E-sports game is not only an enlightening game for many players, but also an indispensable social activity among players.

Moreover, whether it is the ranking of the highest-paid games in the world, or the analysis of the game market, e-sports games account for at least half of the country!
According to the relevant industry report, “the total number of players of electronic games in China has exceeded 700 million, of which the number of e-sports gamers is close to 500 million!”
For example,” premades “,” I want to become a professional e-sports player “, and the topics around various e-sports games have been out of the circle and become the focus of discussion in the whole society.

In this article, let me talk about e-sports Game, which is currently the most influential game in the game market — making the most money, affecting the most users, and having a large number of related topics and high frequency.
Why is e-sports ‘s game so influential?
How is it different from other types of games?
What is the difference and relationship between e-sports and traditional sports?
Next, I will talk about e-sports ‘s game and the e-sports industry derived from it.

I. What is e-sports ‘s game?

How should we understand e-sports?
I think there are two key words, one is competitive, the other is called core gameplay.
What does it mean?

First of all, e-sports, like most sports such as football and basketball, is a competitive sport, that is, antagonistic sports are carried out under one rule, but football has its own rules, and each e-sports game has its own different rules.
Later, we will talk about the inextricable relationship between e-sports games and traditional sports.

Secondly, not all games that “fight under the same rules of competition” can be counted as e-sports games. Only when confrontation becomes the core or even the only way of playing games, can such video games be called e-sports games.
For example, there are many siege battles in MMORPG, points ranking competitions in various games, and speed-through competitions in many stand-alone games, which can only be called “competitive” or “confrontational” elements, but not real e-sports games.
Without these competitive elements, these games can still be played normally, you can still experience the core fun, this is not e-sports ‘s game.
In e-sports ‘s game, the competitive way of playing cannot be stripped or deleted from the game.

In my opinion, the word “electricity” in e-sports ‘s game, that is, the electronic element, is the least worth mentioning, because it represents only a carrier such as a video game.
Why are e-sports games so attractive?
Because it, like other sports, satisfies the enthusiasm of human beings for competition.
When talking about action games, we mentioned the fascination with violence, competition and confrontation in human genes.
With hundreds of thousands of years of history of human evolution, competition and rivalry has been deeply rooted in the genes of human beings, especially men!

However, compared with other competitive sports, e-sports also has some unique advantages.
For example, e-sports games have strong potential and advantages in terms of participation threshold and convenience.
Traditional sports generally need specific venues, time, equipment, personnel, fees and other conditions to start a competition, but e-sports games basically have no requirements and restrictions in these aspects, you can find players anytime and anywhere, and then have a competitive confrontation together.

Moreover, e-sports ‘s game is also the highest in the compatibility of user groups. Compared with the physical confrontation of traditional sports, e-sports is more of an intellectual confrontation, which greatly reduces the differences among different users in the project. and because of its networking characteristics, players can fight with other players around the world, and their dependence on the surrounding environment is also greatly reduced, greatly reducing all kinds of embarrassing situations that will occur in traditional sports.
For example, if I am short, they don’t take me to play basketball; I want to play badminton, but I am surrounded by boys who want to play football, and so on.
Finally, as a kind of immersion and interactive experience, games can also shape different competitive confrontation experiences based on different themes and methods of play, which can bring people stronger and more competitive fantasy satisfaction. this is also the effect that traditional sports are difficult to achieve.

II, what are the elements of a successful e-sports game?

From this point of view, e-sports games have the potential to better meet the needs of human competition, will it surpass or even replace traditional sports?
In fact, it is not that simple, traditional sports have been developed for hundreds of years or more, and this product that can travel through time is the crystallization of wisdom that has been verified.
On the other hand, the electronic e-sports game has a history of only 20 or 30 years, and there are not many really successful e-sports game projects, not to mention the e-sports game projects that have been eliminated, only how the existing e-sports game projects can go further, and how to create more successful competitive projects is the top challenge of the game industry.
So, how do we make a successful e-sports game?
Let’s take a look at what elements a successful e-sports game should contain and what the specific challenges are from the perspective of game design.

