With the EVO fighting game tournament going on this weekend, Gamasutra’s staff began to wonder how the rise of professional, competitive play is affecting how developers make games — so we asked. What once seemed either insignificant or far-off — that’s something South Koreans are into, right? — has gotten much bigger and much closer to home for Western developers. People watched 2.4 billion hours of eSports last year. eSports are starting to share space with more traditional sporting events. The U.S. government considers eSports athletes professionals, and the prize pool for Dota 2 outstrips the U.S. Open golf tournament. Riot Games is investing heavily in eSports, and League of Legends is obviously benefiting from that. It turns out that it has reverberations beyond the development process — and beyond games that themselves are eSports, as one prominent developer, Rami Ismail, points out below. This collection of tweets shows that this phenomenon is having a profound effect on developers: opening up opportunities for people to make games that would not have been viable in the past, and shaping their approach to everything from design to presentation.
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2014