Accessibility
One of the most important components in sports, and esports especially, is ensuring your audience understands the rules and basic mechanics of the game. The best way to do this is to provide a means for the viewers to play the game themselves. The more people who play the game, the more potential viewers you have. This is a huge reason as to why free-to-play games, such as League of Legends and Hearthstone, have a large viewership for esports events. Even the biggest FPS esport, Counter Strike: Global Offensive, is available for the low price of $15.
Here is where Overwatch hits its first snag. The cost of Overwatch is that of a standard game, $60 for consoles and $40 for PC. Because of this higher cost, Overwatch might not be able to bring in as many players and, as we said, less players means less potential viewers. However, we did mention that Overwatch is available for both consoles and PCs, which is a large point in its favor. Being multiplatform means it may be able to draw in a crowd that it wouldn’t be able to if it was PC only, which most esports are.
Cost isn’t the only element in a game’s accessibility. The basic rules and mechanics for an esport must be easy to learn, yet hard to master. It’s important that players constantly build an interest in the game, because if they don’t they’ll fall off of it and thus lose interest in the esports for it. When a game is easy to learn, players won’t be intimidated in picking up the game and will be able to latch onto it quickly. When a game is hard to master, players will feel as though they’re being challenged to be better and will work towards improving themselves and their gameplay. Where do players go to learn high level techniques and strategies? You guessed it, from professionals playing on an esports level.
This is where Overwatch really shines. The standard mechanics of Overwatch are pretty simplistic and many of the characters are very straight forward to play. However, some of the characters can be very complicated and mastering any character can be extraordinarily difficult. Each map’s objectives are fairly plain to understand, but can require strong teamwork and out-of-the-box thinking in order to navigate your way through the enemy team to complete them.
Overwatch may be a monetary investment, but once you pick it up, you’ll be looking up strategies and trying to master characters in no time.