1. Easy to use, but difficult to master.

First of all, we can learn two key points from the predecessor of traditional sports.
The first point is “easy to use, difficult to master”.
Football and basketball are among the most influential and popular sports in the world. why?
When we get a ball, the simplest interaction is to bounce the ball with our hand or kick the ball with our feet.
It can be said that without teaching, children will naturally interact with the ball, while other balls have to learn certain movements to interact, the natural threshold will be higher.
This is what I call “easy to use”.

The second is “difficult to master”.
We all know well that, just like basketball and football, shooting are the most basic movements, but the performance of top athletes and ordinary people is also different. Behind this is the result of talent and thousands of hours of training.
Unlike traditional sports, which emphasize the competitive confrontation of the body, e-sports games use electronic devices and game software to carry out confrontation, so the skills of competition among players are also different, so what is the specific skill of e-sports games?

As a sport, e-sports can exercise and improve the participants’ thinking ability, reaction ability, coordination ability, pressure resistance, team spirit, and the ability to adapt to the modern information society, so as to promote their self-transcendence, all-round development and realization of their ideals.
Mental strength, physical strength, willpower and teamwork ability are the most important skills of e-sports gamers.
Among them, willpower and teamwork ability are also reflected in traditional sports.
Let’s start with the mental and physical dimensions.

Mental confrontation, generally refers to strategy, consciousness and other dimensions of confrontation, can be divided into target richness, information complexity, strategic freedom and other details for design and evaluation, such as Go is a typical example of high mental confrontation, while racing games are relatively speaking, the proportion of mental confrontation is much lower.

Physical confrontation, which generally refers to the confrontation of operation, reaction speed and other dimensions, can be divided into operational frequency Actions per minute (APM), spatial precision, time precision and other details for design and evaluation. For example, chess and cards are typical of low physical confrontation, while FPS games have higher physical requirements.

Throughout the e-sports game market, we can see that there are several obvious categories:
Board games with high mental requirements.
Fighting games or FPS or racing that require high physical strength.
RTS games with high mental and physical requirements.
MOBA and Battle Royale Games with moderate mental and physical requirements.
If we draw a normal distribution map of human mental and physical strength, there is no doubt that games with moderate mental and physical requirements are suitable for a wider range of players, lower barriers, and easier to use.

Is it possible to lower the threshold?
For example, lower physical and mental requirements, this is generally leisure against Mini Game, but its depth is not enough, leisure players can play it to relax, but it is not easy to distinguish between players, so there is no way to form a competitive atmosphere.
So the depth of the game is also important, that is, the game is not only easy to use, but also difficult to master.
To sum up, there are two main directions for users to continue to master the game:

First, it should have enough skill depth for players to learn and grow, such as:
It is relatively easy to learn and use a single hero in MOBA games, but dozens or hundreds of heroes require players to spend a lot of time understanding and mastering them one by one, even if they are not their favorite heroes, if they meet this hero next time, they will be at a disadvantage because they are not familiar with this hero; coupled with the impact of dozens of kinds of equipment, players need to invest a lot of time and energy to master a MOBA game!

It is easy to pick up a gun and fire in the FPS game, but to really master the feel of a gun and learn to reverse the effect of recoil by pressing the gun, it takes a lot of practice, and there are many guns in the game, as well as a variety of maps so that players need to deal with shooting challenges in different situations.
You can also think for yourself about the examples of other games, whether they are easy to use and difficult to master, so that you may be able to give good advice on how to optimize the game you are playing.

In the second direction, we should work hard on the game of team confrontation.
The advantages of team confrontation over individual confrontation are:
With the addition of multi-player cooperative play, players not only need to pay attention to and improve their own level, but also need to find suitable teammates and train together to improve the ability of team cooperation. teammates’ strengths and weaknesses, playing routines, cooperation strategies for each game, and so on, the coordination dimension will enhance the depth of the whole game by an order of magnitude.
Team play can also reduce frustration and increase satisfaction.
Giving players the opportunity to attribute frustration to teammates, attributing victory to themselves, giving players more satisfaction and confidence, coupled with the social behavior derived from the need to find teammates, has also greatly improved new additions and user retention.

2. Moderate uncertainty.

After talking about the core way of playing e-sports ‘s game, let’s take a look at the second important element of e-sports ‘s game, that is, “moderate uncertainty”!
There is often a saying on the football field that former West German national team coach Herberg once said: “Football is round”, which means “everything happens on the football field.”

