‘Superhot VR’ feels like a time bending, action-packed puzzle
Earlier this year, Superhot launched on PC and consoles with a fresh gameplay gimmick: Time only moves when you move. This simple idea turned the fast-paced action of an FPS shooter into an odd, methodical, and tense puzzle game where players could stop in their tracks to think their way around a barrage of incoming bullets. It’s incredibly fun on traditional gaming platforms — but it’s even better in virtual reality.
The basics of Superhot carry over to its virtual reality version, but it’s not exactly a straight port. Rather than running around levels, and having your momentum kickstart the timestream, the player stays in one place as the enemies advance. The levels are shorter, too. After a barrage of attackers are dispatched, the game moves forward to the next scene. Each moment is like a short, time-locked puzzle — surviving a section means figuring out what order to dispatch enemies in and how. Sometimes this means merely shooting one, other times it means methodically blocking their shots with an object in the room or throwing a coffee cup at them (really). Sometimes, it means just knowing when to duck so a trap in the room takes out the bad guy instead of you.
It’s not just the level design that makes Superhot VR different from the core PC game, though — it’s Oculus Touch. Player movement is what triggers the world’s movement, and that includes every tiny movement your hands make with Oculus’ new motion controllers and your head movements. It’s a lot harder to keep time frozen in Superhot VR, which forces you to think faster. When you do finally figure out how to clear an area though, it’s extremely satisfying, and that’s the beauty of Superhot VR: It leaves you with a lingering sense of accomplishment. You didn’t just kill some bad guys, you solved a puzzle. It’s a good feeling.
Superhot VR is one of those experiences I can’t recommend highly enough. It’s creative, surreal and perfect for the medium of virtual reality. Unfortunately, it might not last long. Superhot’s developers say they’re targeting a 2-4 hour experience. That’s typical of a lot of first-gen VR games, but it’s a shame. If our short demo is any indication, Superhot VR is the kind of game that will leave you wanting more.
Rockband VR is a completely different kind of guitar game
When Oculus first teased Rockband for virtual reality, it sounded like kind of a stupid idea. A guitar game? In 2016? In virtual reality? How passe. It was hard to imagine how the series’ iconic stream of colored notes would translate to VR, and I immediately dismissed the idea. It turns out I was right — Rockband’s classic game mode didn’t make a smooth transition to VR, so the team at Harmonix had to come up with something completely different — and it’s so much better than awkward rhythm game I was expecting.
Rockband VR still uses the game’s goofy plastic guitar peripherals — it just uses it a bit differently than previous games. Traditionally, Rockband tasks players with matching button presses to a series of “notes” that fly towards the camera — the more accurately you replicate the pattern, the higher your score. Rockband VR, on the other hand, is more about playing chords. Icons embedded on your virtual guitar’s neck indicate what button combinations you need to press to play a specific power chord — which can then be slid up and down the guitar’s neck to change the tone of the song. Rather than doling out points for playing the right “notes,” the game awards points for knowing when to change to a different chord. You can never play the “wrong” chord, either.
It’s definitely less straightforward than the traditional Rockband experience, but it does feel more like you’re actually playing music. Depending on when you change chords or where on the guitar’s neck you’ve moved your power chord, it changes how the song sounds. It never sounds bad, but it does sound different. It’s a bit more of a free form experience, and it definitely lends itself better to the fantasy of playing an instrument on a stage. Speaking of which, the virtual environment looks fantastic: it’s a little intimidating to stare down the expectant, VR audience.
Should that experience seem a little too relaxed for you, don’t worry — the traditional note-based gameplay mode still exists in Rockband VR, but it’s not the main game mode. Still, you’ll at least have the option of playing classic mode if the new gameplay elements don’t tickle your fretboard. Finally, there’s one more thing to keep in mind about Rockband VR: it requires Oculus Touch to play. The handheld controller actually mounts on the end of the guitar’s neck, and it looks a little weird, but it’s necessary to track the accessory in 3D space. At least attaching the controller to the guitar will be easy: every Oculus Touch will ship with the Rockband mounting bracket, whether you plan to buy the game or not.
