Please note: The information regarding money spent on the CGS are educated guesses based on publicly known information using the best resources available due to the transparency of the project. They are not to be taken as absolute fact. The time of the CGS has passed, as of November 18th News...
Please note: The information regarding money spent on the CGS are educated guesses based on publicly known information using the best resources available due to the transparency of the project. They are not to be taken as absolute fact.
The time of the CGS has passed, as of November 18th News Corporation owned Championship Gaming Series ceased all working activities leaving eSports figureheads such as DjWheat unemployed as well as numerous players including all of the World Champions Birmingham Salvo. What was the reason behind the sudden withdrawal and the sudden closure? Why did they decide the swift, sudden action was necessary in the first place?
In this article Simon "Bidy" Bidwell attempts to identify some of the reasons, whilst also remembering how much potential this ambitious project had if only they had stuck to their roots...
The internet is one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century, the ability to communicate with a person in Australia one minute and Alaska the next is not just a marvelous feat of modern technology but now extremely average and underrated. There are now just as many people with access to the internet in the world as there are to television, and there are more IP addresses in existence than named stars lighting up our night sky – the World Wide Web really is a global phenomenon.
The Championship Gaming Series was to be eSports’ global phenomenon, a team based tournament to unite gamers worldwide competing across four titles with a game to please everyone, competitors going from eSports underground infamy to international celebrity whilst earning a nice salary along the way. On paper, the eSports dream come early – by their own admission “too earlyâ€Â. But was the demise of the CGS really because it was so revolutionary, so ahead of its time, or because they ignored all the warning signs of how their glorified view of eSports was going to affect who should have been its target audience?
Paul “ReDeYe†Chaloner, Ben “Aphextwin†Woodward, Jason “1†Lake, Jonathon “Fatal1ty†Wendel, Michael “Odee†O’Dell, Jonas “bsl†Vikan, Emil “HeatoN†Christensen, Mark Dolven, Brain “dkt†Flander and Alex “JaX†Conroy, between them there is a total of over 100 years experience in eSports, having managed teams, shoutcasted, played professionally or in Fatal1ty’s case all three whilst making millions along the way. The CGS should have had more than enough experience in its lower ranks to prevent any possibility of failure coming to fruition. Admittedly, although experienced, those eSports linchpins will not have been able to make decisions regarding all parts of the league, for example HeatoN would be little use in a decision about the stage, but overall they know how online gaming works, who you want to attract and how. eSports was and still is their life, and the CGS performed a masterstroke picking up such talented, dedicated individuals. It would make sense to take full advantage of these experienced officials and make them worth their $50000 wage, but
apparently not to the CGS; ReDeYe one of the many who backed the CGS from the start “had a very close relationship to many of those who made decisions for and on behalf of CGS†but regardless of his friendship, 8 years experience in gaming and people even more experienced than him “were ignored for the most part when it came to changing things we could see were wrong.†A criminal waste of money, not using the resources CGS had paid so dearly for.
Money should have been no hindrance either, yes there would have been a budget, yes there is an economic crisis, and yes spending approximately $10million on player salaries and prize money in two seasons was excessive; success doesn’t come with an instant injection of money – success needs to be nurtured and slowly built up, money cannot solve all – but to say the world wide economic recession combined with the fact the CGS was most likely over budget caused the leagues downfall would be wrong.
The video gaming industry has exploded in recent years and shows no sign of stopping despite the general trading downturn; in a report by PricewaterhouseCoopers it states that the gaming industry is already worth more than the Music industry with an estimated value of $37.5 billion, expected to increase by 9.1% per year resulting in an industry worth $48.9 billion in 2011. Gaming is essentially recession proof; it is cheaper than other past times and despite people spending less money in general, the money spent on gaming is still increasing. Even though people have less money spare their interest in gaming is growing and with the growth comes a bigger potential audience for the CGS. Although in times of crisis people drop their hobbies first, gaming is one hobby which isn’t being pushed aside meaning that to say the recession is causing a downturn in eSports and therefore the CGS is incorrect. For now at least, gaming isn’t going anywhere but up.
Meanwhile, News Corporation, the CGS’s owners and main financers are the world’s largest broadcasting and media conglomerate having holdings with BskyB in Great Britain, StarTV in Asia, 20th Century Fox film productions, Myspace.com, and a 34% stake in Hughes DirecTV Americas largest satellite TV system. The company’s revenue for their year ending 30th July 2007 was $28.655billion. For a company that big, $5million is little more than pocket money. Sure Rupert Murdoch and his chums would have liked the CGS to stay within budget, but when a company is handling that much money, I believe that had the CGS been able to bring in even more viewers than its rumored good ratings, the slight misdemeanors with overspending would have been pushed aside to capitalize rather than capitulate.