The football field is an arena.
The arena is used to decide the outcome of the game.
In line with the principle of fairness, impartiality and openness, generally speaking, the strong party must win. How can it be said that everything will happen?

In fact, football is such a possible competitive match. The West German national team, led by West German coach Herberg, beat Hungary at 3:2 in the 1954 World Cup final, while in the previous first round, West Germany lost to the same Hungary at 3:8.
Not only do people not think that such a football match is unfair, but they are more interested in the game because of uncertainty!
Do people like uncertainty?
When faced with uncertainty, people have only two reactions, either escape or become addicted to it.
Just like in the casino, not everyone is a greedy gambler, but some of them will repeatedly pull down the lever to satisfy the pleasure of his addiction when faced with a random machine.

So what are the benefits of adding uncertainty to competitive competitions?
Create miracles and superstars.
Do you still remember Jordan’s last shot, the upwind reversal of “League of Legends”, the sniper god in CS killing five masters by one, and so on? if there is no uncertainty, these scenes will not bring us great shock and pleasure.
Enhance viewing and entertainment, expand the audience.
In many over-professional competitions, in fact, the performance of the contestants contains a lot of details, but the audience may not understand it, just focusing on the competitive nature will make the competition too professional. and the unexpected and entertainment effects of uncertainty can be felt by everyone.

Increase the complexity and depth of the game and prolong the life cycle.
Randomness will affect the player’s strategy, how to use and deal with the impact of uncertainty, greatly enhance the strategic depth of the game.
Reduce frustration and increase satisfaction.
Similar to the above-mentioned attribution of victory and defeat, players often think that they lost because of bad luck but win win because of their strength in competitive competitions with uncertainties.
Enhance the novice player experience, and then improve retention.
Novice players may also win the game because they are lucky, so they are more interested in the game.
Ben Borde, the father of hearthstone Legend, said: randomness exists to protect the matching experience of players with poor skills.

The greater the uncertainty, the better?
That’s not true.
Once the uncertainty affects the competitive nature of the game, that is, the influence of luck is greater than that of the player’s technology, the game may become more like an entertainment game than an e-sports game.
For example, hearthstone Legend is supposed to be a good e-sports game, but if you go to its early golden game, the players with high rankings are changing all the time, and it is also common for ordinary people to win championships and professionals to be eliminated by ordinary players.
Because in the Legend of hearthstone, the effects of some cards are so random that the results may not even be controlled by the operator!
The entertainment effect of this out-of-control uncertainty is good, but when this factor is put in the competitive competition, it will make the contestants depressed. After all, the focus of the competitive competition is still the skill competition of the contestants.
Until now, it has been unable to become the mainstream e-sports game because of this difficult problem.

In PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS games, there are also many random factors, such as poison circle, material distribution, opponent distribution, physical system and so on, which also bring all kinds of uncertain challenges to players. however, players can still control most of the game process through their own efforts, which is better than “hearthstone legends” products.
Through more restrictions on these random factors, the official competition can achieve the effect of e-sports.
But to tell you the truth, the popularity of e-sports, such as Battle Royale Games, is still not as popular as MOBA and FPS, which is limited by its random design basis.
Sometimes entertainment and competition cannot be perfectly reconciled.
So, is there a game that has a good balance between entertainment and competition?
I think Dota2’s control is subtle.

In Dota2, although random factors such as empty dodge, small passive halo, magic thorn critical strike and so on may have an important impact on a battle, the proportion in a game is not so large, and players can choose a variety of strategies to deal with these random elements.
In addition, some modifications have been made to the random algorithm in Dota2, which can be regarded as “pseudo-random”.
Like a 33% chance of dodging.
If it is really random, it may not be able to dodge successfully for long time, or many times in a row. The huge difference in this experience has a great impact on the player’s expected experience, while the pseudo-random approach is that if the dodge succeeds, the probability of the next dodge will be reduced, and if the dodge fails, increase the probability, so as to ensure that the player has a random experience, but not a large gap.
In addition, the number of heroes with these random elements accounts for a small proportion of the total hero pool.
Thus it can be seen that Dota 2, as a classic competitive game, has always had an exquisite balance in terms of competition and uncertainty.

3. Fairness.

The third and most basic design element of e-sports ‘s game is that it must be fair.
You may think that this is too basic.
It is true that fairness is a basic principle for traditional sporting events, but is it true in the field of video games?
Of course not. The most obvious contrast is that some gamers can win simply by recharging.

