Call of Duty

In 1980, American video games developers Atari held the first video game competition — a Space Invaders tournament — but eSports, as we know it, came into being at the turn of the millennium. Inaugural editions of World Cyber Games and the Electronic Sports World Cup were held in 2000, while professional organisation Major League Gaming, based in New York, was founded in 2002. Competitive video gaming was chosen as a demonstration discipline at the 2007 Indoor Asian Games, but it was the advent of Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) games such as League of Legends and DOTA 2 in 2009 that transformed it into a $892 million industry. It gets bigger: the Olympic Council of Asia (OCA) has decided to recognise eSports as a medal sport at the 2022 Asian Games. And Sabyasachi “Antidote” Bose will be ready.

With a wit to match his quick fingers, the 20-year-old from Kolkata is the big hope of Indian eSports. When he’s not talking of aim, reflexes, proper resourcing and angles in CS:GO, Bose is reminiscing about the early days spent playing Counter-Strike 1.6 in a cyber café in Jadavpur, south Kolkata. “I started playing when I was 13 and within a couple of months, I was participating in a lot of local tournaments held at cyber cafes and college fests. A few months later, I made a team with some friends called Foulplay Gaming. By 14, I’d decided to go pro,” he says.

Bose would lie to his parents in order to attend a tournament and soon, he decided to take a break from student life. Consistent showing fetched him the role of captain of a young team called Invisible Wings, but he was let go soon afterwards.

That’s when software engineer Amol Bharti came in. “I saw Sabyasachi at a tournament in Bangalore. He hadn’t completed his studies and now was without a team,” says Bharti, who left a job at Ernst & Young last year to start a Bangalore-based eSports event organiser venture called Drag2Death. “Our D2D community was already growing. I decided to sponsor him and create a team called Dare2Dream with my partner”.

Late last year, Bose moved to Thane with four local players and resumed his studies. “I told him that you need to finish your education. I have given my players every facility they require. A team manager takes care of them,” says Bharti, adding, “The rent, internet, upgrades, travel expenses and the player’s salary of Rs 20,000 can push the monthly cost to Rs 3 lakh”.

Neerav Rukhana’s eSports team, Entity Esports, is a “passion project”. “I’ve played my fair share of games back in the day, but this did not come naturally to me,” says the 29-year-old realty developer. “I sponsored a bunch of players and we started out as a regional team in Mumbai. Soon, they were competing with top-tier teams and I decided to do this full-time and invest more resources. I gave them good gear, good internet and a gaming house in Santacruz (West) and they performed brilliantly. Our organisation now has 20 professionals for a bunch of games, and Asus sponsors all our equipment,” he says.

Putting the team together was a challenge. “The players were sceptical because they had to leave their jobs, career, families and shift to Mumbai permanently,” says Rukhana, who then sweetened the deal by offering Rs 15,000 as a monthly salary. Last Monday, he roped in three Filipino players and an American coach for the DOTA 2 squad, and is planning to shift his CS:GO players to a different apartment.

Not everybody believes that gaming houses are necessary to succeed. “You don’t need a boot camp to become gamers when there are cyber cafes you can play at for Rs 30-60 an hour,” says Nishant “CloudX” Patel, one of India’s top casters (eSports commentators). “The biggest success stories from across the globe are of guys who used public restrooms and spent months in cyber cafes. Philippines has nearly as bad if not worse internet connection than ours. Their parental culture isn’t sold on this either. The Indian guys who aren’t lazy have proven themselves enough to be funded by private investors,” he says.
Ankit “V3nom” Panth, captain of team Brutality — a mainstay of the Indian Counter-Strike scene for close to a decade — swears by the cafes that got him hooked as a 15-year-old. “Ours is a self-funded organisation, so we don’t stay together. We don’t have an investor yet who can give us the luxuries of a boot camp, salaries, travel etc. Sometimes, we rent a place before big tournaments, and practise at the various gaming cafes,” he says.

Panth still remembers asking his parents for his first computer. “I’m from a middle-class family so it was tough. They told me to prove to them that I could earn a living from playing games. I had no answer to that. So, I assured them that my grades wouldn’t be affected. They relented, and I completed my BCom. I must have earned around Rs 10 lakh from competitive gaming in about a decade,” says the 27-year-old from Mumbai, who moonlights as a DJ and model.

Barring a handful of prominent names, female representation in Indian eSports has been limited to college fests, streaming and occasional women-only events. Zerah “Angela” Gonsalves from Ahmedabad started out as a DOTA 2 player, but has since switched to full-time casting. Mumbai-based Niharika Patil, a fashion design graduate, alternates between cosplaying and streaming gameplay. While they are yet to break into major eSports outfits, several women gamers have taken up streaming on Twitch (an online gaming platform) and YouTube.

For almost the entirety of its existence, video games have battled an identity crisis, caught between “art” and “sport”. In 2010, the late film critic Roger Ebert became the gaming community’s public enemy number one when he argued that “no video gamer now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form”. More recently, sports connoisseurs have taken umbrage to the fact that eSports is being legitimised, believing it’s better off clubbed with Monopoly, Dungeons and Dragons, and even hopscotch.

A case for recognising playing video games competitively as a sport is being made. For starters, the US lists professional gamers as athletes when it comes to the visa applications; this year, eSports is being recognised as a varsity sport in 34 colleges across America, with some offering scholarships worth 70 per cent of the tuition.

Last January, ESPN launched an online vertical covering competitive gaming, but its president John Skipper does not recognise it as a sport. Speaking at last year’s Code/Media: New York event, an annual conference, he said, “It’s not a sport — it’s a competition. Chess is a competition. Checkers is a competition. Mostly, I’m interested in doing real sports”.

