Anyone who has taken an economics class is familiar with the infallible laws of supply and demand. At its most simple form, supply and demand have an inverse relationship. People are more likely to buy something when it’s rare or available for a limited time. However, if something is commonplace and permeates the market, interest will decline, and demand won’t keep up. There’s a reason that film studios stopped making Westerns after the sixties: there had been so many in the market beforehand that people were just tired of seeing them.

As my list of esports games to watch has increased dramatically week-by-week over the last year, I couldn’t help but wonder if esports were beginning to reach a breaking point in terms of market saturation. The number of games with competitive scenes relevant enough to have entire wikis dedicated to them has continued to grow at a rapid pace, nearly doubling since 2014. On paper, it’s wonderful to see each of these games find players to perform at the highest level for their diehard fans, but in practice, the overcrowding the scene faces could be catastrophic. While the game developers likely haven’t realized it yet, the current state of esports is walking a dangerous line that is already hurting their potential viewers and has the potential to cost them dearly in the long run. Don’t believe me? Let’s do a breakdown and see just how big this problem is.

Never Enough Time

I have a massive amount of gratitude for both Esportswikis and Liquipedia, because without their tireless dedication to keeping track of the many, many games that currently hold consistent competitive scenes, I wouldn’t have been able to write this article. That alone says something about the sheer number of games that have competitive scenes. Between the two sites, there are thirteen games currently holding premier tournaments or maintaining consistent league play to which fans can tune in throughout the year. That’s thirteen different competitive scenes that esports fans could potentially be trying to follow on some level at any period of time, and that doesn’t include games that don’t have Western scenes like the incredibly popular Crossfire that dominates the shooter market in the east. Obviously, you aren’t going to be interested in every game equally, but it’s important to recognize that any one of these games is a large time commitment.

Let’s start with tournament based competitive scenes, since those should theoretically be easier to follow. After all, most tournaments usually last for a single weekend, and one should be able to get by even if they only follow the “premier” tournaments. Premier level tournaments are tournaments that tournament organizers and developers believe are must watch events if you want to follow the scene. Unfortunately for viewers, the number of these tournaments have increased dramatically as esports has grown.

Counter Strike: Global Offensive is the biggest offender, with 36 premier tournaments spread out across 11 months this year. Hearthstone, the biggest card game on the digital market, manages 29 premier events, ten of which are run by Blizzard. Heroes of the Storm currently has 20 premier events, including three different World Championships each year. Starcraft 2 and Dota 2 follow close behind with 19, and most of those involve bigger time commitments on average due to having more of a league/tournament hybrid format.

Any one of these tournaments can be a significant time sink. ESL One: New York, the most recent major in CS:GO, had 26 maps played over the course of the tournament, which is well within the average number of expected games at a premier event like this. Each of these games take about an hour to play, and that’s not including any timeouts, technical difficulties, or time spent on the analyst desk. That’s a full weekend of commitment on one tournament, and CS:GO has thirty-six of them. If you’re already wondering how you’re supposed to keep up with other esports at that rate, remember that these are just premier tournaments. There are many, many more major and minor tournaments, all of which may involve your favourite team if you happen to have one you care about. The scene’s growth is wonderful for Valve and the organizations involved, but it comes at a cost that many viewer are simply incapable of making.

If you think that a more consistent, league based system might help due to its predictability, you’re out of luck. League of Legends is the biggest contender in this realm, with an average of 40-50 games played each week per region during the regular season, with five major regions all worth following to varying degrees if you want to know who matters when the World Championships run around. Each region also has their own playoffs, which extend themselves over more weeks, but often ask for a similar time commitment to the tournament based systems listed above. The World Championship has already included 64 maps of play over three weeks, each of which easily averages more than an hour per map once analyst desk and commercial breaks are included.

League of Legends is hardly the only league based system, however. Rocket League introduced a new system in which both Europe and North America see eight Bo5 series each week per region throughout the regular season before their own tournament play. Smite has six relevant regions, each averaging 10 maps per week. Vainglory has their league set up through multiple Bo3 tournaments, resulting in four splits of 3 tournaments each followed by a larger World Championship. Even Halo and Call of Duty, two esports that have supposedly fallen out of favour in recent times, manage leagues with 8-12 Bo5 matches each week throughout their regular seasons depending on the region.

