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by fwip
648 days ago
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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. |
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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.