The Real Problems With Halo Esports & Why Competitive Halo Will Never Grow
Halo esports is not what it once was; the Halo Championship Series (HCS) tournaments struggle to attract viewers, and the events themselves are few and far between. Anyone who knows nothing about competitive Halo could look at it today and not understand what the big deal was. Yet in the mid-2000s, MLG hosted televised broadcasts of Halo 2 tournaments, the Ogre twins of Final Boss were star players, and Tsquared had his face on Dr. Pepper bottles, among other things. Major League Gaming (MLG) took esports to the next level in North America and brought competitive Halo into the spotlight. So what happened? Competitive Halo fans will point to Halo: Reach and Halo 4 as the cause of the decline of Halo esports. But is it really? Or is there something else they aren't seeing?
To understand what prevents Halo esports from growing, you have to understand how other esports grew. That means understanding Halo's history and what the community did wrong, as well as the history and problems of other competitive scenes. For me personally, competitive Halo's history was the most difficult out of all the esports to research because so little information on this competitive scene still exists. Much of the discussion on these games at the time took place on the MLG forums; forums that are long gone and sparsely crawled by The Internet Archive. The MLG Wiki was a lackluster esports wiki at the time, which focused on – as the name implies – MLG players and tournaments, and the information that was present was basic at best. This wiki is also gone.
It wasn't until 2014 when Esportspedia created their Halo esports wiki, long after Halo was removed from MLG. Then it was migrated to Esportswikis. Esportswikis died off, moved back to Esportspedia, then eventually to Gamepedia. To this day, information on the history of Halo esports is in a very poor state, and outside of MLG or HCS-sanctioned events, much of it at this point in time would qualify as hearsay. Old-school Halo fans and players can try to "brain dump", but going off by memory and word-of-mouth is not that great for evidence. What may or may not have been discussed on the MLG forums can no longer be proven, and finding specific tweets is like finding a needle in a haystack which might not even exist anymore. The best thing we can do under the circumstances is look at and listen to multiple perspectives.
Competitive Halo fans can tell their side of the story, but as someone who devoted a substantial amount of time and effort researching Halo tournaments for this website and wondered why there was an underwhelming amount of them despite its alleged popularity, I'd like to tell my side of the story and hopefully shed new light on competitive Halo's history.
The history of Halo esports, from a different perspective
One of the first Halo events were run by AGP. They didn't have a lot of money and their first event made them lose money. When it came time for the second event, they made it very clear to the Halo community what they needed to do to grow:
If you guys really liked the first event, the second will be much better. However, if you like the AGP to continue running these events and guaranteeing the cash prize, we really need help from the Halo community. We need to show it to our sponsors, network tv, to us that we can consistently bring together large groups of gamers. As you know, at our first event, the entry fee did not even cover the cash prize we gave out, let alone the venue and operating cost. It wont cover our budget for this event also, but that doesnt matter. All we ask is that you show up.
This mentality is exactly how you grow a competitive scene, whether its Halo, Call of Duty, Counter-Strike, StarCraft, Dota, League of Legends, Fighting Games, Battle Royale, etc. You need people showing up to events so that event organizers will have the power to negotiate sponsorship deals with other companies in order to increase prize pools and secure better venues. The Fighting Game Community (FGC) is notorious for that, and they grew over a dozen majors from scratch because the people were willing to show up and help it grow. Every event that succeeded is an event the players got to compete in, and that's more money coming in and more opportunities to compete. They increased their attendance with each event, going from 300 attendees, to 500, to 1000+, slowly gaining bigger numbers that they can literally present to sponsors and show the value of that event.
Metrics such as viewership and attendance numbers are used by organizations when pitching to potential sponsors. When you pay the registration fee to an event, you're not just giving your money to an event organizer; you give them leverage to negotiate a sponsorship deal. Sponsorships are always a business decision, and companies need to be confident that their investment into an event will eventually translate into sales for their products and services.
Halo esports began the same as other games: generally ranging from very small local tournaments organized at a store or school, with a handful of bigger events in an inexpensive conference room. Halo: CE and Halo 2 tournaments were just as abundant as Quake and Counter-Strike tournaments. Local LAN centers would host Halo tournaments in-house and post the results online. Unfortunately for this website, they almost never publish prize information. But this was common as prizes at the time were usually non-monetary prizes such as gift certificates, video cards, gaming peripherals, MP3 players and other ancient artifacts. I've personally won a copy of WarCraft III and Unreal Tournament 2003 in a combined WarCraft III and Unreal Tournament 2003... err... tournament... in 2003. Unconventional tournament formats like that were not uncommon at the time.
