BIGR Gaming Weekly 4 - Where's the money?
Hey! Here's a new newsletter format. I wasn't vibing with the old newsletter structure.
I do a lot of industry analysis. I got 7/7 of my 2021 industry predictions correct and my 2023 edition is currently playing out at 100% correct. People often ask me what I'm reading and how I come up with these ideas - So this it a little look-in at my process.
I'll also keep doing polls because they're interesting to me! Plus I'll continue guest submissions because I'm lucky enough to have a bunch of mates with fantastic (and differing) viewpoints on gaming & esports.
Last week's guest was Bill Young , this week is my co-founder Adam Bax and soon we will have submissions from legends like Phil Ranta , Jeff Pabst , Scott Bednarski and more I'm sure!
Where’s the money?
The esports winter is here and I’ve been criticized for some for sharing videos & images with big crowds and big viewership in esports.
Here’s my question & thoughts: There are tens of thousands of passionate fans attending live events, millions watching online and multi-millions playing the games afterwards. So, where is the money?
The general answer I get is that the publishers take all the profit. And when you’re a loss-leader that is a user retention/acquisition vehicle (esports) that’s likely true. But are there some other solutions? Or do companies just need to scale back to “reasonable” levels? Maybe esports teams just aren’t “meant” to have 30+ employees.
A discussion point I’ve had 3 times in the past week is: Esports was over-professionalised by investor dollars. The rapid scale didn’t eventuate as promised, and the realistic situation is that it’s a $1B industry trying to create multiple $1B companies. Growth has been there and will continue to come, but not like the launch of the internet.?
POLL: What’s the best esport to watch?
I don’t think people will ever fully agree on an answer to this, but my bias is always towards FPS games. As hard as it is to convince mainstream brands that they should attach their logo’s to AK47’s and ‘terrorists’, CS:GO has forever been the pinnacle of introducing noobs to the market.
Ongoing poll results:
The poll will be up for a few days, vote here.
领英推荐
Film or Games? Guest: Adam Bax
In 2005 I entered college to learn to be a 3d artist.
Animation, texturing, modelling, particle effects, lighting, rigging and rendering...there was a lot to learn and a lot of crossover between entertainment mediums resulting in the big question everyone asked themselves and others...
"You going film or games?"
It was a quick and easy decision. After days of work, why did the ocean I was making still look like pink vector lines on a flat grey background?
"Oh you haven't rendered it, click this button and wait....2 hours" - I noped right into the gaming stream of the college program.
I was so used to pressing left and seeing the character go left, I couldn’t fathom the idea of spending 4 weeks making grey flat boxes go left before finally seeing a result.
When I was deciding games or film, I was experiencing the Dark Portal opening to Outlands. But I started my gaming journey long ago with Alex Kidd and Commander Keen. That's sprites and hardware cartridges to fully immersive, massively multiplayer 3d worlds in the time it took me to graduate school and get to college.
Destruction physics was faked using baked animation and eventually we developed the ability to do it real-time. Gaming evolved to fake global illumination, now real-time. Lighting, animation dynamics, particle simulations....
So seeing developments like this is nostalgic and mind blowing and inspiring all at once. Excited to see what real-time AI Gen will do for gaming, I see Nvidia's cooking up some exciting stuff given the recent announcements of DLSS 3.5!
Below: Fluid simulations on an RTX 4090 using EmberGen, courtesy of https://twitter.com/bilawalsidhu
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