You can see the problem once it’s laid out this way. Each one of these games has created an ecosystem in which fans will never be lacking for content at the expense of any ability for crossover in fandoms. One could likely manage to follow the most important aspects of any one of these scenes by making it a priority, but keeping your eyes on any more than that means it might as well be a full time job. Even the most savvy esports fanatic has to be selective when there’s this much content.

Keep in mind: those are just the esports that are big enough to have entire competitive wikis dedicated to them. I haven’t even mentioned the incredibly passionate fighting game scene, which is filled to the brim with titles that struggle for individual relevance due to an oversaturation of of the genre that...I feel like I’ve heard this one before.

The Easiest Fix (That No One Will Do)

I can already hear some of you typing away at your keyboards comparing the time commitment made to your favourite esport to the same amount of time one has to spend to keep up with many traditional sports. There’s one big difference that separates these issues, and it has everything to do with timing. Given that esports often serve as a marketing tool for the developer first and a beacon of competitive integrity second, it’s no surprise that offseasons aren’t much of a thing. Note that what I talk about offseasons, I’m talking about them from the perspective of the viewers at home, as teams who do poorly will obviously have longer offseasons for all the wrong reasons.

Sadly, the sample size is a bit smaller than the one I used for timing, since younger esports like Vainglory, Overwatch, and Rocket League haven’t had a full year of scheduling to analyze. We also have to rule out games like the Super Smash Bros. series and Hearthstone, whose offseason is affected most directly by one’s willingness to compete in local competitions.

For the rest, however, the numbers are pretty incredible. DOTA 2 manages to have at least one major every month, meaning the game basically has no offseason. CS:GO and Smite aren’t much better, as each game only has a one month offseason between the end of their last major and the start of the next one. League of Legends, Heroes of the Storm, and Starcraft 2 each have two months off, while Call of Duty gets a whopping three months of no league play as teams adjust to the newest iteration.

Image - Rock Paper Shotgun

Let’s compare this to the traditional North American sports scene. The NFL has a six month season, meaning it spends as much time off the air as it does on it. The NBA, NHL, and MLB are a bit longer, with seven month seasons and five months on hiatus. Europeans are used to slightly longer seasons with their football clubs, but whether one looks at the Premier League, the Bundesliga, or La Liga, their season spans 8 months, with a four month offseason. These traditional sports have realized something incredibly important that esports hasn’t: we can’t miss something when it is constantly around.

Perhaps most importantly, traditional sports tend to stagger their beginning and end dates. The end of the NFL season comes right as the NBA and NHL are heating up, and when those leagues fade, the MLB is there to take their place. There’s a constant rotation of sports that never leaves fans without entertainment as long as they’re able to enjoy the different games. According to the viewer numbers many fans are happy to do just that. Meanwhile, League of Legends, CS:GO, Heroes of the Storm, Starcraft 2, and Call of Duty all have their breaks at the same time: November through December. This makes no sense if you are looking to maximize your potential audience, but makes a ton of sense if you’re a video game developer or tournament organizer hoping to take things easy during the holiday season.

If these games could communicate with each other and take better advantage of when the others are in their offseason, there wouldn’t be nearly as much suffocation during the times in which all of these games are demanding our attention. As it stands, there’s a huge missed opportunity that only manages to make the problems worse. Of course, that’s assuming that you believe there’s a problem, which brings me to that next point.

Developers Don’t See the Problem

The only way you’re going to convince any of these organizations that it’s worth cooperating together and potentially working through the holiday season is to convince them that this overcrowding is an issue. Pointing to the current state of non-Smash Bros. fighting games hasn’t done any good, and at this point, it’s hard to imagine developers concerning themselves about a potential collapse when nearly every headline from the mainstream medium says that esports are growing rapidly and will only grow bigger from here. I completely understand that perspective: after all, who wants to think about doom and gloom when some angel investors and professional sports teams are tripping over themselves to throw money at the organizations that will play in your league. John Meynard Keynes once said, “In the long run, we are all dead” when discussing how we can expect businesses to react when looking at decisions that have differing effects on the short and long term, and given the youth of the market and the constant improvement in available technology, telling these companies to worry about the long term will likely fall of deaf ears.