But as common as Halo tournaments were, that began to change when Halo 3 was on the MLG Pro Circuit. One thing I noticed was that these independent event organizers and local LAN centers – for one reason or another – stopped running Halo tournaments. It's hard to say for sure because many of these businesses of the time are now defunct, but based on numerous online discussions on forums, videos, social media and LAN center updates that I've dug through over the years, my best guess is that players lost interest in non-MLG tournaments. If players were willing to play in and attend these tournaments, they would increase in both size and quantity; tournament organizers would have been foolish not to cater to the Halo community. Instead, non-MLG Halo competitions faded away.
Even though Europe had a competitive Halo scene, it was substantially smaller and there was almost no cross-over between North America and Europe. Halo esports slowly became monolithic as everyone decided to support MLG and only MLG. In fact, Halo became so synonymous with MLG that Halo pros were never called "Halo pros"; they were called "MLG pros". When MLG had an event, that was great! But after the event, what was there to look forward to? Nothing, except the next MLG Pro Circuit stop in the next month or two. This over-reliance on MLG and the overall lack of events led to the slow decline in interest for the competitive scene. Even in the 2009 season, the number of Pro Circuit stops decreased to five from six in the previous year.
To top it off, MLG was losing money year-over-year. The company was funded largely by venture capital and burned through the cash to grow their tournament circuit. It wasn't until 2014 that then-MLG CEO Sundance DiGiovanni reported the company to be "EBITA positive". EBITA means "Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, and Amortization"; basically MLG in 2014 was considered to be profitable before taking into account taxes and existing debts. A year beforehand, Halo was replaced by Call of Duty. Throughout its existence on the MLG Pro Circuit, Halo was simply not making enough money; certainly not enough to be sustainable. It was only when Halo was removed and replaced by games with stronger community support, along with the launch of MLG.TV, that MLG came close to profitability. So when competitive Halo fans talk about the "golden era" of Halo esports, when Tsquared had his face on Dr. Pepper bottles and the reign of Final Boss on the Pro Circuit, they're referring to a time when MLG was burning through cash to make it all happen.
Even in recent years, offline tournaments have been cancelled due to the lack of registrations. They weren't cancelled because of technical issues with the game; it almost never reaches that point. Talk about the Gamers For Giving tournament in 2016 if you will, but a single high-profile event is nothing compared to the potentially hundreds of Halo tournaments with low registration numbers. Eventually, tournament organizers gave up on Halo. There's no point in scheduling Halo tournaments when there was just no real interest for them, regardless of whether it was in 2008 or 2018.
What did other communities do with their games?
Halo esports fans love to point the finger at 343 Industries because of the gameplay issues present in Halo: Reach and Halo 4, much of which is justified. But then you look at other competitive gaming communities of the time, and it really makes me wonder, why didn't they go back to playing Halo 3?
The Quake community went from Quake III Arena, to Quake 4, then back to Quake III Arena before Quake Live came out. The Counter-Strike community stuck with CS 1.6 for over a decade despite Counter-Strike: Source being out, and stayed until at least a year after CS:GO's release when the community felt it was good enough for competition. The Smash community is still playing Melee, despite Brawl, Smash Wii U and now Smash Ultimate being out there, even going as far as to haul those really old and heavy CRT televisions to play Smash Melee with zero input lag. These communities and many others stuck with the version of their game that was best fit for competitive play. They may even play multiple versions or split the communities to focus on the games they preferred, yet the Halo community was incapable of doing that.
Halo 3 never disappeared from the face of the earth the moment Halo: Reach was released. If the Halo community behaved similar to those of other esports, they would have moved back to Halo 3 (or even Halo 2 tournaments) in 2010 when they realized how awful Halo: Reach was for competitive play. They would have supported tournament organizers of those older games, and they would have had many more events than just MLG to look forward to as a result. Actions speak louder than words. Other communities continued playing the superior games, tournament organizers continued hosting those superior games, and the players showed up to those events. They showed the developers of those games with their actions as well as the rest of the world exactly what they wanted in a competitive game and what they were willing to play. If Halo: Reach and Halo 4 were so terrible for competitive play, why continue to play it?
