[JasonSage]

I seriously, seriously think that in the future (possibly far future) various eSports will all be derived from a few open-source base games.

The ability of game developers to leverage licensing, contracts with orgs, etc. to lock down a competitive ecosystem with exclusivity results in inability for a "free market" to develop around running events and broadcasts. Rocket League and League of Legends come to mind here, where the competitive scene is almost exclusively eSports content produced by the developer itself and doing all sorts of tricks to establish lock-in.

If we look at how traditional sports work, it's much more organic. Leagues have the ability to negotiate their own game rules, TV rights, oversight, and more. Leagues compete with each other for viewership, because viewers naturally want to watch the best games (or their local games) and viewership drives revenue via sponsorships and TV licensing. Game developer lock-in prevents this economy from developing, prevents the competitive nature of leagues from working on improving the game from a viewership perspective, and the closed-source nature of the game prevents the game from being able to "move on" from bad rules, bad communities, bad design, etc.

Many (most? all?) of these online competitive games have toxic online communities and in-game interactions. The game developers don't have the money to develop exhaustive anti-abuse mechanisms, or to pay a large support staff to sift through reports, so lots of times the best you get is a simple heuristic. And these companies are not financially incentivized to ban bad actors. In fact, they're incentivized to ban _as few as possible_ without damaging the player base. Players will quit over toxic interactions and cheaters, but cheaters and toxic players can also be the most reliable spenders in a game, so there's to reason to ban any more of them than absolutely necessary.

But with an open-source game, communities can self-organize and self-moderate. If I play on a local soccer team and they're all racist or homophobic, I'll find a new team or a new league. But at present there's no "find a new Rocket League".

So I think open-source games will have a big impact on the competitive online game industry. I think the resulting ecosystem has a lot more sustainability and player stickiness than current games do in light of the aforementioned toxicity and anti-competitive patterns, so there is much more money to be made than game developers are making currently.

[bogwog]

Alternatively, the "sport" in esports is the genre (FPS, Moba, Fighting, etc), and the "leagues" are the individual games. Yes, the specific rules and mechanics of each game are vastly different even within the same genre, and strategies will be different, but skills like leadership, reaction time, hand-eye-coordination, etc will be used similarly across all games. Even with an open source game, it's likely each league will want to make changes to the base game anyways.

Maybe an open source game could work for smaller "leagues" that don't have the resources to develop an entire game from scratch (and assuming there's even a demand for a small league like that), but even then forking/building atop an open source game is still a lot more work than just using an existing commercial game that has more flexible multiplayer options (and so long as there aren't licensing issues)

[tylerflick]

> The game developers don't have the money to develop exhaustive anti-abuse mechanisms, or to pay a large support staff to sift through reports, so lots of times the best you get is a simple heuristic. And these companies are not financially incentivized to ban bad actors. In fact, they're incentivized to ban _as few as possible_ without damaging the player base.

I can promise you this is not true. Major publishers absolutely try to curb toxic behavior and are heavily invested in doing so.

[JasonSage]

I’m interested in learning more about this. Obviously this is something I care about and want to be well-read in when presenting a case. I do know in League of Legends that there’s a lot more care and attention put into it, and frankly I suspect that it’s because they have the money to do so and because they care deeply about the game still being relevant in 1 & 2 decades from now. The same can be said of Fortnite, possibly because of their closer integration with app stores as well and the sensitivity of having a younger audience.

Anecdotally, I think it can’t be said of Rocket League at all. It seems strongly to be profit-driven and moderation-light, and I think most games that size and smaller are operating the same way.

I’d love to hear where/why I’m wrong and what public information there is on the subject.

[SkiFire13]

Rocket League has been declining since Epic Games bought them.

[fwip]

I don't think "open-source" means much of anything here. You can freely copy game design and make your own knockoffs. That's why half of the video gaming market is Doom-derived.