This is also the biggest difference between e-sports games and other online games such as MMORPG, SLG and so on, because most of the other online games have numerical growth.
In other words, as long as the player continues to invest time or money in the game, his strength will continue to improve.
Of course, this is also the charm of these online games to attract players, pay will be rewarded.
E-sports ‘s game is different. Players need to be fair. Everyone’s starting point in each game needs to be consistent, and the process of growing up cannot be accelerated because you invest money or other factors. Players want to play better than other players. The only way to win is to improve your technical strength, that is, the “easy to use, difficult to master” part we mentioned above.

Therefore, the easiest way to distinguish whether a game is e-sports ‘s game is to judge the factors affecting the player’s strength in this game. How much is determined by the player’s own technical strength, and how much is determined by the accumulation of time and money.
In e-sports ‘s game, what else can we do to ensure fairness as much as possible?
It’s actually kind of hard.
In addition to the methods common to traditional sports competitions, such as using strict and consistent rules and equipment environment, there are several special design difficulties of e-sports ‘s game:

First, ladder ranking and matching mechanism.
Traditional sports, such as running, have a unified scoring method, which can be ranked easily, and through round robin, all teams and contestants can compete fully. Then according to certain calculation rules to eliminate and arrange follow-up events, the competitive ranking obtained by this method is convincing.
However, the ranking of e-sports ‘s games has encountered new challenges, such as:

The contestants and teams are of the order of magnitude of billions of people, which is impossible to play according to the round robin, so how to evaluate the strength of the players?
Because of the convenience of the game, the game is happening anytime and anywhere, how can a player get his ranking immediately after playing a game?
In 1970, Arpad Elo, a Hungarian mathematician, invented a new method of ranking, called the “grading” algorithm (also known as the Elo rating method in memory of the mathematician’s contribution).

This algorithm is suitable for dealing with particularly large data samples, and is suitable for sets composed of isolated intervals between samples that do not fully communicate with each other.
Another advantage of this algorithm is that “no matter how large the sample size is, the order of magnitude of the results is stable, as long as the competitor’s score reaches a specified value and remains for a period of time.”
It is precisely because of this set of algorithms that video games have a vivid ranking list with the name “ladder”. The score of each ladder is fixed, and the process of players hitting a higher goal ranking is like a process of climbing a ladder.
And the statistical method is used in the algorithm, so a weak can quickly improve his ranking by defeating the strong, while in turn, even if a strong continues to beat the weak, his ranking will not be significantly improved.

Therefore, almost all e-sports games use the Elo scoring method to rank the player’s strength, on the one hand, it can clearly feedback to the player’s own level of strength, on the other hand, it is more important for players to match opponents with similar strength, and the competitive experience provided by a close contest is the fairest.

The second difficulty: the need to constantly adjust the balance of the game.

After all, e-sports ‘s game is still a game, and the sustained and stable income of the game itself is often put in the first place, which requires the game to update its content regularly to bring freshness to players, so as to inspire new payments.
So how can you ensure that these new additions do not affect the game that has been adjusted and players are familiar with the competitive balance that they are used to?
This is one of the most important jobs of e-sports game manufacturers, and it is also an old topic in e-sports ‘s game industry. a game that can be done well can not only optimize the fairness of the game environment through this continuous adjustment, but also enhance long-term benefits, but also bring more changes to the game, increase the depth of the game, and prolong the life cycle.

There is no mature algorithm to ensure that every game balance design is universal and successful.
Sometimes in order to balance both sides, we have to use simplified means, such as MOBA games, they add an additional insurance function, the so-called BP mechanism, that is, the Ban and Pick mechanism.
Contestants can take turns choosing or banning heroes before the game.
In this way, no matter how many heroes are updated in the game, the players can have a certain degree of freedom to choose, can deliberately shield some possible unbalanced elements in the game, and use this more violent means to ensure the fairness of competitive confrontation.

The third difficulty is anti-cheating.
This is also unique to video games and may be somewhat similar to the problem of doping in sports.
Generally speaking, the final stage of the competition at the scene is carried out with officially designated equipment, which can effectively prevent contestants from using cheating plug-ins, but external competitions and daily competitions that are open to all players every day, it is necessary to use complex technical means to monitor whether players have used cheating software.
Plug-in cheating software is often destructive to a game, especially to e-sports games.
A successful e-sports game must have zero tolerance, which requires a lot of technology and experience.
And like antivirus software, it is a long-term battle of wits, competing with long-term input, stable response speed and processing speed.