Oculus’ prototype headset points to VR’s wireless future
Tucked away inside the dark hallways of the San Jose Convention Center is a meeting room with signs that read “No photos” and “No food or drink.” I shook the hands of the Oculus spokespeople who were there to greet me and proceeded to try to get in the door. But before I could do that, I was instructed to leave my backpack, my purse and my phone behind. When I was finally allowed in, I was surprised to see that the room was decorated to look like a giant living space, with a large sofa and chaise in one corner and pillows, books and paintings placed throughout. But I wasn’t there to judge the interior design. No, I was there to try a prototype of Oculus’ newly announced standalone VR headset, Santa Cruz.
The hardware, which was announced at the Oculus Connect 3 keynote, sits somewhere between the Rift and the Gear VR. It doesn’t require a PC like the Rift, yet it’s more powerful than Gear VR. And it’s wireless. What’s particularly interesting about the Santa Cruz is that Oculus is using it to show off something called “inside-out tracking,” a technology that uses cameras on the headset for positional movement — so that the game can know if you’re crouching or leaning to one side, for example. The Rift requires external sensors for this, and the Gear VR doesn’t have this feature at all. So to have this simply built-in to a standalone headset is a big deal.
Because the Santa Cruz is strictly a prototype, I wasn’t allowed to touch the headset. But I did get a good look at it before testing it. The entire thing looks almost exactly like a Rift, but instead of being attached to a PC, the wires are connected to what appears to be a miniature computer attached to the rear of the headset (aka the part that hits the back of your head). On the front, there are four tiny cameras, which provide that “inside-out tracking” magic. The prototype was pretty rough, the wires were held with what looked like tape and the internals were exposed. But there was indeed no PC or smartphone in sight. All that’s powering my VR experience was that tiny PC.
Before I could wear the headset, I was told to look around the room to get my bearings of where the different objects in the room were located. The idea here is to get a mental boundary, so that I don’t run into the couch, for example. Since I wasn’t allowed to touch the Santa Cruz, Oculus ‘helpers’ in the room had to put the headset on for me. It was a little awkward, but after some futzing and adjusting, they finally had it on my head.
The first scene I was in was that of an empty space station. I walked all around the stark interior, making my way from one end to the next. It was cool to be able to walk around this virtual space without having wires encumber my movement. But as I approached the edge of the physical room, I saw a blue grid show up, indicating that I was at the edge of the world and could go no further. I asked the spokesperson if they needed to map out the room ahead of time in order to mark out the perimeters for the headset, but was told that no, it wasn’t necessary. It’s unclear if the Santa Cruz is nimble enough to figure out boundaries on the fly, but at least in the case of this demo room, it seemed to be doing a good job.
Next, I was transported to “Paper Town,” which is a fairly common Oculus demo. In it, you’re in a city made out of paper — of course. People are yelling, there’s a house burning and oh, there’s a UFO too. I crouched around, leaned from side to side, and could even peer over balcony railings and look behind objects. It was a lot more interactive than most Gear VR experiences and was on par with how I’ve felt in Rift games.
And, well, that was it. The Santa Cruz demo lasted for only a few minutes. I asked if it would eventually support Oculus’ Touch controllers or if it would be compatible with the same titles as the Rift, but all Oculus could say was that it’s far too early to tell. Right now, the Santa Cruz prototype is simply a proof-of-concept that its inside-out tracking works. It could very well develop into a separate, standalone VR product. But the company could also use that same technology and integrate it into the Gear VR or a future Rift, perhaps transforming those into standalone headsets themselves.
The experience was short, but it was pretty great. There are no sensors and wires to worry about. You can just put on the headset and get started, no PC or phone required. There are other standalone headsets out there — Alcatel has one and Intel’s working on its own version too — but it could very well be Oculus that gets it done right.
The Oculus Rift earbuds are surprisingly comfy
Headtracking, motion controls and visual fidelity usually dominate the conversation about what makes for an “immersive” virtual reality experience, but great sounding audio is every bit as important — that’s why the Oculus Rift ships with built-in headphones. The on-ear speakers are more than adequate for a good VR experience but at Oculus Connect 3, the company announced an alternative that might be just a little bit better: the Oculus Rift Earphones. I got my hands on a pair before leaving the developer conference, and I can say that Oculus confidence in the earbuds is justified: these things sound pretty great.
