Competitive gaming is still relatively young in South Africa, although the industry has been continuously expanding as more gamers become involved.
The eSports industry in South Africa has seen major growth recently, with local tournaments featuring bigger and better prize pools, creating a growing interest in the gaming scene.
Andreas ‘Cent’ Hadjipaschali, Manager of Bravado Gaming and passionate competitive gamer, told MyGaming about the importance of the consistent growth local gaming is experiencing.
“As long as growth takes place, numbers and investments will come in good time. Lets try and stay away from comparing numbers to numbers and rather focus on a percentage increase on growth – that’s what’s important.”
Tournaments such as the DGL Masters Series, which boasts a R1 million prize pool, have created an interest in local eSports which boosts the growth of the industry, said Hadjipaschali.
“When investment, production and opportunity take place, individuals and companies will use this as an example in order to continuously invest. I think it’s just going to get bigger and better from here on.”
The future of local eSports
Competitive gaming is a massive industry internationally, featuring tournaments with million-dollar cash prizes and celebrity players.
In order for local gaming to compete with international eSports, there needs to be an increase in investment and awareness of competitive gaming, said Hadjipaschali.
Overseas, professional gamers are paid salaries and play games full-time – whereas locally, most top competitive gamers are competing part-time while working or studying.
One of the biggest challenges we face are individuals (who aren’t gamers) thinking that gaming isn’t ‘all that’ – well, let me tell you – it’s definitely a thing.
Hadjipaschali told MyGaming that the skill deficit between top local gamers and their international counterparts is a result of the previously mentioned factors coupled with physical distance, rather than a difference in talent.
“Unfortunately we don’t get many opportunities to build the skill level of our players in South Africa, because we don’t consistently play against the best in the world – and we can’t because of internet distance.”
Bravado Gaming win the DGL Masters Series at rAge Cape Town after beating Aperture Gaming.
Other developing countries have also shown great progress in eSports development, such as Brazilian CS:GO team Luminosity, who took home 1st place and $500,000 at this year’s MLG Major Championship: Columbus.
Bravado Gaming’s CS:GO team has recently added Robby ‘blackpoisoN’ Da Loca to their roster – a South African player who has returned home after a year of competitive gaming in Sweden.
Bravado Gaming is the top multi-gaming organisation in South Africa, recently winning the DGL Masters Series tournament at rAge Cape Town and the Dota 2 Crucial Cup.
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“Unfortunately we don’t get many opportunities to build the skill level of our players in South Africa, because we don’t consistently play against the best in the world – and we can’t because of internet distance.” – I think this will be changing very soon. What we need is for some of the bigger service providers like TELKOM, IS, NEOTEL, MTN, and SEACOM to step in and assist. They have infrastructure and peering in place whereby, if they were to set up a server in a central African region, we could be playing against Europe with about 50-70 ping each side. That is definitely within the playable range, even for high-paced competitive FPS. It’s already possible as the infrastructure is already live for the most part – the problem we face is a lack of game server presence in central Africa, ie a lack of sponsorship/permission from these bigger providers to host dedicated servers for Steam games, which is really all we need to make this a reality!