From Humble Beginnings: the NFL vs. eSports

By most accounts, American Football1 started out with humble beginnings: a college sport that branched off association football (rugby) that spawned a bunch of disorganized professional organizations that eventually coalesced into the NFL and the college football behemoths we know about today.

The game started in the mid 1800s. The first professional game was in the 1890s, with the first player getting a secret single game contract that paid him $500 (a staggering $13,000 in 2016 dollars). By 1920, what would be the NFL was born. Players were averaging a few thousand dollars a year ($27K in 2016 dollars) by the 30s and often took second jobs to make ends meet. By the 70s, the modern game and the college game began to take the form we see today. The rest you know: Billions of dollars and a billion fans watching for it’s marquee event.

Parallels

In the late 90s, a new genre of competition now called MOBAs (multiplayer online battle arena) came to be. Derived from a popular real time strategy game, Starcraft, it has since spawned a growing industry of games in that genre. A few games, League of Legends (LoL) and Dota 2, have tournaments with million dollar prizes. They have college clubs around the world, including at a few you may have heard of. They even have their own doping problems.

Discovery

ESPN streamed a Dota 2 tournament in 2015 and even broadcast a MOBA on ESPN2 last year. Hard core sports fans were less than impressed.

I admit, I also was a little confused why a game I personally had never heard of, let alone played, was worth broadcasting on TV. Being me, that meant I started doing my research: learned about big prizes and huge audiences, read about the massive popularity of eSports in Korea, and looked at the games themselves.

That these games are the popular tournament ones makes sense to me. I used to love RTS games back in the day2. These RTS games are the predecessor to LoL, Dota 2, and Vainglory. MOBAs still share a lot in common with their ancestors. These games are a mix of:

  • pure reflex and physical skill
  • complex strategy carried out on a deceptively simple field
  • clear, easy to understand objectives

Actually, kind of like the NFL.

In other words, if you don’t play, you can still tell what’s going on at a basic level (kill the other team, take an objective). But if you play… wow, there are layers to unfold and strategies to debate and technique to admire.

I don’t play Dota or LoL, which is why a single Dota 2 broadcast couldn’t keep my attention for the whole event. I thought it was cool, recognized the RTS heritage, and basically went back to watching sports.

Revelation

One day, I picked up Vainglory. It’s a free MOBA for iOS which was featured during an Apple event. I dove in and immediately was hooked. I wrote about Vainglory (indirectly) last year. At that time, I had been playing the game frequently for months, so now (except for a couple month hiatus around the birth of my daughter) I’ve been playing this game for over a year. I literally play a round most nights before I head to bed.

I’m naturally competitive, and so naturally I want to be good at this game… Which is when the whole thing finally clicked.

In the Twitch post, I likened watching Twitch to the Golf Network. Boring if you’re not a golfer, but a great source of tips and help if you are. This is true of the entire community around video gaming now. For example, I’ve been watching videos on YouTube like BenTimm1’s videos to learn strategy and tactics. Tournaments are often streamed on Twitch.tv, so that’s another good resource.

Vainglory also has televised tournaments in Korea. The Vainglory IPL is broadcast on OGN, “a South Korean cable television channel that specializes in broadcasting video game-related content and eSports matches.” Here’s one of their broadcasts of a Vainglory IPL final:

Those are pretty good production values, which isn’t very surprising given the popularity of eSports in Korea. You can see a huge improvement, though, as each subsequent tournament is streamed. There’s a big improvement in the commentary, for example, even from the Vainglory World Invitational final, which took place right before the IPL tournament embedded above.

It’s important to note that this is for Vainglory, a relative newcomer to the MOBA and eSports world. Take everything I’ve said above and amplify it for LoL or Dota 2. This is a shot from Wikipedia of the Dota 2 finals crowd in Seattle:

By User:DarthBotto, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33874814
By User:DarthBotto, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33874814

Legitimacy

While the Great Depression hurt the growth of the NFL, it did provide one benefit: it convinced otherwise respectable men to turn to football as a primary source of income. These were college educated men, disproportionately from white collar families who probably would’ve pursued other opportunities. This raised the talent level, making the league stronger and likely creating a feedback loop3.

