In a series of two posts, I want to touch on scaling up the fighting game community (FGC) on a strictly commercial/economic level. I am going to make two assumptions:
1) We want the FGC to grow. That idea seems to be uncontroversial, but the FGC has always had an ambivalent attitude to the modern era of e-sports.
2) We want to keep the “soul” of the FGC. That is something of a squishy term, but I take it to have three key components. Firstly, we want the FGC to have a strong grassroots presence. We want Evo, Combo Breaker, CEO, and the like to continue, and reward those who have built the community. Secondly, we want FGC events to continue to host multiple games – nothing near as restrictive as Overwatch League. Thirdly, we want to keep it accessible: the idea that anybody can enter, and you can play against a Daigo, a SonicFox, or a Justin Wong whether you are a sponsored pro or entering your first tourney.
I want to present an approach to scaling up the FGC that keeps the “soul” of the FGC intact. Indeed, I think such an approach has many things in its favor. We would reward those that have invested their livelihood into the FGC, we would be less buffeted by the whims of publishers, and we could determine which way we want to grow instead of venture capital/outside investors washing that core away. In the interests of brevity, though (and in a desperate attempt to keep you from dozing off), in this first post I want to focus on some of the more common proposals to level up the FGC. But to begin with, let us look at some of the benefits and drawbacks of scaling up the FGC in the first place.
The benefits of increasing the amount of money in the FGC are obvious – a rising tide lifts all boats. More money in the FGC means (at least in theory) Twitter posts mocking prize pools will diminish. It will also mean more stability for the people working to bring us the product – including the streamers who make tourneys viewable, commentators to entertain us, and the tournament organizers that run the events in the first place. It will hopefully allow us to pay the volunteers and bracket runners at these events, without which the whole edifice would crumble. That it would enable people to make a living doing something they are passionate about and allow us to reward and take care of the people who have given so much to us, is a good thing. Alas, adding money to the FGC does not exist in a vacuum, and nature abhors a vacuum. By vacuum, I mean e-sports, and by nature, I mean the FGC.
The chattering heads and nattering nabobs tell us that e-sports is the next big frontier. They draw charts, torture statistics, and drop sales decks, all with the siren song of e-sports being the NFL/NBA of the 21st century. Depending on who you ask, it is either the next El-Dorado or the next dotcom bubble. I would argue that the significant shift in e-sports occurred around the launch of Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty. In the world of e-sports 1.0, publishers viewed tournaments and events as a marketing expense, if they were involved at all. The success of Starcraft: Brood War in Korea opened their eyes to another option – e-sports as a revenue stream via broadcast rights. Though Starcraft 2 was not the game to lead us into this brave new world, it laid the groundwork for Riot’s League Champion Series and Blizzard’s Overwatch League. The FGC has events like the Capcom Pro Tour, and the Mortal Kombat Pro Kompetition circuit, though these still probably fall under the realm of marketing expense. But that may be changing if one believes Capcom’s financial reports. However, the FGC, unlike most other games that have morphed into e-sports, has a very ambivalent view on the matter, and I want to explore that tension briefly.
The FGC has been around a very long time, over a third of a century, long predating e-sports 2.0. And I suspect it will be around a long time after. During that time, it has existed in an odd détente with the publishers and developers of the games – at best, it was a kind of benign neglect; at worst, it was sometimes hostile (especially with Nintendo and Smash). Since there was not a lot of money, and no real central authority, FGC events were by necessity grassroots. That we would compete to see who the best is no shock – an old joke is that the first car race happened the moment we made the second car. The FGC is bottom-up, not top-down. Like Whitman, the FGC contains multitudes: events, games, and circuits. Over time, as with any sub-culture, the FGC has developed its quirks, personalities, and flaws. We can easily contrast it with Overwatch, where Blizzard willed Overwatch’s e-sports scene into existence (with some casualties along the way). Something like Overwatch League is a tabula rasa, with Blizzard shaping it as it sees fit. The FGC is a different kind of animal, one with a history, with all the blessings and baggage that entails.
The FGC’s relationship with “traditional” e-sports has been tumultuous if we are generous. The early interactions with Major League Gaming (now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Activision-Blizzard) were bumpy. From requests to make fighting games more “viewer-friendly” by banning top tier characters and the sense that fighting games were second class citizens at Evo with MLG’s focus on Halo at the event, it was a marriage doomed to fail. It started with the best of intentions, but vast misunderstandings of the cultural gap between modern, top-down corporate e-sports and the grassroots nature of the FGC collided head-on, and not for the last time. Even now, Momochi laments the role that the Japan eSports Federation is forcing out the people who have stuck to and built up the scene in Japan in favor of outsiders and (implied) legitimacy.
