ESPN is really gunning for eSports, but it's too little too late

ESPN has been shedding subscribers at an alarming rate since 2014. So far, they’ve lost more than 10 million subscribers or approximately 10 percent of their user base. So what are they doing to stem the tide? One word: eSports.

It was only last year that ESPN president John Skippe was quoted to have said that eSports aren’t real sports . Today, they’ve announced that they’ll be airing 18 hours of eSports on ESPN2 and ESPNU on July 17. They also added that the tournament will be streamed on WatchESPN.

I’m a gamer and I spend an inordinate amount of time playing games. I also spend an inordinate amount of time watching live streams on Twitch and YouTube and I can very frankly say that I’ve no clue what ESPN has been doing with itself these past few years.

ESPN’s being a bit silly if they think that gamers who care about eSports will even want to watch TV to get their daily gaming fix. Separating a geek from his PC is in itself tantamount to cutting off a limb! Your phone’s at arm’s reach, your browser already open and free livestreams of the events just a click away.

I doubt many gamers will actually spend upwards of Rs 1,000 a month just to watch eSports on TV anyway.

I’m excited that mainstream media companies are getting interested in eSports, understandable considering the estimated $500 million in revenue that eSports generated last year.

If you’ve seen Valve’s DOTA 2 tournaments , these are events where just about everything is generated by the user-base. Valve’s 2016 tournament has already generated a prize pool in excess of $17 million . It’s a study in gamification and a perfect example of a true eSports community at work. That’s a real gaming community.

ESPN is just throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks. The events that they want to cover aren’t about gamers or even the games, they’re about content and as long as there’s content and ad revenue, ESPN won’t care.

It’s not that streaming games on TV won’t work. South Korea is the perfect example of this, but that’s a country with a historic inclination towards gaming. TV channels in Korea latched onto gaming at a time when streaming video didn’t exist and even then, the streams almost exclusively focusses on one game, Starcraft.

With eSports, ESPN and the like will have to run the gamut of Starcraft, DOTA, World of Tanks, League of Legends, Call of Duty and any number of assorted games and genres. Twitch and YouTube give users freedom of choice. ESPN has never done that and I’m fairly certain that such a concept will be alien to them. That’s something that won’t happen overnight and it’s also something that doesn’t work with a TV format.

If anything, ESPN needs to find a way to get everything that they offer online and to build an engaging community around it. Professional coverage of sports has its place, cricket, football and the like will simply not be the same without it.

Remember Flipkart’s venture into eSports ? Neither do I. Whatever ESPN’s planning, it’s too little, too late.