Gaming is not unknown in America, in fact it is very successful with a cable/satellite channel, G4, dedicated just to gaming, and a professional console league, MLG, regularly having live streams with over 500,000 people watching an event at any given time whilst shows are also produced for TV with ESPN on site for each of the 2008 Pro Circuit Competitions. Although not an advocate of multiplatform gaming like the CGS, MLG proves that an eSports television show is viable.
But, in today’s climate Television is no longer a progression but the opposite, if you go back say four years, flash streaming and plug-ins such as octoshape were still in their infancy and projects such as the BBC iPlayer were just a pipe-dream. However due to technological advancements in broadband the BBC iPlayer has been a possibility and it is testament to how big a market online viewership can be. We no longer need television, television is coming to us; the internet and personal computer are the new video broadcasting medium. The internet broadcasting revolution has lead to a decline in scheduled television ratings – people want to watch at their convenience and now they can. The internet is so great because information is available at your finger tips or the click of a button, the human race and in particular gamers are impatient they don’t want to be held back by the constraints of a fixed schedule.
By moving to television, the CGS left who should have been its hardcore fans alienated and feeling unwanted, when the CGS was actually scheduled to show in was the peak time for gaming whether it be social or competitive, leaving players with a choice; play with their team or watch the CGS. Had the CGS branched out into the internet, and made their whole content available live or on demand as one show over the web as their consoling counterpart, MLG, has done, NewsCorp’s gaming fairytale could well have had a very different ending, but for now competitive gaming is dead to them and it comes as the world wide network of computers which gave life to this new sport were shunned until there was no going back.
It has been over two years since the CGS was first announced, many jumped on ship, proclaiming what a great showcase the ‘world’s first televised eSports league’ would be for gaming, but just as many were perhaps a bit more skeptical. At board level at least the company had a distinctive feel to it, and it wasn’t that of eSports. Albeit each individual had had a lot of success in their respective fields in the past, Andy Reif had been Chief Operating Officer of the AVP Pro Beach Volleyball Tour and Director, Mike Burkes had been a producer on the Super Bowl as well as an Emmy Award Winner, but when it came to gaming they knew as much as most of the public, little to none.
Despite the boards lack of familiarity with gaming it is undoubted that he CGS was a good thing for eSports, it has brought unprecedented amounts of public exposure to eSports and provided new hope to our industry where some would have thought it impossible to earn a living from gaming they have been proved wrong. The team work aspects of the CGS and its point scoring system have created great stories, and dissuaded the misconception of the stereotypical gamer being an unsociable nerd sitting behind a screen 24/7. There was possibility for the league to carry on, and they were moving in the right direction with the addition of tournaments such as the CGS Pro-am and adding more first person views in counterstrike: source. The untimely, unfortunately dissolution of the league will leave a gaping hole in the gaming community, but where there is a hole it will be filled as with any growing industry.
Without the support of the internet, our sub-culture, our industry which we all strive so hard to improve, would not exist; the internet is our roots and without roots any structure cannot hope to stand, be it a plant or computer gaming it is just a shame the CGS started to realise too late.
The Championship Gaming Series was to be eSports’ global phenomenon, a team based tournament to unite gamers worldwide competing across four titles with a game to please everyone, competitors going from eSports underground infamy to international celebrity whilst earning a nice salary along the way. On paper, the eSports dream come early – by their own admission “too earlyâ€Â. But was the demise of the CGS really because it was so revolutionary, so ahead of its time, or because they ignored all the warning signs of how their glorified view of eSports was going to affect who should have been its target audience? Paul “ReDeYe†Chaloner, Ben “Aphextwin†Woodward, Jason “1†Lake, Jonathon “Fatal1ty†Wendel, Michael “Odee†O’Dell, Jonas “bsl†Vikan, Emil “HeatoN†Christensen, Mark Dolven, Brain “dkt†Flander and Alex “JaX†Conroy, between them there is a total of over 100 years experience in eSports, having managed teams, shoutcasted, played professionally or in Fatal1ty’s case all three whilst making millions along the way. The CGS should have had more than enough experience in its lower ranks to prevent any possibility of failure coming to fruition. Admittedly, although experienced, those eSports linchpins will not have been able to make decisions regarding all parts of the league, for example HeatoN would be little use in a decision about the stage, but overall they know how online gaming works, who you want to attract and how. eSports was and still is their life, and the CGS performed a masterstroke picking up such talented, dedicated individuals. It would make sense to take full advantage of these experienced officials and make them worth their $50000 wage, but
apparently not to the CGS; ReDeYe one of the many who backed the CGS from the start “had a very close relationship to many of those who made decisions for and on behalf of CGS†but regardless of his friendship, 8 years experience in gaming and people even more experienced than him “were ignored for the most part when it came to changing things we could see were wrong.†A criminal waste of money, not using the resources CGS had paid so dearly for.Money should have been no hindrance either, yes there would have been a budget, yes there is an economic crisis, and yes spending approximately $10million on player salaries and prize money in two seasons was excessive; success doesn’t come with an instant injection of money – success needs to be nurtured and slowly built up, money cannot solve all – but to say the world wide economic recession combined with the fact the CGS was most likely over budget caused the leagues downfall would be wrong.