Vainglory, my favorite, is still small, paying out 10s of thousands for their grand prizes. Dota 2 has much higher payouts and an enormous prize pool. LoL is further along in their growth, and their tournaments provide a sense of where things are going. Riot Games, makers of League of Legends, provides salaries for their tournament players along with travel stipends. Make the choice to leap into professional eSports easier and the talent should follow.

All of that combined makes being a professional “League of Legends” player a viable career opportunity. This helps the game reach its full potential, because we want to avoid our pro players coming under financial stress and having to hold down part-time jobs. We want to make it so being a pro player is a completely viable career opportunity.

Riot Games’ CEO, Brandon Beck

It’s still not huge money. With sponsors involved, some of these players are making a decent living, even if they need to also have a side job. Kind of like the early NFL.

Prediction

The big MOBAs are growing the infrastructure around eSports in a way that points to a sustainable future. There are campus organizations forming along with amateur associations. There’s also more mainstream acceptance of gaming thanks to smartphones, and thus a bigger potential audience. The choice to play competitively is getting easier to make for players. Those trends just need to continue in the same direction, and eSports could be a huge thing. Maybe… kind of like the NFL.


  1. … hey, I’m overseas now, have to distinguish! 🙂

  2. I was a decent Starcraft player in my youth, and related titles like Warcraft III and Command and Conquer are still some of my favorite games. And wow, I didn’t realize C&C was still being released…

  3. I didn’t find too many sources aside from that one book (which I only have the Google excerpts for – it’s out of print, it seems). The draft came to be toward the end of the Depression and pre-WWII, which could correlate. It’s unclear (to me, right now) if the draft initially was because of an abundance of potential players or a way to entice players in. Worth doing more reading around this.

Goodbye Google Apps (GMail), Hello Fastmail (and MailRoute)

I recently moved nearly all of my email off of Google’s services over to Fastmail, with MailRoute in front of it to block spam. 1

So far, I’m really happy. The services are relatively inexpensive, and the features compare well with Google, both in terms of space as well as functionality that I used. The best thing is that Fastmail offers a real, simple, plain vanilla IMAP implementation, which means it works a lot better with my iPhone and OS X’s Mail.app without weird label/folder/all mail strangeness.

MailRoute’s best feature is the quarantine summary email. Basically, each morning (or any interval you define), MailRoute sends an email listing mail it blocked that might be legit. Each email listed has a link to recover the mail and/or whitelist the sender. So, from there, I can quickly recover false positives without logging in and trolling through dozens of obvious spam emails.

I’m really happy with the setup, and with a lot of the surrounding email cleanup this prompted – I consolidated a few addresses and unsubscribed from a lot of newsletters/marketing crap I wasn’t reading anyway.

On the spam front, it’s just a tiny, tiny bit worse than what I had with Google. There are fewer false positives (legit email that ends up in the spam folder) and once in a while, a spam message makes it into the inbox. There are knobs and controls to twiddle with if that bothered me, but so far I’m not motivated to fix it – it’s just not enough of an inconvenience that it bothers me.

Whys and Wherefores

Both Fastmail & MailRoute are paid services, while my use of Google Apps for Domains/Business/Work/whatever-its-called-today was free. So, why did I do this?

I had a long, rambling explanation written talking about tracking and the ad market and evercookies and super cookies and why this bothered me, but I’ll summarize all of this with a few images. These are all the third party elements loaded when you visit a major online site like people.com:

people.com

Step down to a smaller publication that has to be more creative about ad networks or revenue, like, say the Norwich Bulletin:

norwich-bulletin

Tell me the business models and privacy policies of all of those third party sites. I’m in the industry and even I don’t recognize them all.

While most of the top 10-20 online sites are pretty good about restricting the partners they work with, ad retargeting and related ad models are getting more popular, all of which require tracking you as you wander around the web.

I just want to browse the Internet without a simple Google search or visit to an Amazon product page, for example, following me around the Internet for the next few days. So, that means not relying on services that need that data unless I have no choice. 2

Email is only one of the things I’m looking at removing. I’m testing out DuckDuckGo instead of Google Search.3 I’m also contemplating writing/installing/tweaking a web analytics package to get rid of Google Analytics. That’s a bigger time commitment, though, so I may just need to find one with a better privacy stance.