I can think of a reason: during the CPL World Tour in 2005, Painkiller was the arena FPS game chosen in place of Quake III Arena. Players played this game for one reason and one reason only: the money. The entire season for Painkiller had $1 million USD up for grabs, a massive amount of prize money for its time. But when the season ended, what happened then? No more Painkiller tournaments. There was a brief stint when Quake 4 was played on LAN, but the community ultimately moved back to playing Quake III Arena until it was eventually replaced with Quake Live. Can you imagine if arena FPS players forced themselves to continue playing Painkiller in hopes that DreamCatcher Interactive or CPL would throw them a bone? Interest in the genre would have died out sooner. Quake III Arena was played because the players enjoy it, but they played Painkiller for the money. Halo: Reach was played for the money as well, but all the players did was talk about the previous games while continuing to play the game they disliked.
Then there's the story with the Dota scene, which sprung up from a WarCraft III custom map and had zero support from Blizzard. It was purely the community effort that made it grow; through the DotA-Allstars forums, through Garena and other services as an alternative to Battle.net, finding ways to have existing event organizers run DotA tournaments, and simply engaging with people to get them interested in the custom map. I've heard stories about the Fire in Ice LAN from 2007 and others where players would scrape together what little money they had to go to a DotA tournament; sharing motel rooms, sleeping on someone else's floor, planning road trips, finding any way they can save money to make the trip possible. They played for pride, not profit. Because of the custom map's popularity, several companies later made their own stand-alone version of DotA or a variant of it, such as Heroes of Newerth or Smite, but the most popular games in the end were League of Legends and Dota 2. Realizing what they had lost, Blizzard tried to make their own version with Heroes of the Storm years later, but ultimately didn't attract much of a following.
There was nothing stopping anyone from dusting off their old copies of Halo 3 and playing on LAN. Halo 2 was still very playable as well. Just by looking at these different communities – not necessarily contributing, but simply observing them – and then looking at the Halo community, it baffles me that competitive Halo fans would rather have Halo: Reach tournaments hosted by MLG than Halo 3 tournaments by up-and-coming tournament organizers. Even when MLG dropped the Halo series and the scene moved to the Arena Gaming League (AGL), they played Halo 4 instead of going back to those superior competitive games. But now that an entire decade has passed and a new generation of gamers are here that may not care for the older games, going back to previous iterations in the series may no longer be viable.
Differences between competitive Call of Duty and Halo
When it comes to console FPS, Call of Duty esports suffers many of the same problems as Halo esports. The key difference is in its community members and what they were willing to do, most notably OpTic Gaming and its social media interaction and building up of its core influencers. Once Halo 3 started to wind down, console Call of Duty was taking off, and at the forefront of content creation was OpTic. They were notable in that they were always grinding out content, streaming, engaging with fans, and building a community around competitive Call of Duty on console. During this time, the top Halo players barely did anything. Few of them created YouTube content or streamed consistently, and most of them were slow to build a Twitter following.
There are exceptions of course. Goldenboy, Kampy, Bravo and perhaps a few others have made an effort to create content, but one that stood above the rest would be Tyler "Ninja" Blevins, the only Halo player to consistently put out content at a similar rate as his Call of Duty counterparts at the time. This is the reason why Ninja was able to pull roughly 4x more views than other top Halo players once they finally got the ball rolling. Top Halo players made fun of him early on as a content creator, but once he left Halo and blew up in the battle royale scene, they probably want to be his best friend now. He built a substantial following around himself, and his early commitment to that is paying off years later.
Hector "H3CZ" Rodriguez, former-CEO of OpTic Gaming, made a video addressing the Halo community back in 2016.
Halo as a scene is still growing. It is not where it once used to be. I talk to the players and the players say it's the developer's fault, … but at the end of the day, it was their baby. It was their responsibility to make it happen. So when I hear about players – Halo players – complaining about the lack of viewership or the lack of interest … that's they're fault. And I've told them that personally so I'm not afraid to say it right now. And I've preached this concept to … not just my Halo players … but also to other players who I've met through the scene.
It was their responsibility to get the fans. Nobody in the Halo industry when it was going big and going strong, none of them, except for Bravo [and Kampy], they took the time to make YouTube videos to generate an audience for themselves. And then from there, that audience would have translated to the scene. That's what happened in Call of Duty, when there was literally nothing on the circuit. When Call of Duty was shoved in a corner because Activision didn't give a shit, and MLG didn't give a shit, we made that shit work. … We took what was there and made it a point to be entertaining [and] create content for you guys to be interested in the scene; with the storylines, what's happening here. We made it a point to talk about it.
These guys [Halo players] would go to an event … and go home and that's it. That was their job. So when Halo people talk about how they feel like [they] don't get enough support, like you had it for years. Then you as the [players and organizations] should have made something happen from it.
