Is e-sports and competitive gaming more deleterious than beneficial to the gaming-industry?

Electronic sports are fast-becoming a lucrative business, but amid the short-term glitz and glamour, it is best not to put all our eggs into this one basket.

On one hand, e-sports has brought more awareness to videogames, and with more awareness comes more revenue. But it begs the question, has e-sports become popular because the gamers were there to begin with, or did it attract a new group of people that like to watch, but not play videogames? How much has e-sports increased the audience of money-paying gamers?

E-sports encourages people to play and pay, but it also puts an invisible barrier upon entry. Kids or newcomers may watch professional gamers and be intimidated, and thus never play the game to begin with. Some people watch professional athletes play a sport, and then when they're outside, try to emulate them, but others don't even bother because they have low self-esteems and don't think it's possible.

Are competitive communities around games more hurtful than beneficial to its particular game? Street Fighter has a large and influential "fighting-game community," or FGC for short. It deserves it. Street Fighter II is the best fighting-game ever created, and basically made the genre what it is today. A lot of people are attracted to the idea of a "community," but others are not. When there is a hardcore, hard-to-break-through, pretentious aura around a "community," it also repels people.

This is a shame in the case of Super Smash Bros. The series was created as the anti-fighting-game: the fighting-game for everyone. But with Melee, the skill-ceiling has become so high that it has repelled a lot of would-be players to the series in general, not just Melee. I remember seeing a comment on one of Nintendo's YouTube-videos on Smash 4. The commenter was worried about playing the game if he or she was new to the series. Reading that was unfortunate. The most inviting, welcoming fighting-game had become impenetrable in his or her eyes; Sakurai would have wept. Having a "community" that is driven a lot by competitiveness is not very welcoming or inviting to people because not everyone is competitive; some people just want to have fun. There must be a balance between having fun and offering competitive options as well.

At the same time, I have some advice for people that are not competitive. Avoiding games because they have reputations for being difficult is foolish and prejudicial. What about the first person that ever played that game? He or she was fearless and was able to experience it unbiased, untainted by fear. Play games without fear. Play what you like. You don't know if they'll be hard for you, personally. You could be a prodigy at that game

In the end, I think that e-sports both creates new fans of videogames and alienates them at the same time. I don't think the net effect of e-sports is deleterious; I do think overall it is positive. It is just not the be-all end-all of the gaming-industry.

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