Anybody can make a football league, and anyone can make a MOBA. But to make the next League of Legends or the NFL, you need a ton of marketing money, and you need to pay to attract the top player talent. The actual money you pay the developers is not the lion's share of the spend. By the reports I can find, Overwatch cost about $50M to make, but they spent over $900M on advertising/marketing/tournaments/etc.

[JasonSage]

Open source means everything here.

Let’s say that you want to be a tournament organizer and do tournament streams of an esport. You are going to use sponsorships and ad revenue to drive your profit, and you have a sponsor providing the prize pool.

You won’t be able to feature current league teams that are contractually obligated to participate in developer-endorsed events only, because the developer has all the leverage in being able to provide a larger prize pool for their official championship league (that is marketing budget for their game, funded by the game itself), so esports organizations are going to be locked-in to that contract.

The barrier to entry for you as an organizer is now to either pay a licensing fee to the developer for the privilege of being endorsed and allowing their contracted organizations to participate, which has a huge impact on your profitability… or to make your own fucking video game.

The open source aspect gives you:

- an existing player base

- ability to provide your own game rules

- ability to use exclusive visuals/assets

- ability to avoid licensing fees destroying your profitability

And if your organization goes under, the game lives on. If another organization goes under, you have opportunities to capture more of your market. You have the ability to improve your viewership by funding improvement of the game.

And, by the way, if you suck, somebody who can do it better will come along and take your money, which is actually good for the viewer and the player, which is much better than the way current games/leagues deteriorate.

[busterarm]

Hard disagree. With the exception of 1v1 fighting games, centralized/official servers are _required_ for esports to even work. Peer-to-peer communication models and self-hosted client-server games both are filled with cheaters. How would players ever feel comfortable competing on community/self-hosted server?

"Esports" games require absolutely massive communities (e.g., marketing) and no open-source game has even come close to the scale required to sustain an esport.

[JasonSage]

I think you’re conflating unrelated things

Servers can be community-run and centralized per league/community. See TF2 (more decentralized) and FaceIt (Counter-Strike) for examples of self-moderating communities than can exist outside of the developer-centralized model.

At no point do I assume P2P to be a requirement or even beneficial in this scenario.

[busterarm]

TF2 is overrun with bots right now to the point that the game is unplayable and the surviving community has been screaming at Valve about this for years.

As for FaceIt, that came about from the existing CS community. After 15+ years of the game being out. You can't just build something like that in a vacuum.

The whole point is that "esports" depends on centralized servers and somebody footing the bill for that. Even in fighting games that are P2P, there's still the matchmaking lobbies.

And you could say "well, there's FightCade!"...but a) that's illegal and b) I've never seen more than 150 people in a FightCade lobby and it's usually around 10-30. Esports games have > 10^4 concurrent players.

[JasonSage]

I’m optimistic that as the opportunities come along, players will take them.

Your argument sounds to me analogous to “everybody will just use Twitter/X because why would somebody want to pay to host a Mastodon instance with no participants.”

The reality is that some (but not all) people do genuinely have grief with the centralized platform (moderation, censorship, toxicity), do have the ability to pay for something better (or freeload off people who do care), and are thus willing to make a change with there’s sufficiently low resistance.

The reason this is possible at all is because people that did care in a very small minority made the decentralized platform for free while everybody else was oblivious. It doesn’t get built overnight and usage doesn’t convert overnight, but when the solution exists it can then be viable.

I do think open source games are a fair ways off, but I find it impossible to believe that people will work for decades for free on open source social media because they enjoy it, but the same will never be true of games.

It’s an eventuality, and it is one that changes dynamics for the end-consumer.

[JasonSage]

> TF2 is overrun with bots right now to the point that the game is unplayable and the surviving community has been screaming at Valve about this for years.

Perfect example. With the existence of a sufficiently-close open-source base, the community would have self-organized TF2 out of existence with a functional replacement. This just isn’t possible today, but when it is possible there will be no turning back.

[lupusreal]

> "Esports" games require absolutely massive communities (e.g., marketing) and no open-source game has even come close to the scale required to sustain an esport.