The video gaming industry has exploded in recent years and shows no sign of stopping despite the general trading downturn; in a report by PricewaterhouseCoopers it states that the gaming industry is already worth more than the Music industry with an estimated value of $37.5 billion, expected to increase by 9.1% per year resulting in an industry worth $48.9 billion in 2011. Gaming is essentially recession proof; it is cheaper than other past times and despite people spending less money in general, the money spent on gaming is still increasing. Even though people have less money spare their interest in gaming is growing and with the growth comes a bigger potential audience for the CGS. Although in times of crisis people drop their hobbies first, gaming is one hobby which isn’t being pushed aside meaning that to say the recession is causing a downturn in eSports and therefore the CGS is incorrect. For now at least, gaming isn’t going anywhere but up.
Meanwhile, News Corporation, the CGS’s owners and main financers are the world’s largest broadcasting and media conglomerate having holdings with BskyB in Great Britain, StarTV in Asia, 20th Century Fox film productions, Myspace.com, and a 34% stake in Hughes DirecTV Americas largest satellite TV system. The company’s revenue for their year ending 30th July 2007 was $28.655billion. For a company that big, $5million is little more than pocket money. Sure Rupert Murdoch and his chums would have liked the CGS to stay within budget, but when a company is handling that much money, I believe that had the CGS been able to bring in even more viewers than its rumored good ratings, the slight misdemeanors with overspending would have been pushed aside to capitalize rather than capitulate. Gaming is not unknown in America, in fact it is very successful with a cable/satellite channel, G4, dedicated just to gaming, and a professional console league, MLG, regularly having live streams with over 500,000 people watching an event at any given time whilst shows are also produced for TV with ESPN on site for each of the 2008 Pro Circuit Competitions. Although not an advocate of multiplatform gaming like the CGS, MLG proves that an eSports television show is viable.
But, in today’s climate Television is no longer a progression but the opposite, if you go back say four years, flash streaming and plug-ins such as octoshape were still in their infancy and projects such as the BBC iPlayer were just a pipe-dream. However due to technological advancements in broadband the BBC iPlayer has been a possibility and it is testament to how big a market online viewership can be. We no longer need television, television is coming to us; the internet and personal computer are the new video broadcasting medium. The internet broadcasting revolution has lead to a decline in scheduled television ratings – people want to watch at their convenience and now they can. The internet is so great because information is available at your finger tips or the click of a button, the human race and in particular gamers are impatient they don’t want to be held back by the constraints of a fixed schedule. By moving to television, the CGS left who should have been its hardcore fans alienated and feeling unwanted, when the CGS was actually scheduled to show in was the peak time for gaming whether it be social or competitive, leaving players with a choice; play with their team or watch the CGS. Had the CGS branched out into the internet, and made their whole content available live or on demand as one show over the web as their consoling counterpart, MLG, has done, NewsCorp’s gaming fairytale could well have had a very different ending, but for now competitive gaming is dead to them and it comes as the world wide network of computers which gave life to this new sport were shunned until there was no going back.
It has been over two years since the CGS was first announced, many jumped on ship, proclaiming what a great showcase the ‘world’s first televised eSports league’ would be for gaming, but just as many were perhaps a bit more skeptical. At board level at least the company had a distinctive feel to it, and it wasn’t that of eSports. Albeit each individual had had a lot of success in their respective fields in the past, Andy Reif had been Chief Operating Officer of the AVP Pro Beach Volleyball Tour and Director, Mike Burkes had been a producer on the Super Bowl as well as an Emmy Award Winner, but when it came to gaming they knew as much as most of the public, little to none.
Despite the boards lack of familiarity with gaming it is undoubted that he CGS was a good thing for eSports, it has brought unprecedented amounts of public exposure to eSports and provided new hope to our industry where some would have thought it impossible to earn a living from gaming they have been proved wrong. The team work aspects of the CGS and its point scoring system have created great stories, and dissuaded the misconception of the stereotypical gamer being an unsociable nerd sitting behind a screen 24/7. There was possibility for the league to carry on, and they were moving in the right direction with the addition of tournaments such as the CGS Pro-am and adding more first person views in counterstrike: source. The untimely, unfortunately dissolution of the league will leave a gaping hole in the gaming community, but where there is a hole it will be filled as with any growing industry.
Without the support of the internet, our sub-culture, our industry which we all strive so hard to improve, would not exist; the internet is our roots and without roots any structure cannot hope to stand, be it a plant or computer gaming it is just a shame the CGS started to realise too late.
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