POP GAME STILL ON
WHILE OTHER PRO SPORTS ARE HUNG UP BY COVID-19, THE PITTSBURGH KNIGHTS ARE GOING STRONG BY MATT PETRAS - PITTSBURGH CURRENT CONTRIBUTING WRITER
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efore the COVID-19 pandemic, The Pittsburgh Knights, a local esports franchise, were coming up with a schedule that would last from May through the end of the year, which included a slew of in-person tournaments as well as events at spaces like Stage AE. “Obviously, that landscape has completely changed,” says the franchise’s CEO James O’Connor. The pandemic has put traditional sports on hold around the country, but competitive video games still have a path to continue through the internet. As O’Connor puts it, “you can’t play baseball from home.” During the pandemic, the Knights have lost important revenue from the loss of in-person events but have a lot to gain from huge bumps in viewership for online tournaments. Around the world, gamers have been playing and watching video games much more than before the pandemic. Far more eyes are now on Twitch, the premiere place for both casual and professional gamers to stream gameplay. Traffic for online esports tournaments have surged, and the Knights are certainly seeing that. At first glance, this is promising for esports, an industry that has been striving toward the prominence of sports like baseball and football through video games like Overwatch, Counter-Strike and League of Legends. However, the business model for esports has traditionally relied on in-person tournaments. About a quarter of the Knights’ revenue was anticipated to come from in-person events this year, according to O’Connor. These
Despite, a global pandemc, the Pittsburgh Knights Esports franchise is still making waves worldwide.
also serve as marketing opportunities for the game developers and the teams. For players, missing out on tournaments can also simply be a bummer. Garett Bambrough, the esports consultant for the league, played Counter-Strike competitively with and against O’Connor years ago and can attest to the joy of an in-person tournament. “Just being able to be in another country and compete, in front of a live audience and so on and so forth, that’s the best part of being a pro gamer, to be honest with you,” Bambrough says. “And that part’s been taken
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away.” There’s also additional fun in watching the players as they win and lose throughout an in-person tournament. “You see them get loud and excited and pumped up, or you see them get sad and depressed. And fans like to see the experiences of the players as it’s happening,” Bambrough says. “But online, you don’t get to see those people’s expressions at all.” It’s not standard practice for esports players to have cameras streaming them as they play in a tournament, which means that the sponsor-clad jerseys aren’t visible during online
tournaments. Getting a camera on every player would be costly and require a lot of behind-thescenes work to get players a properly set up camera. It’s also an addition that makes some players uncomfortable, according to Bambrough. “For a lot of teams, they’re not cool with that,” Bambrough says. “They don’t want that.” Even before the pandemic, the Knights tried to give their fans some window into the players’ reactions and conversations during online tournament gameplay. The league has a video series called “Rocket League Comms Chaos,” for example,