The issue the FGC is facing is one that anyone from Harlem, Flushing, Chicago’s South Side, or any other gentrifying urban area would be familiar. The influx of capital and investment can help revitalize neighborhoods and local businesses. But it can also squeeze out residents and businesses, replacing them with large corporate interests and armchair explorers looking to live someplace “exotic,” but not dangerous. There is a fear that all these new visitors are simply that – temporary tourists who will leave when the neighborhood becomes like all the others, or if the money isn’t there. But before then, they will have forced out all the people who built up the community and made it unique, replacing it with a desolate façade. And in that metamorphosis, there is the fear that the FGC will lose something precious forever. The topic of gentrification is a complicated and highly charged one, and one that I am ill-equipped to provide an answer for. Suffice to say; I think that the concerns the FGC has about the unfettered encroachment of e-sports are real and justified. Outside organizations looking to come in would do well to treat these concerns as legitimate instead of the ravings of closet communists who are upset over nothing.
Overwatch saw its nascent e-sports scene smothered with the announcement of the Overwatch League, and even now, some fans mourn its passing. It highlights the most significant difference between traditional sports and e-sports. The NBA does not own basketball, but Blizzard does own Overwatch. If you want to play Overwatch, especially at a professional level, you will do it on Blizzard’s whims. But I believe the FGC’s decentralized nature, grassroots scene, and legacy give it a unique opportunity (at least among aspiring e-sports) to chart its own course. There are proposals floated by various members of the FGC to increase money in the FGC without entirely “selling out,” so let us look at them now.
One common refrain is that developers should pump more money into FGC events. I think there are a couple of reasons we ought to be pessimistic about this approach. Firstly, this is not within the FGC’s control – for most developers, funding tournament pools is a marketing expense, not a revenue source. For smaller games, this is not feasible, and even for bigger games, we must remember the competitive scene is a small fraction of the market. I would argue some developers, like Nintendo, have a vested interest in NOT establishing competitive Smash as the way to play. Secondly, a developer prize pool only benefits players of that specific game – it is hard to see NetherRealm Studios putting in money for Capcom Cup. Thirdly, this runs headfirst with the idea of keeping the FGC independent, leaving us dependent on the whims of the publisher. Perhaps, then, a better approach is to increase tournament fees, so the payout is better.
After every major event, it has become almost customary to lament the minuscule prize pools for the top 8 competitors. Raising the entry fee to a tournament seems to be an easy solution to this – double the fee, double the prize pool. It is true that the price of entering a tourney has likely not kept pace with inflation. But I think this would do more harm than good. First, I am not convinced that tournament fees are inelastic – I suspect that the revenue you gain from increasing prices will largely be offset by people simply not entering. If not for the large games, then you will see smaller games suffer disproportionately. It is increasing the hurdle for any new player looking to enter the scene. You are squeezing blood from a stone – from many die-hard players and volunteers who will not see a dime of that money. I confess that I am less concerned about the top 8 finishers in any game – they are doing (comparatively) well economically from the FGC. The FGC is unique in the modern zeitgeist in that it seems uncontroversial to say that the top ten percent do not have enough and that the rest of us ought to contribute more. This push towards attempting to extract more value out of the existing audience has other perverse ramifications, no more so than in the endless pursuit of individual sponsorship.
Justin Wong, Daigo, and Tokido are all examples of fighting game players who have successfully leveraged their legacy and performance in the FGC to land multiple individual sponsorships. Justin extols the virtue of building your brand and hustling to get those sponsorships. In one sense, I think he’s right – too many players assume that it is enough to be good at the game. If you’re Punk or Sonic Fox where you win just about everything, then sure, that works. But that is not most aspiring pros, so you need to make yourself attractive to sponsors outside of that. And therein lies the rub – fighting game players aren’t stupid; they strive to produce the kind of content that people within the FGC consume.
That content producers tend to make content they’re passionate and familiar about is no real surprise. So, it isn’t surprising that most aspiring fighting game professionals default to streaming ranked and posting setups or combo videos. The problem here is that the market for the audience is relatively small, and there is ever-increasing competition for it. A setup to make Alex’s normal stomp -3 on block instead of -5 is fantastic content for nutcases like myself, but not for anyone from the broader public. And in turn, somebody who can reach a tiny community who are already aware of endemic products is not particularly valuable to Hyper-X. The obvious rejoinder is that these aspirants ought to produce different content – but there’s a chicken and egg problem. People watch Justin’s tier list videos because they already know Justin from his prior shenanigans. If I make a tier list video about Greek philosophers, I will probably get two views (thanks, Mom and Dad!). To be sure, some players get out of this rut – Smug and BrianF leap to mind. But it is not an easy path, and more importantly, is probably not the most reliable or efficient way to grow the FGC quickly because it is not scalable. Individual sponsorships rarely are.
And with that, we end the first part of our journey. I plan to return shortly with part two soon, wherein I will provide my pie in the sky proposal for scaling up the FGC that hopefully avoids the pitfalls in the approaches I mentioned above. Of course, my plan might be problematic in a different way, but I will touch on that as well. As always, thank you for reading through my mental meanderings, and if you have any feedback or comments, feel free to reach out to me!