MLG’s Lack of Competition

Very good article Mike. I actually agree whole heartedly. I left after reading that story in the times and thinking it read like an MLG puff piece. There were far more statements in that article by Mr. Bromberg that I find completely incredulous but I guess time will tell.

Some serious stuff happening in gaming these days. Great read as always, Mike

Good read Mike! Well written!!

"The history of league sports ends with one league, and it only does that after that one league has absorbed other entities and completely transformed and reinvented itself.

Wake me up when that describes Major League Gaming"

I agree with that 1,000,000%. Maybe the "An idea before its time," is just something we have to keep our fingers crossed on. I hope and pray that maybe one day CGS could come back and give this esport ego ran juggernaut a run for its money. Everyone knows my postition on MLG from the CGS forums. -.- I hope their president gets stung in the balls by bees.

I support MLG because I support gaming in general but they probably should choose their statements more carefully.

I love MLG alot but i agree: they are too fuckign cocky. Seriously, if i wanted to work with dicks i'd work with MLG. They didn't run anyone out of business, never have, never will. It's just the truth, they need to get over themselves.

<span class="cquote">"The history of league sports ends with one league, and it only does that after that one league has absorbed other entities and completely transformed and reinvented itself.

Wake me up when that describes Major League Gaming"

I agree with that 1,000,000%. Maybe the "An idea before its time," is just something we have to keep our fingers crossed on. I hope and pray that maybe one day CGS could come back and give this esport ego ran juggernaut a run for its money. Everyone knows my postition on MLG from the CGS forums. -.- I hope their president gets stung in the balls by bees.</span>

Or by the raccoon in the rofl news of the day.

Fantastic read. Someone pass this to Bromberg ASAP. He could stand to learn something about the progression of the sport he claims to support.

i like MLG, and there CEO was right about alot of things but they shouldnt say MLG drove CGS out of business. CGS did that themselves.

MLG needs competition. I just attended MLG Meadowlands 2009, and it was their worse event ever. Having dealt with them for 2 years, they miss an important part of any new industry: entrepreneurs. They do not embrace entrepreneurs, instead they stifle the growth of North American eSports. At the end of the day, we all lose if MLG is the sole source of competition. We need another league, much like WCG, that embraces entrepreneurs, but is focused on North America, and is much more of a traditional League.

What the MLG needs badly is an executive that has an MBA from a top business school that understands new industries and emerging markets, not someone who thinks that business is like a game of Halo. Well-written article.

well said, hopefully we see some competition arising soon.

Sounds like sour grapes to me. The CEO is absolutely right; for a stable future you can only have 1 league/ governing board. Otherwise your dilluting the player base between seperate competitions and with that the validitiy of their titles achieved within any competition. Also you are dividing the fans which prevents the Esport as an entity from reaching its true potential.
Your only complaint really seems to be with the CEO because he said he drove CGS out of the market; Which from what YOU have said seems to have an element of truth.
Im a business student and you stated CGS's downfalls was its outgoings. OK thats fine, but why did they allow themselves to have such large outgoings? No doubt because they anticipated holding a much larger marketshare which could justify those expenses which didnt happen due to the dominance of MLG. MLG took hold of the market share with a firm grasp which enivetably led to the downfall of CGS, that much is obvious in my eyes. Harp on about outgoings a bit more though but what business doesnt go down because of their outgoings? If they didnt spend anything no business would ever go bust!

So yeah, stop whining because CGS went under, MLG provides a good league with a high quality and imo excellant coverage so stop complaining.

#12

Did you read the full article? The parts where he referenced cold, hard, irrefutable facts about how every major American sports league was really the combination of multiple leagues that had coexisted for decades?

Because that had direct conflict with a statement by Bromberg that claimed everyone knew the history of sports all began with one league. That is incorrect, clueless, and borderline ignorant.

Bromberg doesn't say, "We had set the bar so high for the CGS that they could never reason those goals." he says "We have run every other league out of this industry." which is just completely fictional. MLG has yet to run a single league out of the industry because it's not in competition with anyone. WSVG was the closest thing to direct competition with MLG and WSVG was screwed by it's own machinations since the beginning.

Also, again, we have another genius here that believes the CGS board members woke up one morning, walked into the office and screamed "Oh my god! People don't like our league! SHUT IT DOWN! SHUT IT DOWN!", someone who is a business student should be educated enough to know that, that's a wildly unrealistic concept. I won't sit here and argue that they were bleeding cash, but they were well aware what that budget would look like when they began. They were well aware that the growing process would take time. There were other, bigger issues that combined along with the fleeting economy that led to the ultimate and abrupt downfall of the CGS.