It’s mostly a triumph of design. The Rift’s standard headphones sound fine, but as an on-ear solution, they’re subject to noise pollution. In-ear headphones are simply more isolating, blocking more outside noise and lending a more immersive experience to VR by default — which make the Oculus Earphones perfect for Rift users looking for a more intimate sound experience. I took a pair to the Superhot demo booth at Oculus Connect 3 (Oculus is giving a pair to every attendee), and convinced the developers to let me install them on the demo station’s Rift. Installation is easy — a single screw holds each headphone in place, which snap on with magnetic connectors.
The eabuds look a little silly dangling off of the bottom of a Rift headset, but they sound great — the soft silicone earbuds fit comfortably in my ears, and blocked out almost all outside noise. It was great for the VR experience, but a little detrimental to the demo experience: every time Superhot’s developer tapped me on the shoulder to get my attention, I jumped. I had no idea he was even there! The buds were quite loud, too; we had to reduce the game’s volume by about half before I was comfortable.
As great as the Oculus Rift Earphones sound, they do present one problem — they’re a very personal audio device. Yes, earbuds sound great, but they’re also one of the few peripherals we put inside a part of our body. Unless you’re comfortable sharing earwax with strangers, it makes the Rift unshareable. Still, if you’re the only person in your household who uses the Rift (or you don’t mind uninstalling them out for other users), they’re a great accessory.
‘League of Legends’ is adding post-game replays
Nailing a sweet pentakill in League of Legends is even better when you have an easy-to-share video of it for bragging rights. But what if you don’t want to resort to third-party tools to watch or create a clip? Well, according to developer Riot Games, you shouldn’t have to wait much longer. Ahead of next season, Riot announced it’s adding the highly-requested feature to the game, and replays from the current patch can be watched directly from the LoL client itself.
There’s also a new Annotated Timeline that sounds like it’ll highlight the best moments of a particular game, giving you easy access to scrub from one tower take down to the next dragon kill. You’ll be able to make your own highlight reels as well. There isn’t a definitive timeline for when this will roll out, but with season six ending next month and season seven starting near the end of January, sometime between then seems pretty likely.
Via: Rift Herald
Source: Riot Games
The next batch of Oculus games highlights the Touch controller
2016 has been a banner year for Oculus for one main reason: After four long years, it finally shipped the consumer edition of its VR headset. Sure, it’s pricey at $600 and sure, it requires a pretty powerful computer, but for a first-generation product in an extremely young field, the Rift delivers the goods. One of the reasons for that is that Oculus has been busy cultivating a vast ecosystem of games and apps for years now, thanks to the company’s fervent developer community. On the eve of Oculus’ third annual developer’s conference, we got to get a sneak peek at the very latest that community has to offer. The big theme this year? Getting to use those soon-to-be-available Touch controllers.
Arktika.1
First-person shooters are de rigueur for VR games, and for good reason — it’s just so much fun. That’s certainly how I felt when playing Arktika.1, where I took on the role of a mercenary set in a post-apocalyptic ice age a 100 years into the future. My job? To protect the colony from getting robbed by bandits and all kinds of fearsome enemies — both human and non-human varieties. It’s an Oculus exclusive but, importantly, it’s also a Touch exclusive, as it was designed with the motion controllers in mind. — Nicole Lee, Senior Editor
Kingspray
Kingspray is really less of a game and more of a virtual gathering of friends. That is, friends who are into the creation of street art. In this VR experience, you essentially use those Touch controllers to manipulate spray cans to tag up walls to your heart’s content. You’re able to change up colors, adjust brush size and even capture a screencap of your masterpiece to share on social media.