Why Fastmail and MailRoute?

There are a lot of services out there and, if I’m being honest, I didn’t do a ton of research on this one. Just too busy these days. I heard about both of these services over the last few months from the Accidental Tech Podcast (MailRoute sponsored them a few times, I think), and co-host Marco Arment has blogged about them a few times.4

So, I basically just ran with that recommendation after pricing it out and deciding that the $5-6/month was worth it. A little more privacy (plus the better/different features) for a little bit of money seems like a fair tradeoff.

Like I said, it’s been about a month and I’m very happy so far.


  1. My @gmail.com address can’t be moved, and I’m keeping it. While I’m shifting most of that email to my main address, I’ll still use it for some things.

  2. I still can’t justify/rationalize quitting Facebook or Twitter. Moving email providers was easy. Yay, standards!

  3. so far, Google just seems better, especially for technical/programming searches. I haven’t switched over to DDG yet.

  4. That post, by the way, expresses a lot of what I like about this setup

Some Observations on the Mobile Market in India

Living in India has given me a new perspective on a lot of things. Professionally, I’m constantly learning a lot just by seeing how differently people use their phones, and how different the market and ecosystem around mobile is here.

Intex? Karbonn? Spice Mobile? Oppo?

The biggest eye opener has been seeing the number of India-focused brands here in the smartphone market.

In the US, there are global brands like Apple, Samsung, HTC, Motorola, and LG and then a spread of other smaller brands. Here’s IDC’s list of the top smartphone vendors in India last year:

  1. Samsung
  2. Micromax
  3. Intex
  4. Lava
  5. Xiaomi

The market is also full of up & comers like Spice Mobile, and Karbonn, & other Chinese manufacturers like Oppo among many others I probably haven’t heard of.

Windows Phone is still a factor here, and I do still see Blackberrys from time-to-time, though they don’t rank in any public market reports I can see.

And feature phones – J2ME, basic phones… still big in India, too.

I’m Developing Android First

Most of the smartphones sold in India run Android. Android has a 90+% market share in India. Nothing else really is worth talking about, when you’re talking about smartphones.

So, while I personally am a dedicated iOS user, professionally in India, our teams think Android first. This is not the case for our US development teams, where both platforms have roughly equal priority and resources.

In the U.S., Fred Wilson’s 2010 call for Android first was bad advice then (and probably still is now), but the realities of emerging markets like India means doing exactly that. It’s literally the only game in town that matters.

Price is King, But Technology Matters

India is a price sensitive market. Obvious, right? But what I’ve found living here and talking to coworkers is that it isn’t just price that matters, but affordable value. From Ben Thompson’s excellent blog, Stratechery, talking about Xiaomi’s (and others’) rapidly growing customer base in India & China:

These customers are not conservative, or even pragmatists: they are enthusiasts and visionaries who simply don’t have very much money. The proper way to reach them, then, is not to sell them trickle-down technology: they will see right through that, and dismiss it out of hand. Rather, the solution to is develop new business models – indeed, in the case of Xiaomi, a new company – that is built from the ground-up to serve their specific needs.

This, too, is a powerful opportunity: there are far, far more potential customers in developing countries than there are in developed ones, but just because they don’t have much money does not mean they are technological laggards. Indeed, many of these customers are even more advanced when it comes to being mobile first because of the lack of a PC legacy, and they will embrace a brand that lets them live on the cutting edge.

Specs and feature bullets are still huge here, and not just because so many people in India work in the technology sector.

Android is Different Here

That central point, that people want tech but simply can’t afford the flagship devices, means that manufacturers need to find creative ways to manage cost while still offering an overall solid device. This creates subtle differences in user experience that go beyond the speed or feel of the device.

For example, Rs. 10,000 (~$160) is a common marketing cutoff for “inexpensive” smartphones (all phones are sold unlocked and contract free here).1

So, I decided to pick up a Micromax Canvas A1, which cost me about Rs. 4800 (~$75) fully unlocked, got a SIM for it, and have been using it as my ‘free time’ phone when I don’t need work email or iMessage.