Sam Mathews, founder of popular outfit Fnatic, has disagreed with Skipper. He defines eSports as “competition augmented by technology.” “ESports are highly strategic. It can be up to 10, 12 hours a day of gaming just to perform that one movement or skill shot better,” he said last year, in an interview with CNN.

There is consensus among the Indian community as well. “Call us athletes. We practise day in, day out. We have to enhance our physical skills to have better and faster reflexes than an average person,” says Panth. “I’d invite the sceptics to come for a training session,” says Rukhana, adding, “You can be sitting in that chair in front of the computer for close to 12 hours. You need superb hand-eye coordination and reflexes. These people are training their a***s off”.
To the layperson, training mimics typing practice. If typists are judged by the number of words per minute, players are judged by the brutal metric of “actions per minute” (APMs). A standard competitive eSports player can register up to 300 APMs — or five actions per second. Players train in certain combinations that have to be executed at top-speed.

As a result of a mostly sedentary lifestyle and long hours, ailments such as deep vein thrombosis, carpal tunnel, back strains or ‘trigger finger’ — a finger stuck in bent position — are common. Much like a footballer’s boots, high-end equipment limits the damage. Ergonomically-designed gaming chairs can cost anywhere between Rs 10,000 and Rs 30,000. At big events, physiotherapists can be seen doing wrist massages.

The mental aspect takes the real toll. From memorising, rapid-fire decision-making and communicating to preparing expansive strategies, mental agility makes or breaks a player. Parallels to chess are often drawn and used as a defence, but Lokesh Suji, Electronic Sports Federation of India (ESFI) director, believes the comparison is unfair. “You don’t need to be physically active to move a pawn. A competitive game in eSports is played at breakneck speed and you can’t survive without quick response,” he says. Suji, 43, left his job as a telecom professional to establish the ESFI, which became member of the international federation in 2013.

According to data analytics service Newzoo, eSports is set to attract a global audience of 385 million this year — that’s more than the population of the United States. Last year’s League of Legends world championship final between Koo Tigers and SK Telecom at the Mercedes-Benz Arena in Berlin drew 36 million unique viewers. Quick comparison: Game 7 of the 2016 NBA finals, between the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Golden State Warriors, was watched by 31 million people, the highest viewership in the last 18 years.

This August, Premier DOTA 2 competition, The International, is offering a prize money of $20,770,460 — almost double that of golf’s Augusta Masters. While the industry is set to touch $1.5bn in revenues by 2020, Southeast Asia, in particular, is home to the fastest growing audience: numbers are expected to grow from 9.5m in 2016 to 19.8m by 2019. And the decision about the status of eSports at the 2022 Asian Games could not have come at a better time for India.

“The growth of Indian eSports has coincided with this announcement. OCA had recognised it as part of Asian Indoor Games in 2007. This is the last leg moving towards Olympics,” says Suji.

And to think of it, it could have been game over for Indian eSports only a few years ago. Almost five years to the day, the infamous India Gaming Carnival took place — or didn’t take place.

The red flags were all there, not least of which was the organising company’s name: WTF Eventz. They generated a lot of hype, promising a footfall of 300,000, and a prize pool of Rs1.5cr — without a single sponsor. Call it naiveté or the lure of a nice payday, but a flurry of teams flocked to the Ayatti Caparo Convention Center in Greater Noida, including Moscow Five, a popular Russian Counter-Strike team. They were welcomed by crude wooden tables and rudimentary computers for equipment. Amid power cuts, reports of bouncing cheques and an angry mob, the organisers shut shop and left midway. Moscow Five cursed their first and last visit to India and warned foreign teams to steer clear. The debacle threatened to put several aspiring gamers “AFK” (away from keyboard). “It set us back a few years. Brands and investors were unwilling to come on board and fund us,” says Patel.

However, the mess also turned things around for the better. “A lot of us gamers then thought we will put our mouse and keyboards down and put on our business suits,” says Patel, whose eSports portal afkgaming.com reports that Rs 77 lakh was paid in prize money in 2016. Approximately Rs 295 crore is being committed by investors this year.

Electronic Sports League, the world’s oldest professional eSports organisation, is running a tournament in India for the second consecutive year — the prize pool has increased from Rs 42 lakh to Rs 64 lakh. Next month, UTV Group’s Ronnie Screwvala is launching UCypher, a league with a prize pool of approximately Rs 50 lakh.

Glory is reserved for those who play. Well-off teams such as Dare2Dream, Entity Esports and Brutality, are now regularly duking it out with the heavyweights, with the stars enjoying a cult following. However, as eSports inches from the niche to mainstream, it is being hounded by the impatient aspirants. “I’ve seen teams change at a whim after losing out on prize money and then purposely creating rifts to go and find another team. These petty things have always kept us below par,” says Panth. “Most Indian gamers are waiting for a sponsor to come in right at the beginning. Sponsors have a different approach. They look at the return on investment, your popularity. You need to put in hours and money,” adds Suji.

But the toughest challenge gamers face is the Indian parent. To thaw the ice, the ESFI organises sessions for those apprehensive about their children’s future. But Bose has a better approach. “My parents now proudly tell relatives that their son is an eSports athlete who represents India. Now it’s easier, because you can dream of winning an Asian Games medal,” he says.

Fastest fingers first: (From left): Dare 2 Dream’s Akshay ‘Kappa’ Sinkar, Vivek ‘Shabby’ Patel, Bhavin ‘HellRanger’ Kotwani and Sabyasachi ‘Antidote’ Bose at the team’s gaming house in Thane ;(below) Counterstrike Global Offensive is one of the most popular games.