The real idea behind Kingspray is to mark up a wall not just by yourself but with your friends too, through a social multi-player mode. You can do things like throw virtual bottles and cans at your buds if they mess up your art. There’s also a boombox that’ll play your favorite tunes as you indulge your graffiti fantasies. We’re not quite sure if VR graffiti will catch on with the masses, but at least this way, you won’t be risking arrest. — Nicole Lee, Senior Editor
Killing Floor: Incursion
If you’re a fan of the Killing Floor survival horror franchise, you’ll likely be a fan of the Rift version of it too. Instead of using a gamepad to kill the undead, you’ll be using the Touch controllers to not just shoot at them, but also to stab and punch them to death. To keep alive, you’ll have to wander around finding health and ammo packs and, of course, to just be vigilant. The best thing about this game though, is that it’s a multi-player co-op, so you can get your friends to join in on the zombie killing fun too. — Nicole Lee, Senior Editor
VR Sports Challenge
Sports and video games have always gone hand in hand — but it was the breakaway success of the Nintendo Wii that made motion controls their ever-present third wheel. With Oculus’ Touch controllers on the horizon, VR Sports Challenge was an inevitability. Sadly, it’s also a little mediocre. The idea is good (who wouldn’t want to play out the fantasy of being a star athlete?) but the experience can come off as a bit awkward and unintuitive. The game’s football experience is a good example: Despite using motion controllers with 1:1 tracking, the ball doesn’t go where you physically throw it, but where you are physically looking. The force of the throw doesn’t matter either — distance is determined by the angle of the player’s head, not the power of their throw. It feels, frankly, a little unnatural.
VR Sports Challenge’s basketball mode fares better, at least. Free throws, passes and blocking with the motion controller work exactly as you’d expect, although the game’s tendency to automatically teleport the player to wherever the most action on the court is can be a little disorientating. By and far, the best experience in the VR Sports package is hockey — not for the sport itself, but for the first-fights. Turns out having an angry brawl in VR is a ton of fun. — Sean Buckley, Associate Editor
Unspoken
Insomniac Games’ The Unspoken has often been described as a bizarre mash up of Fight Club and Harry Potter; At Oculus Connect 3, the game got an extra dose of magic. Fundamentally, the magical multiplayer combat experience hasn’t changed. Players still fling spells at each other while teleporting across a chaotic battlefield, but the game’s just a bit more complicated now — with new spells, new motion controls and the introduction of two character classes: the Anarchist and Kineticist.
The game’s new class system to serves to enhance the complexity of its battle mechanics. Each type of character offers players a completely different set of skills — Anarchists sling fireballs and deal in direct damage, while the Kineticist uses telekinetic powers to throw cars, plants and debris at their opponents. Players can also now cast spells with mere gestures, allowing them to cross their arms to put up a shield or spread their hands apart to unleash a powerful attack. Apparently, the new gesture spells were designed to allow players to focus on the action without looking away from the battle to use item-based attacks. It worked — we didn’t take our eyes off our opponent for our entire demo. — Sean Buckley, Associate Editor
Landfall
What would happen if you crammed Halo: Spartan Assault into VR, minus the Halo branding? You’d probably get Landfall. Okay, that may be stretching a little, but not too much: earlier this year, the developer behind Halo’s top-down shooting games reformed as VR-exclusive production house. The company’s first game? A twin-stick, top-down VR game, naturally. At first blush the experience seems a little odd, but in a space currently dominated by first-person experiences, Landfall’s overhead perspective is a little refreshing.
Our multiplayer Landfall demo pitted Engadget’s team of two against two unseen journalists from Japan, tasking us with defending a series of control points against a horde of soldiers, turrets and the occasional oversized war-mech. Each player controls a single warrior, viewed from an disembodied aerial view. It was almost a nostalgic perspective — like looking down on a collection of toy soldiers. — Sean Buckley, Associate Editor
Lone Echo
Without a doubt, Lone Echo was one of the best experiences on display at Oculus Connect. You take on the role of “Jack,” a possibly sentient robot working on a space station in the rings of Saturn. We don’t know a lot about the story yet, but it has something to do with a special anomaly and disaster that threatens both the station and its human astronauts. It’s a good story, but that’s not what makes this game great — that’s more about how the player moves through the space station: completely weightlessly.
