As you will read, I had the opportunity to work with videogames in the commercial field for about three years. During this time, I have been able to observe the market and think about it.
One of my thoughts are eSports.
For those not knowing this term, eSports (or Electronic Sports) are "virtual" sports based on videogames, where players compete against other players. These tournaments could be about any type of videogame: sport games (FIFA, PES, NBA,...), fight games, shooters, strategic games, etc. They are played at amateur, semi-professional and professional level.
A player or team of players signs up for a tournament and challenges other players: if he beats them all, he wins the tournament and often also gets a cash reward.
Each player must comply with standards relating to game settings and accessories (joypads, controllers, keyboards, mouses, etc.) to avoid inequity and disparity between the participants. For example, in various tournaments, if controllers or pads are required, customizable and/or programmable ones are not allowed; the transgression of this rule can lead to the expulsion from the tournament.
Here "my two cents" of the day: the use of accessories and devices in eSports, both strictly speaking (pad, joypad, etc) and broadly speaking (gaming chairs, headphones, etc).
Currently, in many of these tournaments, the rule above is used; each player must have vanilla standard equipment, so the difference is made only by the player.
Conceptually it is not wrong, but personally I believe that we could add another way of managing these tournaments: teams that challenge other teams, supported by sponsors who do something more than give money and advertise themselves. To make it simple: do you know how Formula 1 works? There is a driver (or a drivers team), with his set of skills, who drives cars and entertains fans...but he is not alone. Next to him there is a team of engineers, mechanics and electricians taking care of his "equipment" under the attention of car companies (Ferrari, McLaren, Renault,...).
This challenge is not only a "driver vs driver" challenge. This challenge is something like "car company vs car company", "engine vs engine", "engineers vs engineers". It becomes the opportunity to enhance an entire team of people, each one with its own know-how and its own specialization.
How could we apply this model to eSports? We could reverse the accessories rule.
Why standardize all the players when we could have each player with his own controller/mouse/joystick perfectly balanced by skillfull engineers, his own gaming chair designed by specialized designers, his own energy drink made by a group of professional nutritionists?
Yes, the player would make the difference, but not alone. The number of main roles would grow up. There would be the opportunity for sponsors to join even more actively in something that is seen more as a product placement space than anything else. Our car companies in the Formula 1 example would be replaced by hardware/device companies (Trust, Nacon, Sony, Speedlink, Microsoft, Secretlab,...).
eSports would become a challenge between hardware companies. The player would "drive" not only for himself, but for his team and his company that sponsors him providing him products tailored to him. In the long run this would incentivize the producers themselves to invest more in better accessories and devices and could push those outside the market to enter it with their own new product. With a cascade effect, there could also be benefits for final consumers: greater investments in this direction would mean more research and development, so new patents and new optimizations that could be put on the mass market; common players, people like us, would benefit from it, having accessories with new brands and new cutting edge technologies, with more frequency of product renewal (more improved versions in a shorter time frame).
It would also create new figures and roles, not only players and trainers, giving the opportunity to excel in an eSport also as an engineer or as a designer into a winning team.
Finally, it would also be an opportunity to look beyond vanilla and standard equipment of players and define once and for all what could be accepted as accessory/device in a tournament, with consequences also on amateur world of videogames: dedicated servers by accessories type, game modes designed for special devices, etc. How many often on the internet someone asks "If I use a programmable pad in a normal online game mode, can I be banned?".
This approach to eSports would also have an additional economic advantage, which Formula 1 does not have (F1 cars are only for official racing): after some time or after the tournaments, companies could decide to sell the same accessory that a player used in a tournament or even won with it; they would make it available to the public, maybe in a limited edition, a type of product that never fails in this sector.
A gaming chair or a mouse or a keyboard identical to those of the winner, maybe even autographed by himself, would have a small economic potential that should not be underestimated...because remember: if you give someone a chance to buy something that convinces himself to be similar or as good as someone else, he will definitely buy it.