It's more interesting to watch pretty much any sport if you have participated in it at some point.

I guess this is why soccer more popular than sailing. Most people have kicked a ball around with their friends before but wouldn't have access to a yacht.

With F1 for example , plenty of people have driven a car and probably at least wanted to drive it fast, F1 is basically that desire taken to it's logical conclusion.

With e-sports, the barrier to entry for picking up a games console or PC with some games on is pretty low. What will be interesting though is to see which games dominate.

FPS games don't lend themselves as well to spectators as fighting games or RTS do for example.

> FPS games don't lend themselves as well to spectators as fighting games or RTS do for example.

This may be true, but I'm not sure it definitely is.

FPS games have been involved in some of the biggest steps esports has taken over the past decade to get to where it is (from duel games like Quake 3 to team games like Counter Strike).

Right now it's true that FPS games aren't getting the same spectator numbers as some other genres, but it's also the case that FPS esports scenes aren't as big or high profile, as there aren't really any FPS games in a good enough position to compete with the likes of SC2 or League of Legends. Counter Strike 1.6 is dying and while it's newest sibling Global Offensive is picking up steam, it doesn't have the user base or the developer support (in terms of esports support) that Blizzard and Riot are showing their games. Quake Live made a decent attempt, but right now there aren't really any huge duel games. And the biggest selling FPS franchises, like Call of Duty or Battlefield, just aren't well enough suited to competitive play.

Maybe the FPS era of esports is over (at the top level, that is, it's still strong lower down), or maybe it's just waiting for the right title to take it back to the top - if that happens, we'll see if the spectator problem is actually a problem.

(I'm 10 days away from finishing the job I've had for five years working in and around esports, and largely due to that work, with a bit of personal preference added in too, FPS has a big place in my heart, so I certainly hope to see bigger things from it in the future. Not decided whether to stay in the industry or look elsewhere yet...)

I think the problem with FPS is that you have so many players who all have a completely different view of the game at any time. That makes it difficult to follow on one screen because you would have to keep switching between player's viewpoints which would disorient you to what is actually going on and make it difficult to see the state of play at a glance.

You might be able to fix this by showing a zoomed out overhead map and zooming in on parts that look like they are about to get interesting. Problem with this would be predicting which parts will be interesting to see, because you never know if someone is about to get sniped or whatever. With something like soccer there is only one ball so wherever the ball is will probably be where the most interesting play is happening.

I guess F1 would suffer from the same problem, but in that case there is just something exhilarating about watching a car take a corner at those kinds of speeds.

There are 1v1 FPS titles, namely Duel games like Quake, Unreal Tournament, etc. which don't have this problem.

For team FPS games it's certainly an issue, but not necessarily an insurmountable one. For starters, we've already seen that there are plenty of people happy to watch it (a Counter Strike tournament earlier this year saw 77k concurrent unique viewers for its final match).

Good commentators play a big part in this, it's their job to help viewers understand the big picture and understand what's going on all over the map, not just where they're looking.

One option, that hasn't often been used but is certainly a potential solution, is to have a slight delay on the broadcast, just 30-90 seconds to allow the cameraman/men to know what action is about to happen and show it appropriately.

Generally speaking, the view on esports streams is usually controlled by a single person, often one of the commentators, but with a slightly bigger budget there are other ways to play around to get the best footage. For example there was a league called the Championship Gaming Series a few years ago, they were News Corp. owned and had $50m in funding (there's a whole long story here that I won't go into) - one of the games they used was Counter-Strike: Source, and rather than the usual production standard of taking a feed from one client which changed views repeatedly, they had one client spectating each player, and a number of other camera angles set up, then did standard TV production to switch between them, which was a big improvement. But hey, those shows were produced by 13 (if I remember the number correctly) time Emmy-award-winning sports producer Mike Burks who had experience from NFL and a bunch of other sports.

That's a solved problem in professional sports broadcasting. They have dozens of cameras, and if something interesting happens away from the current camera they just do an instant replay from the camera that caught it best.

It's not quite the same in team FPS games, as most sports (that I can think of) tend to have one area of action at any one time, for example in soccer there may be 22 players on the pitch but there's only one ball - so replays to show what they missed are more to show better angles or other tactical plays, rather than missed action. But yes, this is still a useful (and currently often underused) tool in esports broadcasts too.

I really think if e-sports were to take off, it'd be in a dota genre game. It seems like the best balance of action, appreciating nuance and being able to understand at a very high level.

I have always found competitive FPS like Quake Live pretty boring since the players traverse the map in a specific way to capture weapon spawns and such. (vs. running around like a headless chicken.)

Not many kids grew up sailing. Most kids these days have a fair bit of experience with video games, first person shooters especially. They might not get the subtleties of some of the 'pro' level FPS games, but I think they would be able to spectate. Games like Starcraft and DotA pretty much require that you play the game regularly to appreciate them though.

Then again, the rules to football are fairly complex depending on how deeply you're concerned about player formations and stats, yet it's wildly popular. Starcraft can be simplified to 'blow up all their stuff' just like football can be simplified to 'get the ball in the endzone'.