Lone Echo uses the Oculus Touch controllers to let players push off bulkheads and grab walls to weightlessly navigate through their environment. Can’t find a good hold? Don’t worry — your robot avatar has tiny jets to propel him through the void of space. It’s a game where momentum matters, and offers players a realistic sense of what it might like to float in the freefall of deep space. That’s exactly what a lot of us want out of VR: the kind of experience we’re just not likely to get out of our mundane lives here on earth. Ready at Dawn studios was coy about how the rest of the game will play out, but the developer certainly has our attention. — Sean Buckley, Associate Editor
Walking in virtual reality is hard, so ‘Lone Echo’ got rid of it
First generation virtual reality may have nailed sense of presence, but one major limitation keeps it from feeling truly immersive: Walking. The endless landscapes of the digital world are hampered by the confines of reality — your playspace is only so big, and if you walk too far in any given direction, you’re going to hit a wall. Most games get around this with teleportation mechanics, allowing the player’s avatar to jump to far-off locations. Ready at Dawn Studios’ Lone Echo took another approach: turn off the gravity, and eliminate the need to walk altogether.
Lone Echo casts the player as Jack, an artificially intelligent robot who helps astronauts run and maintain a space station that orbits Saturn. It’s the perfect environment for a game trying to sidestep limitations of VR’s walking problem: with no gravity, there’s no need to walk. The player pulls themselves around the space station by hand instead, grabbing rails and pushing off bulkheads to weightlessly drift through the space station’s futuristic corridors. Moving with your hands in VR isn’t a completely new idea, as it’s essentially the concept behind Oculus Studios’ The Climb — but freeing the player from the threat of gravity allows ‘Lone Echo’ to have a full, endless range of motion that doesn’t feel confined by the physical space around the player.
Not only does this movement mechanic solve VR’s physical space problem, but it makes the entire game feel more immersive. Manually pawing your way through the levels helps you feel connected to the virtual space and makes it easier to get invested in the story. And the story is plenty interesting, focusing on the chaos that erupts after a space anomaly tears through part of the station and threatens your robot avatar and the human astronauts he works with. Along the way, Jack will have to travel and explore the station, cut through bulkheads with a wrist-mounted torch, save human lives and repair broken systems. Admittedly, that would all probably still be pretty interesting if the game had relied on the same teleportation mechanic a lot of VR games are using right now — but it found a better way.
Sadly, Lone Echo’s solution to VR’s “walking problem” only works for games that where the player doesn’t need to actually physically walk. It’s kind of a cheat — but it’s a cheat that represents everything that’s great about first-generation VR. Lone Echo seems to be a game that put design first: one that was built around making the most of the medium’s limitations. Technology will get better, and each generation of VR will come with fewer and fewer shortcomings for developers to work around. I’m looking forward to that, but I’m also glad we’re not there yet. Clever developers can do great things with VR’s foibles. I can’t wait to see what they come up with next.
Update: We just played a 5 x 5 multi-player demo of Lone Echo here at the Oculus Connect event, where you’re essentially playing a fancy game of Capture The Flag. Except in this case, you’re supposed to grab a frisbee and then fly it back into your opponent’s den, thus destroying it and taking it over. The mechanics are identical to that of the single player demo we saw above — to propel through the zero-gravity space, you grab onto surfaces and push off on them. You can also generally move around by pressing on thrusters and boosters. I found it pretty hard to get around at first, but you soon get used to flying through the air. In general though, I’d prefer the single player mode to multi-player; chasing after frisbees proved too fast-paced for me.
Fight off post-apocalyptic bandits in ‘Arktika.1’
It’s a hundred years in a post-apocalyptic future and a second ice age has arrived. You’re a mercenary, hired by a Russian colony to protect the facilities from bandits, criminals and other… creatures. That’s the basic premise behind Arktika.1, a brand new VR title developed by 4A Games with the help of Oculus Studios. This first-person shooter is an Oculus exclusive, and importantly, it’s also a Touch exclusive, which means it’s designed from the ground up to utilize the VR firm’s motion hand controllers.
After donning the Rift headset and going through a brief tutorial, I got the hang of using the Touch controllers fairly quickly. I picked two guns as my weapons of choice and wielded one in each hand. As you do so, the tutorial offers a brief hologram on how to reload your gun — which either means lowering your gun and lifting it again or flipping your wrist to cock a virtual barrel. You’ll know when to reload when the floating ammo digits above your gun is, well, zero.