Growing core influencers was a major factor in Call of Duty's growth to what it is today, but this approach has its own drawbacks. During Call of Duty tournaments, concurrent viewership would spike whenever OpTic Gaming was playing. It could be argued that those fans are more OpTic fans than competitive Call of Duty fans, since those fans tend to only care about OpTic players than the games and the overall competitive scene at large. Reliance on OpTic going deep in tournaments is a double-edged sword: great for the viewership numbers when they make it to the grand finals, terrible if they were eliminated early. Those players may not even be interested in smaller events, which means the interest they've generated means nothing in the lower tiers of competition.
In spite of all that, Call of Duty also had amateur and local LANs. The MES Detroit events is a great example of an independent tournament organizer running tournaments for Call of Duty. Even through it doesn't get much attention from the competitive Call of Duty community at large and the viewership for the streams tends to be on the low side (4-figure concurrent viewer numbers), they're still able to throw events year-after-year. Same thing with Elite Tournament Gaming (ETG) in New York. When you can attract 48 4-player teams to compete in a tournament without any support from the publisher, that says a lot about the community. There was a genuine desire to compete and it didn't matter that it wasn't run by MLG or Activision. It certainly had nowhere near the sheer quantity of tournaments compared to a game like CS:GO, but it was something lower-tier players could look forward to and compete in, with the possibility of new talent rising up and beating established names.
These smaller events are essential in Halo for a variety of reasons; they provide opportunities for lesser players to compete and build their skills and gain experience in an offline environment, they allow players the chance to get to know each other face-to-face, and it provides a way for competitive Halo players to introduce their friends to the scene and give it more exposure. This ultimately creates more interest in Halo esports long-term, which in turn will translate into more viewership and more prize money in the long run.
Even fans within the competitive Call of Duty community who don't compete themselves had projects started up as a hobby, and ended up having an impact in the competitive scene as well. For example, the people who ran CoDStats were just a bunch of random Call of Duty esports fans who came together and covered their tournaments. For the first time ever, there were stats in professional Call of Duty events (at least on console). A year later, time in hill was a stat added to the game by the developers who took notice of this. This was a direct result of these fans actions and the discussion by the community around it.
But just like Halo, Call of Duty had a few bad games for competitive play that the community stuck with. Black Ops 2 arguably had the best maps and balance for competition, but though MLG, UMG and other organizers, tournaments focused on the latest iteration of the series. Although a "throwback tournament" was ran for Black Ops 2, there was never any attempt at re-establishing the game on a more permanent basis.
All things considered, Call of Duty is still in a much better place than Halo. The competitive Call of Duty fans have made some of the same mistakes as their Halo counterparts, but they've also done some of the same things that other successful esports communities have done to grow the scene. The talented people running OpTic Gaming, FaZe Clan, and other organizations in that space had a much better understanding of what kept their fans engaged and that carried them through the rough times in Call of Duty's competitive history. Lesser known members of the community had also went out of their way to make a difference.
HCS Grassroots... because 343 Industries is needed for "grassroots events"
A large corporation is needed to run grassroots events for Halo. That says it all, doesn't it? While 343 may have good intentions, think of the unintended consequences for Halo esports, and how it ultimately reflects on its community. In comes the HCS Grassroots program to assist in community growth. What exactly is it? From its original announcement:
HCS Grassroots is not a new league - it’s a partnership program where tournament organizers big and small, along with content creators, can apply for support that comes in a number of different ways that will evolve over time.
In other word, HCS Grassroots is anything but. It's a program designed to help existing organizations and content creators, but doesn't address the underlying problem of competitive Halo fans not supporting them.
Within the context of esports, "grassroots" means a scene is grown from the bottom-up, like grass growing on a lawn. You start small and build your way up. That's what happened with Halo: CE and other competitive games of the time. But as time went on, Halo fans decided with their actions that anything grassroots was not worth supporting and only MLG events and the later HCS events were important. It's unfortunate because some of these small events can grow and expand into other games.
Dreamhack in particular started out as a small gathering in the basement of an elementary school. People just got together and played, and it slowly grew over the years. Now they have events in multiple countries supporting numerous games. The Evolution Championship Series (EVO) started as a 40-man tournament called "Battle by the Bay" at an arcade in California. That slowly grew into the largest event for fighting games. Halo had AGP trying to get something going early on, but ultimately went away after a few events.
These days, small-scale local events for Halo happens in Microsoft stores, and they don't even attract many entrants anyway. Halo fans who were "hoping to see a real grassroots effort by Microsoft" really makes me wonder if they even know what "grassroots" means.
