Is Australia professional enough to game professionally?

Written By Andrew "Starks" Starkey
13 February, 2009 07:19 PM

Burn baby burn!

4. Burn baby burn!

The community itself is a volatile, demanding, clicky, abusive, often cheating and always hormone driven environment. Beginners to competitive games are often forced to run a gauntlet of fire that at best is wrong and at worst is the self destructive force that could destroy the e-Sports community.

Elite players who have zero social skills, even less patience to help tutor those up and coming and ego's that make Napoleon look humble, making the competitive community one that bites the hand that feeds. Whether it be paid coders sourced from the community who simply won't finish updating various softwares for sites, teams (And in most cases it comes in a wave) who simply implode, disband and leave a vacuum of shit to be cleaned up by administrators struggling to finish competitions or cheating scumbags who would sooner ruin the enjoyment of others than admit their talentless turds - The Australian community has it all.

This is not to suggest that we are alone in this matter. The world is full of assholes, and frankly our community is not unique in that manner. However, given we have an uphill battle to have consistent community tournaments and encourage corporate sponsorship to help grow the competitive scene in Australia, you would think that people would wake up to themselves and look at the big picture.

It is more evident every day that no matter what forum I visit, the administrators, who give up their own time and efforts for no monetary return, attempt to put out a fire that is simply relit in another area.

Add to this the constant flux of teams who are competing or not, and trying to run tournaments without knowing if the sides involved are dedicated to completing the season or not and it is no wonder that competitive gaming sputters and stalls each time it is looking like it will take off in Australia.

This isn't to say that competitive gaming in Australia is dead. By no means. Indeed, I would suggest that it is very much alive.

What I am suggesting is that the balance of forces trying to build the scene to bigger and better things are indeed being prevented by the above issues and stopping it from evolving into something like what the United States have, where corporate sponsorship allows players to game for a living.

This can all be changed in a matter of months. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that if the various sites in Australia running competitions and websites with tournament persuasion came together and moved forward as one, competitive gaming in Australia would take off like a rocket.

Combine this with a core of 12 to 16 teams in each game being dedicated sides willing to stick together and give it a real shot, and I would suggest that it wouldn't be long before sides like Encore, Sydney Underground, Immunity and many, many others would be given the opportunity to test their mettle overseas.

And the reason for this is because it would attract money. If you have unified websites trying supporting both Online and LAN events as well as teams consistently attending and competing with regular line ups, you turn the entire industry from amateur to semi-professional in its very nature. The only thing required to birth it into the professional realm is sponsorship, and indeed if, say, a hardware sponsor new that its involvement in the Australian competitive gaming community would allow him to reach an additional target market of 50,000 new customers or more, then the question turns into one of ‘when' it will happen, not ‘if'.

Until this unification and maturing process happens, however, the fragmented Australian competitive gaming community will have to be content with playing for prize pools that are well below the talent they possess.

Source: Australian Gamer