In my demo, I was thrown into enemy combat fairly quickly, in what appears to be a storage facility. Thankfully, the bandits didn’t appear to be terribly bright, and I could crouch behind barricades and walls without being detected. To move throughout the space, you simply aim your gaze at a pre-determined area — they’re highlighted in blue or yellow — and press the A button. You’ll be teleported there instantly. Blue spots have high cover but terrible shooting angles while yellow areas have low cover but you get to blast bandits with greater accuracy. After you clear the room of bandits, you get to move to the next stage by teleporting to the elevator and going on to the next floor.
Arktika.1 is what I would describe as a full-body VR game, as I not only used my arms and hands to shoot, I also bent down and got on the floor to avoid getting shot. It was a lot of fun, so much so that my 20-minute demo time flew by. The use of the Touch controllers really makes this game pretty immersive as well. Arktika.1 should be out by Q2 of next year, which is good, because the Touch should be available by then too.
Oculus brings VR gameplay streams to your Facebook news feed
Facebook has been experimenting with livestreaming gaming for a bit, and now Oculus is coming into the fold. You’ll be able to broadcast your Gear VR gameplay to the world’s largest social network. From the stage presentation, perhaps unsurprisingly it resembles how the current streams work. Basically, it looks like a status update, and you can tag friends, comment and talk smack. Or, ill-timed words of encouragement from your family members as you blast away enemies. Because that’s how Facebook works.
This is how your parents will watch esports
Christina Alejandre ended up chatting with UFC President Dana White backstage at the Turner Studios in July, just before the final game of ELEAGUE’s debut Counter-Strike: Global Offensive season. As VP of esports and ELEAGUE at Turner Sports, Alejandre was pivotal in producing that first season, and she told White how excited she was for the final game, which would be broadcast live on TBS. It was more than excitement, she explained; something more powerful was pulsing through her veins.
White knew exactly what she was trying to describe.
“There are very few people in this world who can identify exactly what you’re saying,” Alejandre remembers White saying. “What you’re feeling is the first time that I saw UFC on Fox.”
UFC has been a household name for years now, and esports are on a similar path. Alejandre is one of the most influential esports shepherds in the business, as she’s working to make professional gaming as visible on television as traditional sports. She works for Turner Sports, where she helped establish ELEAGUE, the first US esports league to stream directly to television in a regular, predictable schedule, just like football, baseball or, of course, UFC matches.
The Turner Sports crew sets up the Overwatch Open (Image credit: Engadget)
ELEAGUE started in 2016 as a competitive CS:GO league, airing games on TBS every Friday night for three months straight over the summer. The final game took place on July 30th, handing out more than $500,000 to the top teams. Already TBS has started preparing for season two, which kicks off Oct. 21st, and for the ELEAGUE Major, a prestigious tournament sponsored by CS:GO developer Valve. This will be the 10th Major tournament ever held, and Turner Sports was selected to host after completing just one three-month CS:GO season. That’s a huge accomplishment for Alejandre.
“It’s almost unprecedented that they would have chosen us, because they choose a lot of other big companies that have been around a long time, and they have done amazing work with their stuff, so for us to get chosen was — it was a little bit humbling,” she says. “We’re just very, very, very excited that it happened.”
ELEAGUE isn’t all CS:GO, all the time. Turner and its ELEAGUE partner WME IMG just wrapped up the first professional Overwatch tournament to ever hit television, the Overwatch Open. The grand finals were televised live on TBS on Sept. 30th, filmed live in front of a sold-out audience.
The television aspect is crucial to Turner Sports’ success as an esports trailblazer. Professional gaming has infiltrated the online world via communities like Reddit and live-streaming sites like Amazon’s Twitch. Online, you can build a fantasy League of Legends team just as easily as a fantasy NFL team. But on television, esports are just starting to make themselves known.
Sebastian “Zebbosai” Olsson waits for the Overwatch Open to start (Image credit: Turner Sports)
Imagine the following scenario: A teenager and his parents are seated around the television on a Friday night. It’s 10PM and ELEAGUE is on TBS, airing a professional Overwatch match. Flipping through the channels, the screen pauses on TBS and the teenager says, “This is that game I was telling you about, the one that people play professionally. For money. I told you it was real!” And instead of shrugging off what clearly sounds like a young gaming nerd’s unrealistic dream, the parents can see the action first-hand, complete with a fancy studio, excited audience, professional players and dynamic shout-casters explaining what’s happening on the screen. It suddenly becomes more real.