4. Appreciability.

The fourth design point of e-sports ‘s game is ornamental.
This point e-sports games and traditional sports games are the same, they both need a large number of basic players.
Even if some people can’t become masters, they may even think they can’t play well and don’t dare to try the game at all, they can still become spectators.
With the development of traditional sports for many years, we have accumulated countless experience in viewing, and made numerous improvements in the design of the competition.
Sometimes users’ demand for viewing will even affect the rules of competitive events in turn.

The most typical example is the 24-second rule of NBA. In the past, there was often a stalemate between the two sides in NBA, even when the score was only 20 in a game, and the audience felt bored.
As a result, NBA changed the rules so that the person who gets the ball needs to shoot within 24 seconds or hand over possession of the ball. This rule change greatly speeds up the pace of the game and improves the viewing of the game.

In today’s era of live broadcasting, video games can precisely give play to their unique advantages, with the help of this trend, directly through the Internet, the use of star anchors to help them expand their audience.
Many video games are designed with full consideration of the viewing of live streaming and the friendliness of broadcasters to spread it.
There are similar design cases in e-sports ‘s game. For example, Battle Royale Games added the poison circle drainage rule in the later version, which means to avoid brushing in the water as far as possible in the later stage of the game, so as to reduce the situation that players are hiding in the water. Improve the rhythm and viewing of the game.

However, I have to say that the development of e-sports games is still relatively short, and the rise of live video streaming on the Internet is much later.
So so far, the vast majority of e-sports games have not fully considered the ornamental nature at the beginning of the design, and only when they accidentally become a successful e-sports game will they want to polish the ornamental nature.

III. The present situation and challenges of e-sports ‘s industry.

1. Current situation.

By comparing e-sports with traditional sports, we will find that “the industrial income, the number of spectators, the prize money and the income of top players of e-sports are still far behind those of the most famous and popular sports in the world.”
The annual income of the global e-sports market is less than 1/10 of that of other top sports leagues.
Even for the highest-paid contestants e-sports, their annual salary is about 1/30 of that of the most expensive traditional athletes.
E-sports ‘s game bonus is only 1/20 of that of top events such as the World Cup and the UEFA Champions League.
The number of viewers in the final of e-sports ‘s top tournament is less than 1/10 of the audience of the World Cup final.

In a short time, e-sports must be difficult to catch up with professional football, which has a history of a century, but e-sports still has great potential, the core of which lies in the differences among fans.
A spokesman for the “Overwatch” league has said publicly that 45% of their viewers are between the ages of 18 and 34, far more than any mainstream traditional sporting event.
What is the audience share of the 18-year-old 34-year-old in mainstream traditional sports events such as NBA and the World Cup?
The answer is 15% to 25%, which is only about half of e-sports ‘s competition.

This is why governments all over the world have actively supported e-sports industry, because it represents the love of young people and represents the future.
Moreover, compared with other types of video games, e-sports games pursue fair entertainment rather than extreme profits. they can also drive more surrounding industries, have close ties with the Internet industry and high-tech industries, and are more modern than traditional sports. it’s easier to get attention.
However, we should also pay special attention to not blindly over-touting, and we must be aware that e-sports ‘s industry has not been fully developed. The e-sports industry data written in many reports actually take into account the income of the video game itself, and the figure appears to be large. In fact, it is deliberately avoiding the “actual financial situation of the vast majority of e-sports industry participants.”

Because of the strong mass base, many traditional sports still rely entirely on offline, but they can get objective local attention and benefits from the offline events in each city.
And e-sports ‘s game has no offline geographical restrictions, and players around the world are all fighting in real time on the Internet. Naturally, the attention is all focused on the limited number of top championship teams, sponsorship, bonuses, including live streaming, all focused on a limited number of games.
In an e-sports project, the e-sports contestants who can reach the head of the world and get attention and income are naturally limited.
We should avoid “focusing all on the top cases and thinking that the whole e-sports industry is really that big.”
In fact, we can see that the e-sports project, which was launched blindly in many places, is now deserted.