That’s not the only factor keeping you, the consumer, from a world in which it’s actually possible to follow multiple games over the course of a year without feeling like you’re missing 90% of the content. I mentioned earlier that these companies view esports as an advertising tool first and a competitive atmosphere second. Now, imagine an advertising bureau going into a corporate office for a meeting and trying to convince the company that they would do better if they advertised less often and worked with their rivals to make sure they advertised during different parts of the year to maximize both companies’ profit margins. That advertising bureau would be laughed out of the room. As long as games are being played, headlines are being made, podcasts are being recorded, and forums are filled with discussions. The game creators who hope to turn views into sales are never going to have the same incentives as a traditional sports league whose main product is what you’re actually watching.

Finally, let’s not forget that solving any of these oversaturation issues requires these companies to acknowledge there is an issue and care about fixing it. When I bring this up in conversation to experts within the scene, the answer is always the same: gaming companies view the target audience as people who are already securely part of their fan base. For developers, esports are a celebration of what they’ve already accomplished and a reminder that those fans should keep playing to recreate their favourite moments (hopefully with the same in game purchases the players used). That’s how they plan to make their money. Fans who are happy to watch the competitive games but don’t actually play the game aren’t particularly welcomed. Imagine if the NBA followed the same logic, advertising exclusively to people who already play basketball in hopes that they’ll continue to play it in a new jersey bought in their local team store. Sure, that audience exists, and you can bet the NBA tries to capitalize on those people, but they also understand that some people just enjoy a good product. You can enjoy professional basketball without being a basketball player, and you can enjoy League of Legends without being a League of Legends player. Attracting that market is another article for another day, but pretending that market doesn’t exist is yet another short sighted move.

So What’s the Damage?

Funnily enough, I started work on this article well before the news that the Korean Starcraft 2 Proleague was shutting down, with five of the biggest organizations closing their Starcraft operations entirely. It’s devastating news for those who loved the scene, as this loss of resources is likely the death knell for the game standing as one of the most important esports out there. Unless a miracle occurs and new investors pop up out of nowhere, we’re already seeing the first major loss of this oversaturation issue, and it comes at the cost of the only RTS that was still relevant in the esports realm.

In equal measure, there are many games that are consistently struggling to pull in decent viewer counts that may find themselves in a similar boat soon. While Heroes of the Storm’s success in Korea is one of the bigger reasons cited for Starcraft’s demise, the game is now finding itself forced out by another Blizzard game, Overwatch. Professional players from many different games are already starting to make the switch, and as Overwatch grows in popularity, games like HotS that don’t have a stranglehold on their genre are likely to fall to the wayside. See also: Smite, a game that has held on thanks to amazing advertising deals but now looks to fall to the wayside as their already struggling viewership continues to shrink.

It’s also worth noting how the sheer number of games that have managed to claim their stake at the top of the esports realm means new games attempting to create their own niche will struggle mightily to do so. Battleborn is the latest example of a game that could have turned itself into an esport in its own right. It was well received by critics and had a spectator mode that would have made the transition into this realm quite easy. However, the market only had room for one game in the genre, and Overwatch won that battle by a landslide. Overwatch had the advantage of being made by a company that knew how to ensure they won the viewership battle before it even began on both the casual and competitive fronts. Now, Battleborn is all but dead, and we’ll never get to find out how fun the game’s competitive scene could have been.

Maybe those games don’t matter to you. Statistically, they likely didn’t, otherwise they wouldn’t be in this position in the first place. This downsizing is the ultimate side effect of the oversaturation problem: when the market cannot sustain that many games, there will be inevitable casualties. Those who were fans of these games are now lost without their favourite pastime, while fans of games that currently reside on the edge of relevance await the sword of damocles falling upon their favourite game. Until the market returns to its natural saturation point, there will continue to be more and more casualties, and there is no game that is safe from this potential decline.

This is a fixable problem, but it would require a complete change in philosophy from those currently making decisions. Until then, the average esports fan will be the one who suffers, unable to find the time to try a game they might love, worrying about whether their favourite game will be next on the chopping block, and finding themselves unable to get invested in the next big thing without sacrificing the game they already care about. Game developers unwillingness to separate their advertising from their esports product will ensure the oversaturation bubble continues to grow, and when it bursts, we’ll all be wondering where our favourite games have gone.

If you enjoyed this piece, consider following the author on Twitter at @RedShirtKing.