With just over $1.5m USD to go until the entire second set of stretch goals have been met, it sort of seems like The International is becoming an outlier to the greater esports scene rather than a leader in it.
That’s not to say that I think the achievement of giving away the most amount of money for the sake of a video game isn’t an important one, but I think that as the hype dies down about the prize pool and turns towards the tournament qualifiers and the main event, the other companies who have games out there will be beginning to implement their league’s year-end plans.
Only Riot has the player base that can compete in the crowd-funded tournament arena, but they’ve always had solid prize pools from the get-go, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.
Blizzard isn’t really in the conversation anymore as they’ve seemingly taken the role of an outsmarted pioneer in so far as to have pretty much started the hype train for modern esports and then having the scene completely abandon it.
Activision gets a lot of press for its million dollar world-wide championship tournament thingamabob, but let’s get real—COD is fan worship to the extreme, Ghosts is bad and Advanced Warfare looks to be worse.
EA could step up, but I’m not sure that’s possible when you consider their big games (Battlefield and Titanfall) both fell flat after their release for one reason or another. Between releasing a broken game and releasing an incomplete game, there’s not really much hope unless they get serious about a Command and Conquer reboot. And I’m saying that mainly because I’d like to see a Command and Conquer reboot.