Competitive Halo fans can complain about not having more tournaments, but they don't host one themselves – and on the off-chance they do, others don't join those tournaments either. Within the more prolific esports, community tournaments are standard fare and the fans in those communities fundamentally understand that supporting the scene means showing up to those tournaments. I've entered my local StarCraft II tournaments – no sponsors involved, just one guy at a local shop – where some of the players carpooled for three hours just to compete for fun. It speaks volumes about the general attitude and work ethic of the Halo community if they can't even get small-scale local events up and running without a large corporation holding their hand. You can't even make this stuff up.
Does Halo have any potential to succeed as an esport? Yes. Will it? Probably not.
Halo began the same way as many other esports at the time – with an abundance of LAN events both big and small. The attitude shift began with the rise of MLG and the subsequent decline in non-MLG events, though many Halo fans will point to a much later date when Halo: Reach was played.
Other issues that would be brought up such as the game mechanics, console controls, aim-assist or any "PC Master Race" arguments are largely irrelevant. Not everyone in the esports world would appreciate a first-person shooter played with a controller; what matters is building interest in those who don't care about such things, and it is possible as Call of Duty has demonstrated. Competitive scenes outside of Halo have also shown that you don't need to support a bad game in a series when previous iterations served the community just fine. Halo fans need to take a good hard look at what other communities did in their competitive scenes, and replicate it in their own. The peak of Halo esports – the "golden era" of competitive Halo if you will – should not be defined by MLG burning through cash year-over-year to make it look bigger than it is.
When you compare competitive Halo fans to the fans of other esports, the mindset and the priorities over what's important are completely different: dependence on large corporations, artificially inflated prize pools, lackluster amateur and semi-pro scenes, and an arguably excessively-toxic community (moreso than others). The cynic in me feels they'll just find whatever scapegoat they can point their fingers at – be it the gameplay, the developer/publisher, event organizers, anything and anyone but themselves – to justify not doing anything to grow their scene. They've taken corporate handouts to the extreme, placing all of their eggs in one basket, and the result of that speaks for itself.
On the other side of the spectrum, the Fighting Game Community wants all the power and control over their competitive scene, even if it means the prize pools remain low. The openness and grassroots nature of the FGC is why it's strong, and unkillable because all of its growth has been organic. The grand prize of a tournament could be a can of Chef Boyardee, and you'll still have dudes in their 30s showing up to compete in anime fighting games. Even if an event disappears for whatever reason, there are dozens more to compete in. They shy away from the corporatism and "prim and proper" attitudes that's associated with other esports, to the point where many of them would argue that esports is not a part of the FGC (another topic altogether).
Sometimes I wonder if the Halo series would be much better off if 343 Industries diverted resources away from esports and focused more on single-player content and the casual multiplayer community. Non-competitive Halo fans seem more likely to attend gaming conventions and put more effort into fan art and cosplay, than competitive Halo fans attending esports events and growing interest their scene.
A game can only be as good as its community, and this is especially true when it comes to esports. Microsoft and 343 Industries both have their part to play, but so do members of the competitive Halo community. Throughout the years, communities that thrive have been driven by the players themselves, and not by large marketing budgets where players grow accustomed to having everything served to them on a silver platter. It's up the Halo fans to show the world that they deserve respect; many opportunities have been given to them over the years, and they always wasted it. They can say that they care about grassroots events and local tournaments, but talk is cheap.
Regardless of what anyone thinks about the future of Halo esports, its community has been given yet another opportunity to grow and succeed with Halo: Infinite. Esports Engine was announced to be the Global Management Partner for Halo Infinite esports, a company founded and run by former MLG employees, basically MLG v2.0. Halo: Infinite will support split-screen and LAN, eliminating the problems stemming from the lack of those features. Beta testing up until its release will allow Halo players to provide feedback and ensure that Halo: Infinite is the game they want to play.
It's all on the competitive Halo community to take full advantage of these features and make something happen with them. The players and the fans themselves need to step up and take responsibility for the growth of their competitive scene; if they're not willing to do that, then they don't deserve anything. Considering their track record over the last two decades, I would expect quite a few MLG v2.0 events but almost nothing outside of it. Whether they take the opportunity to drive interest into their scene, or complain about problems while doing nothing about them – the choices they make will ultimately reflect on themselves and their resulting esport. No amount of #WeBack hashtag spam will ever change that.
DISCLAIMER: The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the text belong solely to the author, and not necessarily to Esports Earnings, or other group, organization, agency, committee or individual.
