The Rise of eSports: A Developers Perspective

“Most people don’t realize how popular eSports have become,” said Van Veenendaal. “Like any sport, people love to watch other exceptionally skilled people play as much as they enjoy playing.”

The Los Angeles’s Staples Center sold out for the 2013 League of Legends world championships. Over 32 million people watched gamers compete via various streaming platforms.

“In the early days of the industry, Starcraft became very popular in Asia, whereas console games were more popular in America, but these days MOBAs like League of Legends and Team FPS like Counter-Strike are starting to take over.”

The most common video game genres associated with electronic sports are real-time strategy, fighting, first-person shooter, and multiplayer online battle arena. Tournaments such as The International Dota 2 Championships, the League of Legends World Championship, the Battle.net World Championship Series, the Evolution Championship Series, the Intel Extreme Masters, broadcast live.

“The biggest trend we have seen in the past few years has been the rise of streaming,” said Van Veenendaal. “In the old days it was far more difficult to watch tournaments. Viewers had to install some kind of video plugin that they may or may not trust, just to watch. Or, gamers were forced to use their own mechanisms for broadcasting. These days Twitch has really brought streaming into the mainstream with great features such as commentary and even full blown shows dedicated to eSports.”

eSports broadcast distribution is evolving on to traditional media networks as well.

“We saw earlier this year Fox Sports broadcast Australia's Crown Invitational event and later this year there will be a CS:GO Season on TBS in America,” said Van Veenendaal. “This trend should continue to move forward with the swedish network MTG buying leagues such as ESL.”

Van Veenendaal is bullish on the future for eSports careers.

“I think there is a vast array of skills required in the industry, from broadcasters and streamers to live tools for gamers who are in their element, as well as tools for the game at hand,” said Van Veenendaal. “There's a place for programmers of any toolset at any stage of the eSports industry; whether you are hacking on backend services for games in Erlang, making anti-cheat tools with low-level winapi or simply making some cool UI to display tournament scores and results.”

So how did Van Veenendaal transition into the eSports industry and what exactly is he doing?

“After working as a developer for years, I wanted to work on something that I was passionate about,” said Van Veenendaal. “I am a casual gamer and this was a problem that I had encountered in the space, so I felt like trying to solve it.”

Existing voice programs are downloaded. The most popular players rarely updated their tools. Because Bark is a web based voice chat, it does not require a download, and solves some of the problems with DDOS attacks that Skype has.

“In terms of the Stack, I use ReactJS for the frontend, Rails for the backend and C++ for the voice mixing/decoding/encoding,” said Van Veenendaal.

Bark’s voice, chat and strategy solution for gamers has picked up traction in the Counter-Strike GO community, but also has users who play League of Legends, DOTA2, H1Z1, Smite, Rocket League and among others.

“We're in a beta - so we're pushing updates every day with the product,” said Van Veenendaal. “So far people like the fact that it's easy to use and don't have to download anything.”

While the eSports industry salary levels are still evolving across each specialty, Matt’s offers this advice: “Try and do something close to what you have a passion for. Compared to working on products in spaces that I wasn't that passionate about, shipping something and seeing people use a product that I myself want to use is one of the most rewarding things I’ve done in life.”