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Pay Per View in Esports – The Pitfalls

TeaTime 2018-06-26 02:25:46
With a lot of conversation being around teams not being able to properly monetize esports fans, and tournament organizers not being able to raise money without selling broadcast rights to ‘inferior’ platforms, the big question comes down to this: how the hell do teams and tournament organizers make money? One route that’s been brought up as a possibility - even by some as an inevitability - for the future is that of MMA, which is to say, pay-per-view. It sounds like an incredibly attractive prospect for teams on paper. Have individual faceoffs versus your rivals, hype them up as much as you can and be the organizer yourself for it. You get all the ticket sales, set up a decent enough broadcast without needing more than a handful of talent, smaller fees for overall crew and even get a massive boost in local engagement. And that’s not hard to imagine, with as many teams in the overall esports space looking at having their own events. Just a few days ago the Immortals brand launched MIBR in a fairly large event down in Brazil, New York Excelsior in Overwatch has been focusing a lot on local activations with fan meet and greets at a reasonable scale and Optic has had their own viewing parties time and time again for various esports. Teams have the finances to run their own events, and have more than enough incentive to do so too. So why not have pay-per-view matches? Why not do what MMA has seen happen and have Astralis face off versus Faze in an epic Ashes style event, or have Liquid’s DOTA team battle against Virtus Pro? Get the hype up, have a cheaper event with a few hundred seated in a fancy OWL-type studio and have the perfect controlled environment for amazing content, high-priced ticket sales and a high enough number of people buying the right to stream it on their own to consider it a good revenue stream. Well, there’s two big problems. In MMA, you’ve got months to hype up a fight between two fighters - it’s just how the sport works. That gives you enough time to get amazing marketing done, interviews, narratives of trash talk and a hell lot of showmanship gives you a crazy amount of exposure. Esports are entirely different. There’s constant conversation surrounding how oversaturated the scene is, very few esports have an extended off period where a team won’t be playing, and it’s even more difficult to say two teams won’t face off against each other in the middle. Still, that’s something that can be used to your own advantage while building storylines leading up to the event that two teams themselves are hosting. So what’s the bigger issue? Esports teams are unreliable. To demonstrate this, I’m going to wind back the clock to the 16th of June 2017: the Eleague Clash for Cash Rematch. The CS:GO major final happened in January of the same year, with Astralis beating out Virtus Pro in a nail biting finale that went to the pinnacle of skill and entertainment in Counter-Strike. It was a sight to behold, and Eleague, wanting to cash in on the mad hype around both teams soon after scheduled a $250,000 best of three match, with Astralis scheduled to have a rematch versus Virtus Pro. It would’ve been a sight to behold. A repeat of the finals of a major, with legends of the game on the server facing off for an absurd cash prize - monetized through subscriptions paid to the Turner Network, so somewhat similar to PPV - and it was a completely one-sided massacre. Virtus Pro had in a few short months gone from gods to peasants. They had no place on the server at all. Not only that, but due to the oversaturation mentioned before, their descent had already been seen by all fans of the game. There was no aura of mystery, no question marks surrounding it, no one in their sane minds who thought that Virtus Pro had any chance of winning. It was worse than McGregor and Mayweather. And there’s countless examples of this across esports, take any team that wins an International in DOTA (Alliance in TI3, Newbee in TI4) or even the gods of League, SKT, who seem to have fallen from grace ever since their loss at Worlds and you see so much predictable instability. Pay per view just doesn’t work the same way when your narratives are far too easy to see, and your audience isn’t quite hyped up enough to buy in. Esports has infamously always had a problem of both saturation and the temporariness of form. Pay per view is a complicated beast, and no-one truly understands how to implement it into esports yet. We obviously can’t follow the MMA model, and yet success of monetization on that level is something we have to aspire to achieve. Tournament organizers aren’t just keeping away from PPV because they fear community backlash - although this may be true in some small part. They’re doing it because they don’t know how to properly implement it. There is a solution to this predicament, and within it will lie much of the future of esports. Pay per view will come, as long as adblockers dominate the viewing space. The question just is, how will it be implemented?
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