Blog Banter – the collaborative effort of blogging gamers to all rant about the same topic at the same time! Today’s topic is: If you could ask for one thing this year from the gaming industry as a whole, what would it be and why? Well, to prevent a huge massive list, I’ll try and focus on one thing in particular…

Well, possibly the biggest and most treasured thing to me that I would like to ask from the gaming industry is the return of the Championship Gaming Series! When the CGS suddenly ceased operating on November 18th this year, I was wondering how the gaming industry would cope with the loss of a really well structured and run worldwide televised and streamed gaming league. Well, taking a quick look around most of the other e-Sports portals showed that quite a few people were actually expecting it to happen…

People said that it was an idea that didn’t appeal to a majority of gamers. Most of the appeal was on watching the Counter-Strike: Source matches between some teams which had evolved from teams that started out with their roots in Counter-Strike, but decided to become CGS franchises and expanded to take in the Forza 2, Dead or Alive 4, and FIFA 09 players. The other games weren’t drawing in the attention that the organisers must have hoped for.

Another thing that other people had to say about the league was the televised broadcast structure. Firstly, to conserve air time, only a very brief part of the first half of Counter-Strike was shown, which surely did indeed turn away those who were only watching it for that particular game. I do have to agree not only with that fact, but also the fact that the quality of the broadcast after it was re-edited for the European market was, to be quite frank, a load of bullshit. Sky should have just kept the programs thwe way they were shown over on The 101 back in the US, especially as it was mainly being shown in the late hours of the night here anyway…

Which brings me to the early part of the US regular season. Those matches were not played in the main TV studio and recorded for TV, but they were played in the EA building in Los Angeles. This meant that all the games could be streamed live over the Internet in their entirety. It’s broadcasts like these that most gamers actually look for – live play as it happens, in a “controlled” environment, with expert commentary and most importantly, no breaks or cuts in the action. This is probably what contributed to the ever-reducing popularity of the TV studio matches and broadcasts.

While the series prided on calling itself a global, worlwide league, that was not the case. North America had the most focus with six teams and a regular season before the world finals. Europe had four teams, and only had a European finals before the world finals to play in the competitive environment. And from the rest of the world there were only six other teams with no games apart from their respecitve regional finals to determine who would advance to compete in the world finals. This distanct lack of teams and organised events outside the US is likely another factor in their downfall. It’s as if STAR and BSkyB put as much effort into it as DirecTV and didn’t get as much out of it…

In order to make a return viable though, the league really does need to buckle down and make it more well-known outside of America. The population of America in comparison to the rest of the world doesn’t justify the amount of focus that was placed on them prevously. More franchises would need to be added in all the other regions and some form of regular season matches to be played between the teams to keep up the interest in the league before a more involved and a more global tournament that could truly be called the World Finals of gaming.

Other n00bs involved

• What I want in 2009
• The “Roxanne” Edition
• Dear Gaming Industry
• if the industry gave us all presents this Christmas
• Demands for the industry
• Santa, Don’t Bring Me Toys I Have To Share
• All I Want for Christmas Is…
• My Wish for the Year
• Crossing Over
• Checkpoint Unobtained. errr.
• Loading Requests
• LISTEN BITCH!!!
• One Wish
• Dear Video Game Industry

Blog Banter info

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