The Beginning of Something Else
With all the buzz around Worlds coming up, I'd simply like to take a step away from this hype just for a moment to bring you what I believe is one of the largest steps eSports has recently taken. Seven eSport organizations have come together to form a CS:GO league controlled by the owners of the league. The league has been named the Professional eSports Association and the teams that have formed it are Team Liquid, Cloud9, Counter Logic Gaming, Immortals, NRG eSports, Team SoloMid, and compLexity Gaming. The prize pool will be $500,000 for the first season and a total of $1 mil throughout the first year. Here's the article for more information on the league:
This is a huge step for eSports in general and will probably prove to be one of the biggest pieces of it's history. If this is successful, this suddenly becomes a question of which games currently are willing to work with the PEA or whatever other leagues come up later to make their seasons as easy and painless as possible (no huge updates right before major events or no downtime during said major events). I believe that if this is successful, any game with developers who are unwilling to bend to the league a bit will lose a large portion of their eSport scene over time because teams are going to join the PEA while potentially dropping out of the developer's league.
Now while I may sound like I'm saying, "If Riot doesn't change, this new league is gonna fuck Riot up!" I'm not. Riot will do perfectly fine at this current point in time and may do fine in the future because there's still money to be had here and if you can't get into the PEA (which it could be very difficult to do so), then you'll have to compete in developer tournaments (or IEM tournaments I guess).
This is such a great step for eSports, and while some can easily look at this and say, "I don't care about eSports," or "Esports aren't gonna be like real sports," you still can't deny this is pretty impressive for what it could become.