Fact is though, the CGS issue is the smallest problem with your post, you're just clueless.

At what point in my post did i say that they walked in and said shut it down? Thier forcasts where clearly off. The current economic problems have had very little impact on the gaming industry. If it was solely down to the economy then why didnt MLG suffer a similar fate? You either have to accept that CGS was less competitive or that it was badly managed in comparison to MLG because not only did MLG survive but im pretty sure it has grown over the last year.
Your right he did say that other leagues merged but it all ammounts to the same fate; 1 LEAGUE; whether they merge, takeover or just plain drive out the competitors leagues always (with the exception of Boxing i suppose) take off when there is a single established governing bored for the national game. Everything written in this terrible article contradicts its own arguements, I find it astonishing that so few people can see that.

Perhaps you're not up on current events but MLG just recently acquired something like 7 million in VC a few months ago... CGS had the option of either sinking more money in, or calling it early, which they did, because of other issues beyond just funding.

"CGS had the option of either sinking more money in, or calling it early, which they did, because of other issues beyond just funding"

this is purely speculation on your part. Atleast my assumption comes from having some sort of knowledge of business and noticing the warning signs. The arguement that it was purely economics which brought them down really doesnt have very much strength in my eyes.

I can promise you that the statement I made is not speculation. Options were laid out on the table for the CGS, choices were made, you saw how it turned out. The CGS could have afforded to continue, that wasn't the issue.

<span class="cquote">Sounds like sour grapes to me. The CEO is absolutely right; for a stable future you can only have 1 league/ governing board. Otherwise your dilluting the player base between seperate competitions and with that the validitiy of their titles achieved within any competition. Also you are dividing the fans which prevents the Esport as an entity from reaching its true potential.</span>

I'm not sure how to address this paragraph because I don't know how you get "for a stable future you can only have 1 league / governing board" from those quotes, especially the more recent one in the Times. Not once does he mention the future, and not once does he talk about one league being necessary for stability of any kind. The closest thing is "the history of league sports begins with one league," which doesn't seem like the same thing at all. So I'll just ask: is your statement really what the CEO said?

As for your support of that point, I suppose that you are diluting the player base and cheapening titles. But I would add that any marginal decrease in prestige, and especially the player base, could have more positive consequences than negative ones. As an example, when the ABA was created, yes, they stole away some of the players from the NBA -- both established and newly drafted ones. But the most important thing was that other, extremely talented players also had a chance to play. In other words, if you really split the talent pool in half (which is the worst case scenario, and hard to imagine that would happen under any circumstance), new players would fill in the gaps, and some of them would probably be just as, if not more, talented than the people they replaced. Sports is not always a meritocracy -- the best don't always rise to the top. Sometimes talented people don't get the opportunity to shine as early as they could, or ever.

(I'd also say that the prestige of titles fades as time goes along, anyway. Does anybody really care about sports champions from 15-20 years ago? And if so, can they remember the circumstances surrounding those particular years which may or may not have lessened the achievement of winning a title?)

To be honest, I think the comment about dividing fans is way offbase. It presupposes that fans can only follow or support one league at a time, and a fan gained by league X is a fan lost by league Y. If a league really started competing against MLG by using Halo as a game, you probably wouldn't be splitting the fanbase among them. It's much more likely that fans of one would still be fans of the other because at their most basic level, they're ALL fans of high-level Halo competitions.

<span class="cquote">Your only complaint really seems to be with the CEO because he said he drove CGS out of the market; Which from what YOU have said seems to have an element of truth.
Im a business student and you stated CGS's downfalls was its outgoings. OK thats fine, but why did they allow themselves to have such large outgoings? No doubt because they anticipated holding a much larger marketshare which could justify those expenses which didnt happen due to the dominance of MLG. MLG took hold of the market share with a firm grasp which enivetably led to the downfall of CGS, that much is obvious in my eyes. Harp on about outgoings a bit more though but what business doesnt go down because of their outgoings? If they didnt spend anything no business would ever go bust!

So yeah, stop whining because CGS went under, MLG provides a good league with a high quality and imo excellant coverage so stop complaining.</span>

Yes, one of my complaints with the CEO is that he said he drove the CGS out of business. (The others are more focused on him coming off as a jerk and not knowing the basic history of sports.) But about the expenses: no. I don't think you fully understand the relationship between MLG and the CGS, or if you do, you certainly didn't support your claims in any way indicating that.

First of all, they didn't use the same games, so they weren't even competing for the same fans or players in a particular game (presuming that fans of a game can only follow or root for one league, of course, which I don't believe to be true.) So they certainly weren't in the same "market" there.

