The Importance of Grassroots in Esports

Esports is an interesting industry for a number of reasons. People can compete against each other from all over the globe in real time, with both local and online options available. Coverage is mostly digital, with free services like YouTube and Twitch. The main thing here I want to focus on, however, is that unlike traditional sports, esports titles are tied to intellectual property owned by companies.

In football, there is nothing stopping you from finding a place to play and going up against other people. So long as you aren’t breaking any laws, you can play all the football you want in whatever competitive format you wish (such as tournaments or leagues). In esports, however, you are at the whims of whatever company you happen to be playing the game for.

In esports, however, you are at the whims of whatever company you happen to be playing the game for.

This results in a lot of different scenarios when it comes to being an events organiser. Some companies require licenses to run events for, others lock their competitive capabilities away from the general player base and some will shut down events for their games with the possibility of legal action. This is normally counterbalanced by companies running their own events. The biggest games (or “tier 1” esports) all feature developer ran events or at least heavily supported ones.

So we can conclude from this that esports essentially breaks down into 2 main categories, events with a large stake held by developers (or partnered companies) and events run by communities for those games. These are fairly broad and the lines blur sometimes, but we will be looking at the most obvious examples of each one.

The Risk of Developer Driven Esports

As many people already may have heard, in December 2018 Blizzard said there would be no more official Blizzard league for Heroes of the Storm. This includes both the professional “Heroes Global Championship” and collegiate “Heroes of the Dorm” not making a return in 2019. Understandably this upset the competitive scene for the game, as these were the foundation of which professional Heroes games were based on. Commentator Wolf Schröder reported on Twitter that 200+ pro players had essentially “lost their jobs via a blog post”.

I feel sorry for those who dreamed of making it big in Heroes esports, but their story is now one that will serve as a warning to those involved with games whose esports scenes are heavily driven by developers. A scene whose foundations rely on a single entity to support the economy of those surrounding the game proves to have catastrophic results should the game fall out of favour with the developers. It should be noted that Heroes of the Storm is not the only example of this, but is the largest in recent history.

Since I started writing this article, Blizzard Entertainment has further laid off staff involved in running the esports side of certain games. During a recent episode of The Pylon Show, there was some discussion about how this could be the last year of StarCraft receiving as much direct support from Blizzard. StarCraft 2 still has a strong community-driven scene, so it will continue to exist even if support from Blizzard is cut. Loss of jobs around the game would still take place in such a situation.

This isn’t always negative and developer-driven scenes have their merits. Without direct developer support, some games would not have a professional scene and in most cases, it brings the level of production, prizes and that is years ahead of what a scene is capable of doing without that support. Riot Games, for example, has raised the bar when it comes to the production quality of events. It looks like this will remain the case for a while yet too.

The Strength of Grassroots

So why does this all matter in a discussion about grassroots? Let us look at a different game, the one I got my start in as an event organiser and led me to spend close to 5 years running events for a variety of games. I am of course talking about Super Smash Bros.

Smash Bros is probably the best example of an esport that thrived as a grassroots title. Sure, it was on the main lineup of MLG for several years, but it saw the best years of competition outside of that time period. Over the past decade, the series as a whole has seen significant growth and relative stability for the top players. Melee has been around for over 17 years, yet still managed to hit new highs in 2018, such as having its largest event in Europe, Heir 5.

The success of Smash in the long term is a testament to how big a scene can be if the people who play it are willing to build their own foundations. Nintendo could never lift a finger to help its esports scene and there would still be large Smash events a decade from now. These might not reach the same heights as if it had support, but their independence also means it will never face a collapse so long as there are those willing to run and compete at events. Tom Cannon wrote a recent chain on Twitter covering this concept.

The early days of seeing people playing in basements, arcades and cafes created an environment where Smash and other fighting games planted deep roots for their competitive futures. Even with events coming and going over the years, there has been a solid stream of majors for most grassroots titles that date back to the early 2000s.

That isn’t to say there weren’t problems with grassroots scenes over the years. There is definitely a history of downturns in popularity for games over the years. Many Street Fighter veterans talk about how much bigger the scene grew after Street Fighter IV and Smash Bros Melee saw a revival after numbers dropped when Smash Bros Brawl released. There is definitely an argument to be made for outside support having an impact on esports in both a positive and negative manner, even if it isn’t taking direct control of the scene.

The Best of Both Worlds

While grassroots can technically stand on its own, something that has been a growing trend over the past 5 years is a mutually beneficial relationship between community initiatives with companies giving them direct support. Funnily enough, the business model behind modern developer support kicked off with the biggest self-ran developer esports event of the year: DotA 2’s The International.

The model for this is simple, players can purchase an in-game item that gives them a number of benefits (usually cosmetic) with a large percentage of the money from this purchase going towards the event. This helps to cover both the costs of the logistics side of the event, as well as boosting the prize pool significantly.

Some of the best examples of this are Valve with CSGO and DotA 2, Blizzard with StarCraft 2, Capcom with Street Fighter V and (since I’m biased) Dan Fornace’s Rivals of Aether. These games have events all year round, with financial support that uses the player-base of those games to purchase goods to help fund aspects of said events. This includes prize bonuses, player travel and even direct funding to the event teams.

In cases where the competitive side of a game is primarily run by the company who made the game, there is a benefit to having those from outside of the said company running their own events (albeit with some guidelines to follow). A few smaller pillars to support the main one gives competitors more options and something to fall back on should the worst happen.

As esports continues to expand and grow over the years, it will be interesting to see how much grassroots efforts play their part. Hopefully, communities and companies can learn from the history of leagues shutting down in order to forge more robust scenes in the future.