A few years ago I would have never guessed that I would be following a complete season of any sport, much less a video game. However, this past year I have been following League of Legends religiously; taking interest in statistics, rooting on my favorite teams and digging deeper into strategies and overall game understanding.
When some of my friends hear that I watch a video game broadcast and call it a sport, they laugh and can not believe that eSports is a real thing. They picture the low budget YouTube videos of people in spectator mode watching others play video games with a commentator who knows a lot about the game, but may not be the best at passing on his knowledge to his audience. I explain to them that those still do exist, but eSports has made leaps and bounds from what they are picturing and I can now confidently say that they rival traditional sportscasts in production quality.
As recently as last year, at an international competition, League of Legends drew a whopping 32 million viewers. (Source) That is a significant interest in a video game and I believe this is due in no small part to the efforts being made by the broadcast crew currently found at Riot Games.
In the last two years, Riot Games has invested heavily in developing a high quality broadcast that gamers would want to watch. Taking cues from traditional sports broadcasts, League of Legends has created the gold standard in terms of how video games should be presented as a sport. From shoutcasting (what they call their announcers) and instant replays to post game analysis and stat tracking; any person familiar with broadcasted sporting events would be very familiar with the current state of League of Legends eSports. What I believe to be their biggest strength is their shoutcasters.
Shoutcasters alone have made the game very accessible to watch. Be breaking down plays, explaining why certain moves were good or poor decisions, providing instant replays and slowing down the sometimes chaotic action to explain how close a fight really was, does help bring the game to a wider audience. I believe you break a certain threshold when people say, “I don’t actually play the game, but I enjoy watching it.” This is an indicator to me that League of Legends is being presented in an easily digestible format and that the camera work, combined with the shoutcasters, are allowing viewers to follow and understand the action enough to be part of the experience. I am not a very good League of Legends player, and I really can not keep up with the changes in the meta game, but the way the broadcast crew breaks down the information and allows me to just sit back and enjoy the experience is amazing to me.
Other familiar additions to League of Legends eSports that traditional sports watchers will recognize are teams with sponsorships, star players and player story segments, large arenas with live audiences and referees and this is just the tip of the iceberg.
My hope by writing this post is to spread the knowledge that eSports is no longer a low-budget production to be scoffed at; it is a legitimate broadcast that I believe any gamer could get into. If you would like to judge the production quality for yourself, you can pull up past broadcasts at twitch.tv/riotgames/profile/pastBroadcasts or watch live weekly games at lolesports.com. If you would like to learn more about League of Legends eSports, head over to lolesports.com.
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