2. Challenges.

E-sports industry still has several challenges that we must be faced.
The first is the copyright of IP.
This is also an important difference between e-sports games and traditional sports, such as traditional football, basketball, running, swimming and other sports do not have copyright issues, the real brands and profits are all concentrated in well-known clubs and events.

In theory, anyone can set up their own events, organize their own clubs and leagues, and formulate their own entry conditions, rules, rewards, etc., as long as someone comes to participate, you can successfully run it.
If you can do it well and have enough influence, you can make a lot of money, so traditional sports, large and small, official or folk, all kinds of events blossom, which in turn promotes the development of sports and attracts more enthusiasts…form a virtuous circle.
But even if an organizer screws up the event, everyone will think that it is the event organizer’s problem, rarely affecting the sport itself.

But e-sports game has a very important attribute, that is, it is a commercial product itself, with an independent, mature and successful business model.
In other words, even if there is no competition and no development of e-sports, e-sports ‘s game itself has made a lot of money.
At this time, what if someone casually uses their own game project to hold a competition and screw it up?
This will affect the reputation of the game, players will come to complain about the game manufacturers, for such a little e-sports ‘s income will actually outweigh the gain.
At present, most of the events in e-sports ‘s games are the first-party official events of game manufacturers, and only a few are authorized third-party events.
The vast majority of e-sports events in the industry are a means and tool for game manufacturers to publicize in the official market. Whether e-sports makes money or not is a small matter.
Can we make a louder voice in the market, let more users pay attention to the game, to play the game, pay for the game… are their main goal.

The second challenge is the life cycle of the game.
Traditional sports change little with time, how to play a hundred years ago is still how to play now, even the hardware are almost the same, which is good for the construction of a sports-related system.
Based on stable rules, the formulation of relevant ability standards, the selection and training of athletes, and the organization of related events can be continuously accumulated and optimized.

After all, the game is the content industry, although we can see that the vitality of e-sports games is far longer than other games, but the most popular “League of Legends” was also released in 2009, only 11 years ago.
CS, which was launched in 1999, and Dota, which was launched in 2003, have been replaced by versions, and now they have become CSGO and Dota2.
Even if the game is not out of date, because e-sports ‘s game relies on electronic software and hardware, the game also needs to be upgraded to keep up with the pace of the times.
But not all fans will embrace the new version. Look at “how many people are still playing with the old CS and Dota1”.
Therefore, different from traditional sports, e-sports ‘s game how to travel through time and whether it can travel through time will be a great challenge to game manufacturers!

The risk of game life cycle also comes from the internal competition of e-sports game market.
Often a new and successful e-sports game will expand to a new group of players, but it also often grabs the old e-sports game users.
For example, after the popularity of MOBA, took away the vast majority of RTS players, and Battle Royale Games’s popularity, but also let MOBA users have a certain decline.
According to the current market statistics, the user growth of competitive games has been slow in the past two years, which means that the ceiling of the competitive game user market may not be as high as imagined.
So often e-sports game manufacturers will be prepared before others take their jobs. For example, Riot, the developer of “League of Legends”, launched a new FPS e-sports game Valorant, in an attempt to keep more e-sports game users in their own territory.
But if Valorant is done, it will rob CSGO users and still compete in the existing e-sports circle.

The third challenge is that e-sports ‘s ecology is not yet mature and the relevant system is not sound enough.
This problem is not bad, there is South Korea’s KeSPA to do reference, there are traditional sports competitions to do reference, to give time, I believe that e-sports ‘s ecology and system will be improved.
Therefore, although e-sports has an ultra-low threshold, a large number of young enthusiasts, and increasing social influence, we still need to face up to the problems and challenges of e-sports.

IV, the future of e-sports ‘s game.

The emergence of each e-sports game contains the inspiration of developers, painstaking efforts and countless days and nights of assistance from hundreds of millions of players, but e-sports game is still a newborn, compared with traditional sports, there is still a long way to go.
The essential elements of the core play of e-sports games we mentioned earlier are easy to understand, but extremely difficult to do. Designing the core play of a new type of e-sports game is as difficult as inventing a ball game that is popular with many people on the basis of traditional sports.
E-sports from its birth to the present 20 or 30 years of history, there have been FPS, RTS, fighting, racing, MOBA, PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS and other successful competitive games, compared with the speed of mass sports, has been regarded as extremely fast.