It’s not a bad device – performance is fine – and because it’s an Android One device, it runs the latest version of Android. It does have some limitations that impact how we need to develop apps.

First, it’s a 3G phone – no LTE or HSPA+ etc. Even though LTE is coming online here in the cities, the state of the networks, plagued by inconsistent coverage, make this a less significant limitation. App developers already need to think about bandwidth as a precious resource. I’m used to seeing my iPhone on 2G/Edge networks regularly, and I’m not alone judging from our user reports.

The bigger surprise was the limited internal storage. I always found Android fans’ focus on SD card slots odd, but now that I’m running a phone with just 2 Gigs of internal flash memory, I suddenly understand. I went to download an app yesterday and got an error that I was out of space. And all I had on the phone were about 10 reasonably sized apps (the biggest was Facebook, at 150 MB(!). Android does let you move apps and some data to the SD card, so moving apps (when you can2) is the only way to continue installing new apps without deleting other apps.

There are even more subtle issues, some of which are detailed in this blog post at NextBigWhat. It’s a good summary of some of the challenges if you want to target the broadest swath of Indian mobile users.

Of course, you do get what you pay for. While things like Twitter and Facebook run fine, the screen isn’t as nice as the flagship phones. My main gripe, though? The horribly inferior camera.

Photo taken on my Canvas A1:

Canvas A1 Sidewalk Shot

Photo taken on my iPhone 6:

iPhone 6 Sidewalk Shot

No contest, IMHO.

I’m still learning a lot about India, and writing software for Indians (and the world outside the U.S. more broadly – Cricket, rugby, & F1 are global sports). We’re getting close to a few new releases at work, so I’m sure I’ll have more to learn and share soon. And there’s still other things – missed call marketing, the SMS market in India 3, and so much more.


  1. Contrast that to a flagship Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge, which runs for about Rs. 53,000 (~$833), or an 64GB iPhone 6 which runs around Rs. 56,000 (~$880), though on sale at Amazon for Rs. 43,499 (~$684.49) right now.

  2. So, I have an SD card installed, but not all apps allow themselves to be moved to the card (it’s a developer choice to allow this). Why wouldn’t apps allow this? Because moving to the SD card disables things like the app’s widgets. So… you need to focus on app distribution size, then you have to think about the user experience when the app is on the SD card, and parts of your app just stop working. Bottom line: not convinced SD cards are that useful, and rumor has it that Google is moving away from them anyway…

  3. Every company seems to send free text messages for everything. Seriously.

Google I/O: An unadulterated celebration of technological imagination

That mouthful is my one sentence description of Google I/O. The demo floors and tonight’s After Hours party are full of whimsy and wonder, literal playgrounds for technology geeks of all stripes.

The atmosphere at I/O is all about the possible, the future, and the fanciful. There are companies making robots, others building home mesh networks that can control all your lights, and yet others working on all sorts of crazy gadgetry. It was all very cool. I went from demo to demo filled with a sense of wonder of what the next few years might bring. Sure, there were really practical sessions about new APIs and tech, but stepping outside of the sessions put you in a geeky wonderland.

At the same time, I can’t help but see this as a metaphor for the differences between Apple & Google or Apple & Android. At Apple’s WWDC, it’s intensely about what will get done now. It’s about making connections and learning the tech that you’re going to put into your next application. Folks on stage demo apps that will launch very soon. Apple talks about features that will be available in weeks. It’s about go, go, go and very much about making money. It’s almost businesslike during the day, with fun during the evening.

WWDC is all about execution, making money, and shipping NOW. For Android, folks know it’s going to be huge, eventually, so they know they’ll make money, eventually. Every time I saw a cool hardware demo, or a neat looking app with some advanced tech, the answer I inevitably got to my, “When can I get it (I really want it!)?” was “fourth quarter this year” or later.

If that doesn’t summarize the state of the two app markets, I’m not sure what else does.

I’ll be adding more photos to my Google I/O 2011 set as I get time. I have some great photos of some of the demos at the party and around the daytime demo area. You can see what I mean for yourself.