New Counter-Strike eSports Documentary Shows the Sport's Reality

There's absolutely no argument that eSports have grown in popularity exponentially in the past decade. The industry has evolved from small LAN events to massive gaming tournaments -- KESPA's leagues, DreamHack, MLG, WCG (RIP), CEVO, and numerous other tournaments have come and gone throughout the life of the evolving sport.

A new eSports documentary following Counter-Strike: Global Offensive's Team Fnatic through the daily throes gives unique insight to the challenges of becoming a pro gamer. Fnatic's Jonatan "Dvilwalk" Lundberg rather plainly states:

"I want to play to be better. You have to have the dedication to improve all the time; you can't be satisfied with second place, with third place. [...] You need to be at least 80-90 played hours in two weeks. [...] I'm not doing anything else except sitting at home eating, sleeping, playing. It's just a lot of hours."

Pro gaming is a real career with very real sway on the games industry at this point. It's finally starting to get the respect deserved, too; professional gamers are the gaming world's equivalent to super athletes -- to be best requires investing everything into it and making sacrifices, as Fnatic discusses in the documentary. All the major hardware manufacturing brands now sponsor eSports teams and reap the benefits of affordable brand recognition and advertising, often in exchange for paid travel costs (for teams) or contributions to prize pools (for tournament organizers).

It's important to keep things in perspective, though: Even with all the sponsors, the respect, and the recognition within the gaming and hardware industries, eSports are still new and still largely not understood by the outside world. Tell an industry outsider that you watch people play games online, even equating it to watching Football, and the response from the external public is still confusion.

That said, Twitch's success speaks to the emerging pass-time of watching other players compete in games.

You can read more about Team Fnatic's CSGO players here: http://www.fnatic.com/players/counter-strike-global-off/

- Steve "Lelldorianx" Burke.