However, the emergence of new categories of video games is basically concentrated in the initial stage of the development of the industry, and the latter is basically the promotion and improvement on the basis of the original category, and the same is true of e-sports games. We expect that new innovations will become more and more difficult and slow in the future.

The next step is more likely to be integration, elimination and improvement.
Among them, we have seen that the successful RTS has been replaced by MOBA, and the PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS category is representative, but it is also one of the variants of FPS, and this variant is not competitive enough because of the introduction of too much randomness.
And fighting games because it is too difficult to become a master, the number of participants is also getting smaller and smaller.

From this point of view, the whole industry for many years to appear a new hit e-sports game, which not only depends on the efforts of people in the industry, but also requires a lot of unpredictable opportunities.
So 10 or 20 years later, the popular e-sports games are still CS, Dota2, “League of Legends” and “Arena of Valor”?
What brand-new e-sports game will dominate the video game world?

I personally think: every 3 to 5 years, e-sports games are bound to appear new popular styles, although exactly what is unknown, but several of the most successful e-sports games in history, CS, Dota, “PUBG”, are UGC products that grow spontaneously from the player group.
I boldly predict that the new fashions in this field will probably also come from some UGC community that supports MOD or games created by players.

V. Should I play professional e-sports?

Finally, I would like to respond to a topic often faced by e-sports enthusiasts or their parents: “I want to play professional e-sports, how to choose?”
My personal answer is:
Most people are not suitable for playing professional e-sports, and they should be more cautious than choosing the direction of professional traditional sports.
We have compared e-sports games with traditional sports before:

The competition in e-sports ‘s game is fierce, and the group of young people who have the opportunity to come into contact with e-sports ‘s game is so large that they do not need any special physical conditions to participate, but in the end, there is often only one world champion who can successfully get attention. it is difficult for the vast majority of players who do not get the ranking to have a stable income!

Traditional sports generally do not reach the peak of physical development until the age of the university, and only then begin to reach the best time to participate in top competitions, which basically does not affect basic education.
Most of the athletes in Europe and the United States are college students, even if they can not become professional athletes, it will not affect the normal pursuit of other career paths.
The characteristics of e-sports ‘s game determine that “the smaller you start training, the faster you learn and the more familiar you are.”
“therefore, e-sports contestants have been getting younger and younger, which encroaches on the most critical age group for receiving basic education.
Accordingly, the professional age is also relatively short, once you fail to succeed on the career path, it may seriously affect other career development opportunities in the future!

I have a few pieces of advice for young people who like e-sports:

1. If you like playing football much, do you have to play professionally?
Be sure to distinguish between hobbies and work, entertainment and training, competition. In fact, many people want to play e-sports because they think study or work is boring.
But if you really enter a professional club, you should also obey the standardized management of the club, intensive training day after day, run-in with all kinds of teammates, and reject all kinds of temptations or traps.
This process is definitely not playing games as many people imagine, but like those athletes in traditional sports, years of hard training is the main content of life.

2. Give up the illusion of your own ability, do not think that you play well in the small circle around you is complacent, when you meet a master, the other party may easily beat you, and that master may also be a rookie in the eyes of a professional player, this is the huge gap in the ability of competitive players!

3. Give up the illusion of high salary and honor, the development of e-sports industry is still immature, except for a limited number of top experts, most of them can not even earn the basic cost of living, this is the real situation of the industry!
Most of the traditional sports can achieve the goal of comprehensive physical exercise, can have more contact with nature and sunlight, and can strengthen the body even if they do not follow the professional route.

While practicing e-sports games, sitting there facing the screen for more than ten hours a day, they often have to endure the torture of occupational diseases, or even permanent trauma.
Almost every athlete is injured, but in different degrees.
The same is true of e-sports contestants — their fingers, wrists, shoulders, neck, waist, and so on, will cause a variety of acute and chronic diseases due to high-frequency keyboard operation and sitting for a long time. E-sports contestants’ career is only a few years, but these injuries may last a lifetime.

I hope that through my article, more people can understand that “playing games and playing professional e-sports are two different things.” I also hope that our public opinion can look at e-sports industry rationally and calmly, so that video games can avoid its negative effects, give full play to it to please the body and mind, and positively promote the healthy development of various related industries.