This is happening, Alejandre says. She sees stories on forums and social media about young people sitting down with their folks and watching esports every Friday night. It’s becoming a ritual for some families, she says, just like Monday Night Football. Something similar even happened with her own parents.
Alejandre has worked in video games for nearly two decades, most recently at Warner Bros. and esports company ESL. Her parents have never fully understood what she does, and her move into esports was even more confusing for them.
“They were even more like, ‘What are you doing?’” Alejandre says. “So, they tuned in on TBS and they were like, ‘We had no idea what was going on with the game, but it seemed really exciting and it seemed really cool.’ They could actually see what I was doing and participate in what I was doing by watching esports. So, I just love it.”
The Misfits team celebrates after its victory on September 30th (Image credit: Turner Sports)
Televised esports helped legitimize Alejandre’s career. That’s one reason the final game of ELEAGUE’s first season hit her so hard on an emotional level. She was standing on the edge of a new endeavor that allowed her to show the world how much passion, energy and humanity there was in professional gaming — things she’d seen and felt for years, but couldn’t accurately demonstrate to outsiders, including her parents. Television helps introduce esports to people who would never otherwise see a game.
“For me, who’s been struggling to tell my parents what I’ve been doing and legitimize my career, to see that happening, it was immensely gratifying,” Alejandre says.
But TBS didn’t decide to enter the esports industry just to bridge the divide between video game-loving teenagers and their parents. One of the main reasons TBS dived into esports so hard this year was because it was rebranding and re-establishing its internal goals. Specifically, the Turner crew wanted to tap into the most coveted demographic, 18- to 35-year-olds. That happens to be esports’ sweet spot.
In the US, 69 percent of all esports viewers are between the ages of 18 and 34, according to Superdata Research. Worldwide, esports attracted nearly 214 million viewers throughout 2016, with that figure expected to surpass 300 million by 2019. The industry is expected to bring in more than $1 billion in 2017.
With that kind of potential audience and money on the table, ELEAGUE isn’t going to settle for just two games and a few tournaments a year. CS:GO will always be a part of TBS’s esports lineup, Alejandre says, but it’s planning to add more games next year.
Overwatch Open analyst and professional StarCraft II player Chris “Huk” Loranger — he’s one of the people who hosted the grand finals live on TBS — says that esports aren’t that different than traditional sports, and it makes perfect sense for ELEAGUE to exist right now.
A sold-out crowd watches the Overwatch Open in Atlanta (Image credit: Engadget)
“It’s a natural progression for how popular video games are as a hobby,” Loranger says. “Most traditional sports were, at one point, a hobby, and they just developed to where they are now, and that’s basically where esports is.”
The Turner esports crew works closely with other leagues and organizations, scheduling tournaments so that they don’t conflict with one another and trying to make things as easy as possible on players and coaches. On a macro level, esports are fairly disorganized; the industry grew so quickly that it now lacks a regulating body that oversees the well-being of people involved, let alone the industry as a whole. However, organizations like the World Esports Association and the Professional Esports Association are attempting to remedy these oversights.
One of Alejandre’s main goals with ELEAGUE is for Turner Sports to remain authentic to the esports space: She doesn’t want Twitch viewers to switch on TBS and feel like they’re being disparaged or exploited. She was nervous when she took the Turner esports job in February — she’d worked in professional gaming for years and she knew how easily executives could change their minds or misunderstand the industry entirely.
But, so far, it’s been amazing, she says, and season one of ELEAGUE was a resounding success. There are plenty of things to tweak for the next season, but she’s pleased with what TBS has accomplished. She’s pleased with what esports has accomplished.
“This is a legitimate sport, and maybe it doesn’t have the physicality of a traditional stick-and-ball sport, but make no mistake, this is an intellectual sport,” Alejandre says. “I think we’ve been able to kind of provide that exposure that can show [new people] this requires an insane amount of skill. I think esports has kind of arrived and we’re now pushing forward.”
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