Secondly, I'd argue their target audiences, and the mediums used to reach fans, were completely different. The CGS's biggest goal, and the one they put the most resources into, was drawing in a television audience and reaching people that were unfamiliar with competitive gaming. The TV production was by far the biggest expense for the CGS. In contrast, MLG has almost zero presence on television, and they're highly focused online. I can't speak as authoritatively on their target audience, but my impression is that they target competitive gamers -- they support a huge list of games through GameBattles and acquired GotFrag a few years ago.

(As an aside, it's worth mentioning that MLG is almost exclusively console-based, while the CGS's biggest game (in terms of spending) was CS.)

So, to recap, the MLG and the CGS didn't use the same games, didn't compete for the same players, didn't use the same mediums, and weren't really trying to reach the same people. Just about the only thing they "competed" for was sponsors, and I think that still comes with the caveat that competing for sponsors isn't necessarily a zero-sum game.

In essence, the CGS didn't have massive expenditures because they were trying to wrest control of a market from MLG. They had massive expenditures because they were trying to reach non-gamers through television, and didn't have a good enough product to keep them interested or get them in the door, irrespective of whether or not MLG was alive or dead.

Also, I never said anything about MLG not providing a good league. I watched a few of their shows when they were on USA, and I generally root for them to do well. I just think that eSports as a whole would be better off if they DID have competition because it would force them to keep improving their product by leaps and bounds.

barleyarley,

As a guy who worked for executive management at CGS I can say you are 100% wrong. Also you say MLG is still standing so they have won. The recession is not over yet. MLG does some good things but they have done it at the expense of a VERY high valuation due to so much investment funding and that is because they are NOT profitable.* (This is an educated opinion and not a statement of fact)* I have said in several posts that CGS dying was BAD for this industry and everyone will see the effects. I said a few days after CGS died that ESWC would fail and WCG not too far behind. I also said I would not be surprised if MLG follows suit. Again the recession is not over, so we will see if MLG is left standing afterwards. I REALLY hope so but I have my doubts.

Your right he doesnt directly say that you have to have 1 league for esports to grow; his statement however was:
"the history of league sports begins with one league,"

In the context that it is said it is clear that he suggests that Esports cannot advance forward until 1 body can lay down the rule book (atleast for specific games). MLG and CGS aside, could you imagine Esports having much of a commercial future if 2 leagues played with different rules? Its not viable. It wouldnt be accepted for other sports and wouldnt be accepted for this either.
Also everyone knows that business dont run on Profit, they run on cashflow. If MLG's cashflow is functional (which shouldnt be an issue for a while now that the circuit is once more in function) then I cant see them faultering anytime soon.

I think im responding to 2 posts at once right now but whatever

I do like the point about the 2 leagues meaning twice the talent although I would say that people would rather see 1 larger league accomodate all the talent then it being seperated. but I absolutely disagree with you about people not remembering past sporting accolades, the fans of the team that one certainly remember such things.

MLG is so strong, Console Gaming > PC Gaming. You cant deny these facts. Im a PC gamer, but can fully accept that MLG is the best league/LAN event around.. and it wont be dying like the ESWC,CGS,CPL anytime soon.

barleyarley, if he made that statement in the context of a GOVERNING BODY, then yes, I can agree. However, that's not the context. The context is that Mr. Bromberg feels that the history of E-Sports _should_ begin with one league, and he very sincerely wants it to be his. The more that international gaming tournaments and leagues fail, the more it hurts, separates, and distances E-Sports as a whole.

Your questioning whether E-Sports has a commercial future is based on the premise that you can't have two E-Sports leagues with two sets of rules, which would be correct if the two E-Sports leagues featured the same game. However, that premise fails the moment MLG enters the picture, because no other league, NA-based or otherwise, features the lineup of games that MLG uses, save perhaps World of Warcraft. Looking at real sports, North America has four major ones. By your logic, none of them should be doing well, because there should be only one. Also, not everyone knows that businesses are more likely to succeed with a positive cash flow. Accounting students know it, however.

<span class="cquote">I support MLG because I support gaming in general but they probably should choose their statements more carefully.</span> Agreed

I have never considered MLG as a company who was out for the betterment of eSports. They do what they do well, and they fill a space in the scene, but seeing these quotes from Matt just illustrate that it is a corporation run by a non-gaming exec, and he responds the same way he would if he was the President of a packaging company or a car dealership. "We ran them silly willies out of business! hurrah!"

There are people in that organization who do care. Lee is over there now, and of course Singlecoil, but Matt... well, I don't think you will ever catch him downloading a frag video off MLGvideos.com.

And before someone else says it, CGS was also a corporation run by a non-gaming exec.