Perhaps Tiger Woods wouldn't agree, but the creators of the Professional Gamers League believe that Quake players fragging is as legitimate a sports pursuit as, say, golfers putting. Total Entertainment Network today announced the formation of the PGL, the first professional sports league for computer gamers, which aims to line the pockets of the top players and turn online gaming into a recognized sport.
PGL co-founder Joe Perez says the objective is to standardize the currently fragmented realm of competitive gaming, give gaming a mass audience year-round, and create a recognizable "elite" of star players. "We want to give gamers a common place to come for scores - the one place to go for bragging rights," he says. "There's too many different tournaments, and there's no one central place where people can focus their time."
The league, created by TEN and sponsored heavily by Advanced Micro Devices, is modeled after leagues like the tennis circuit or the PGA. Any gamer can join the league, but only the top 128 players in each game category (which are Quake and Red Alert for the first season) will qualify for the quarterly championships. Matches will be refereed, broadcast on the Web, and scored and ranked by a complex system based on chess championships. So far, the PGL has set up an advisory board of gaming-industry VPs, and some of the best-known gamers on the Net are offering input on ranking, officiating, and qualification rules.
"They are closer than anyone else has been on this," says Christian Svensson, editor of gaming magazine Next Generation. "They have to attract the top 1 percent of the gamers ... when they get those guys, they'll get the next 10-20 percent."
But they also, he says, need to address the one-network issue. Currently, league members will have to join TEN - because, TEN contends, it's the only one that has the PGL's strict real-time ranking software and a national network with no local lags. Since the architecture and service structure of every gaming network is different, it's difficult to create a cross-network gaming league. Meanwhile, Heat.net, Mplayer, and the Internet Gaming Ladder all have or plan to have their own tournaments and ladders.
But one key thing the PGL is offering that the other networks don't have thus far is big bucks. Thanks to more than US$1 million in big-name sponsorships (GTE, 3COM, and others) so far, the top gamers could conceivably pay their rent by annihilating pixellated opponents. They will also see their shooter skills broadcast live over the Web, and possibly television as well - PGL says that ESPN2 and MTV have both expressed interest in broadcasting a regular gaming roundup.
As id Software CEO Todd Hollenshead puts it, "If they do it right, it should be the big tournament that all of the best Quake players aim to win - like the Super Bowl of Quake."