If by "sustain an esport" you mean as a profitable enterprise, then probably not. Is that the best metric though? Open source games can become popular enough for competitive scenes to emerge; Warsow is an example of this.

Popular enough for competitive play but not enough to get corporate sponsors seems fine to me. It's probably not healthy to be promoting the idea (to kids particularly) that playing video games can be a profitable career.

[busterarm]

No I mean "sustain an esport" the same as I would mean "sustain a sport".

For it to be an actual contest it needs an actual sample size of players. Sports need spectators and narratives that generate interest.

Nobody gives a damn about Warsow the same way nobody gave a damn about Ferret-Legging.

It's not a sport if its players are limited to "you and your mates from round the way", that's just a game. Sports are meant to expose the limits of human potential.

[lupusreal]

Warsow's popularity fell off but it was there for a while. You can't reasonably expect every game to stay popular forever, not be the most popular around. It's not like every ball sport other than football/soccer is a failure just because "nobody cares about it" relative to that.

[molli]

When a game is not popular anymore some developers just turn off their servers destroying the multiplayer. That won't happen with decentralized open source servers.

[eikenberry]

Cheating is a community problem, not a technical issue. Esports would have organizations managing things requiring players to sign up and be vetted. The community/organization would handle cheating.

[ThatPlayer]

> The game developers don't have the money to develop exhaustive anti-abuse mechanisms, or to pay a large support staff to sift through reports, so lots of times the best you get is a simple heuristic.

And neither do open-source projects. The majority of people looking to play video games do not want to be the ones moderating. They'll take the path of least resistance and let companies do it for them.

> If I play on a local soccer team and they're all racist or homophobic, I'll find a new team or a new league. But at present there's no "find a new Rocket League".

You don't need to find a new game though, you can find a new league. Except for maybe battle royale games, most games still allow private matches. Make a private match and invite the people you want to play with. Organize a league yourself. It'll be easier than building your own game, and you'll run into the same problems with an open-source game: how do you convince people to play your league rather than the official easy matchmaking? Rather than the official huge playerbase game?

[JasonSage]

For certain there will be de facto community centers in open source games, but the fact that a group _can_ self-organize, self-fund, and self-moderate means that communities _will_.

Mastodon is I think a good example of this in social media.

A game example is Team Fortress 2, where community-run servers coexist with matchmaking servers. Some of these are buy-in communities, some of them are freemium ad-ridden servers, some are just small friend groups. And they can pose an alternative to official matchmaking on merit and exist just fine. Oh, and they can remove cheaters and bots themselves.

This is a good example to your last point: when the de-facto league has cheaters, bots, or lack of moderation, people will flock to alternatives en masse, but the alternative has to exist for it to work. This isn't a "problem" with the open-source game, it's the main feature. It's the bridged gap between "building your own game" and "the official huge playerbase game" -- they're almost the same out-of-the-box, so neither the building nor convincing is insurmountable, they're surface-level.

[molli]

Some very interesting thoughts here. Imo open source software is mostly higher quality than proprietary one.

And apparently the industry is not so interested in Linux. Proton from Valve is interesting but crashes on my machine all the time. So I guess we have to build ourselves and have some fun in the process.

[naet]

Traditional sports are totally dominated by individual companies.

There may be some street baseball games here and there, or independent baseball leagues, but the MLB has the viewership, the money to buy all the players, the sponsors, the stadiums, etc. In many ways they have a monopoly on the sport, including a unique exemption from various antitrust laws handed down by the supreme court.

I like open source and open source games, I played many hours of Armagetron Advanced back in the day. But organized competition usually needs an organization to back and, well, organize.

[shard972]

when esports mostly exists as a loss leader to sell video games I don't quite see this vision anytime soon.

[mh-]

I get your point, but I'm not sure loss leader is quite the way to describe it. I think of it as a marketing/promo expense like any other. Are user conferences loss leaders?

Also, RL is free-to-play nowadays. They're banking on in-app purchases, not sales of video games.