Planetside 2 - ESport?

[roastduck]

Sorry to necro this thread, but I felt I had something actually constructive and viable to add to the discussion.

To all those supporting PS2 as an eSport, I ask you to bear in mind one thing: where is the money going to come from? Just like regular sports, eSports operates as a business. Tournaments are not hosted out of some altruistic vision of eSports. They're hosted because those hosting can make money by doing so.

I just watched the IPL5 StarCraft Grand Finals. The first place winner received $40,000. Second place got $20,000, and third got $11,000. Overall, $100,000 was given in prize money for SC2 alone. Between all games from the event, the prize pool was $300,000. This was JUST PRIZE MONEY. There were also production costs, including the venue (the Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas), production crew (provided by GOMTV from Korea), casters, and media costs. A HUGE investment on behalf of IGN.

Let's indulge the fantasy of PS2 becoming a major supported eSport. What would the format be? Having a full continent with full population is just plain impractical. For the purpose of this example, let's establish that one platoon of four squads per team, for a total of 96 players going 48v48. Each team has its own small warp gate area from which to spawn, and they compete for dominance of one major facility and a small number of adjacent outlying facilities. We could either have a set time limit (say, whoever holds the largest percentage of hexes at the end of 30 or 45 minutes) or a ticket system similar to the Battlefield games (of which I have only played BF2 and BF:BC). This is done on an instanced area specifically intended for eSports use, with no interference from the general server population, and is also available as a private server for practices, scrimmages, and tournament use.

My example is vague, but it works for now.

Now that we have a league set up, what will get people to compete? A wise man once said "If you're good at something, never do it for free." The answer to this question is money. At Dreamhack Winter this year, the Counterstrike: Global Offensive tournament offered a top prize of 150,000 Swedish Krona to a team of 5 players. This converts to a little over $22,000, so just shy of $5000 per player. If we keep with those rates, the top prize in a PS2 tournament would need to be about $240,000, which would give each member of a 48-person team $4000, before taxes. (This assumes the team is independent of a larger organization, which would normally take a large cut). call it an even $250k top prize. Second place would be $125k. Overall, you're looking at a prize pool of about $500,000.

At least with PS2, we wouldn't need to worry about live venues. Unless PS2 reaches the same popularity in all its countries that SC2 has in Korea, there is absolutely no way a single venue would be able to handle enough teams to constitute a major tournament, and if they did it would take forever to go from match to match. And good luck if you try to provide PCs to the participants.

TL;DR

PS2 is nowhere near as popular is it would need to be to garner the financial support to be a major eSport. As awesome as it would be, it just isn't feasible.