooner ruin the enjoyment of others than admit their talentless turds – The Australian community has it all.

This is not to suggest that we are alone in this matter. The world is full of assholes, and frankly our community is not unique in that manner. However, given we have an uphill battle to have consistent community tournaments and encourage corporate sponsorship to help grow the competitive scene in Australia, you would think that people would wake up to themselves and look at the big picture.

It is more evident every day that no matter what forum I visit, the administrators, who give up their own time and efforts for no monetary return, attempt to put out a fire that is simply relit in another area.

Add to this the constant flux of teams who are competing or not, and trying to run tournaments without knowing if the sides involved are dedicated to completing the season or not and it is no wonder that competitive gaming sputters and stalls each time it is looking like it will take off in Australia.

This isn’t to say that competitive gaming in Australia is dead. By no means. Indeed, I would suggest that it is very much alive.

What I am suggesting is that the balance of forces trying to build the scene to bigger and better things are indeed being prevented by the above issues and stopping it from evolving into something like what the United States have, where corporate sponsorship allows players to game for a living.

This can all be changed in a matter of months. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that if the various sites in Australia running competitions and websites with tournament persuasion came together and moved forward as one, competitive gaming in Australia would take off like a rocket.

Combine this with a core of 12 to 16 teams in each game being dedicated sides willing to stick together and give it a real shot, and I would suggest that it wouldn’t be long before sides like Encore, Sydney Underground, Immunity and many, many others would be given the opportunity to test their mettle overseas.

And the reason for this is because it would attract money. If you have unified websites trying supporting both Online and LAN events as well as teams consistently attending and competing with regular line ups, you turn the entire industry from amateur to semi-professional in its very nature. The only thing required to birth it into the professional realm is sponsorship, and indeed if, say, a hardware sponsor new that its involvement in the Australian competitive gaming community would allow him to reach an additional target market of 50,000 new customers or more, then the question turns into one of ‘when’ it will happen, not ‘if’.

Until this unification and maturing process happens, however, the fragmented Australian competitive gaming community will have to be content with playing for prize pools that are well below the talent they possess.