The Guest Spot is a feature opening the floor to a prominent eSports personality.

Our third Guest Spot is written by Mike "LANDodger" Luxion, a prominent American eSports journalist and sole contributor and owner of LANDodger.com, a cutting edge humorous blog about North American eSports.

This column is the sole opinion of the author and does not represent the opinion of Heaven Media Ltd or the opinion of any affiliates.

When Cadred first approached me to write a guest article, I quickly went through my "should I accept this offer" checklist. For any of you wondering, it consists of analyzing how much I like where the offer is coming from, then comparing those feelings to the current health of my bank account. As you can see, either I like Cadred quite a bit or I'm having ramen for every meal.

(I'll leave the specifics of that one up to you. And if you're wondering, the second thing I promised myself is, being an American submitting an article to a European publication, I wouldn't reference the Revolutionary War or call the Atlantic Ocean "the pond". I think it's time to let those "jokes" go.)

As for the title of this piece, I suppose it warrants an explanation—unless you can speak Latin, in which case you have every right to leave a condescending note in the comment section saying that you don't need the title explained. Quo vadimus is actually a simple question; "Where are we going?"

I got the phrase from an episode of an old show called Sports Night, but it's an appropriate question to ask about the American eSports scene.

I mean, really, where the hell are we going? If the trail of bodies in the recent history of American competitive gaming is any indication, I'd say the morgue. How gruesome is it? Just look at some news from the last couple years. The CPL closed up shop amid a huge scandal where players were getting paid as often as Bernie Madoff's newest clients. The WSVG went down in flames. The CGS closed its doors after only two seasons. Even smaller LANs, notably DigitalLife's 2008 competition, have been cancelled. For Source, that means the largest remaining LAN might be the one that some random guy has been holding in his basement for the last four years.

While some fans are excited about the prospect of 1.6's return to the limelight, I ask again: where are we going? The CPL's closure, along with the WSVG's, was a blow to that game too. I know people will point to the two remaining big guns, ESWC and WCG, as bastions of eSports health, but I don't buy it. Maybe I'm just jaded, but I can't get excited about the future of American eSports, the answer to quo vadimus, when the future consists of the same thing we've been doing for years and we used to do it better back in the day. Take a look at the prize money for Counter-Strike at WCG and ESWC the last few years (starting with first place and including all the prize money for the CS tournament):

WCG

2005: $50,000 - $25,000 - $10,000
2006: $60,000 - $30,000 - $15,000 - hardware
2007: $55,000 - $25,000 - $15,000
2008: $50,000 - $25,000 - $12,500

ESWC

2005: $40,000 - $26,000 - $18,000 - $12,000 - (5-8) $6000
2006: $52,000 - $36,000 - $24,000 - $16,000 - (5-8) $8000
2007: $40,000 - $24,000 - $12,000
2008: $40,000 - $25,000 - $14,000

I assume you can see the trend. In terms of prize payouts, both tournaments peaked in 2006. Since then, the WCG has cut the 4th place prize of hardware and dropped $17,500 from the overall prize pool. And since 2006, ESWC has dropped a whopping $81,000 from their prizes, including cutting out everybody that finishes lower than third place. To put that number in perspective, since 2006 ESWC has cut almost as much prize money from Counter-Strike as WCG gave out in 2008 ($81,000 in ESWC cuts to $87,500 in WCG payouts). It's worth nothing that both LANs have expanded their number of games, but that's small consolation to the competitive gamers looking to make a living from playing 1.6 or FIFA or Need for Speed, but not all three.

So, for the last few weeks I've been looking at those two trends, adding them to the departures of the CPL, WSVG, CGS, and even DigitalLife, and the question that pops into my head over and over again is simply, where are we going?

Courtesy of ESWC

I wish I had an answer. Believe me, I do. It would certainly make my life easier as I try to choose between staying in eSports, or trying to find a career in some other field, preferably one with a little less disaster in its recent history. But the truth of the matter is that not I, nor anybody else, knows for sure where eSports is heading. Will the new iteration of the CPL breathe some much needed life back into the community? Will online leagues like CEVO continue to prosper, or in the face of a worldwide economic recession, will sponsors of those leagues reexamine their expenses as well?

I won't bother to hazard a guess, but I will say this: no matter what happens, no matter how hard or how fast the biggest leagues fall, eSports will never die.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not all that optimistic about the immediate future. I think I've made that abundantly clear. Still, despite the last few paragraphs I'm necessarily pessimistic, either. I'm just unsure. The important thing to keep in mind, and the thing I keep telling myself after I think about the death of all the big tournaments, is that those tournaments do not encompass competitive gaming. In fact, though they are the most visible part of eSports, and though we attach the hopes and dreams of becoming professional gamers to those big tournaments, they are the smallest and the least important part of competitive gaming.

It's strange to say that. Some people might even consider it heresy. But the truth is that the big-name competitions, with the glitz, the glamor, and the prize payouts, are not the foundation of competitive gaming. I think we forget that sometimes, especially whenever bad news breaks. The competitions we wish were on television, that we dream about competing in and winning, are the unavoidable byproduct of much more basic feelings: people like to compete, they like to play video games, and it's easy to combine those two interests.

Those things are the true bedrock of competitive gaming. Even if all the tournaments, online leagues, and current gamers magically disappeared tomorrow, there would still be people playing over the Internet. Among them, there would be somebody, or some group, that wanted to play in a more organized setting. They'd find other people that felt the same way, and with just those two things, you already have the smallest seed for the start of another league.

Basically, after looking at the declining payouts and declining tournaments, I'd forgive anybody that feels like the sky is falling – or if not the sky itself, anybody that feels like the shattered pieces of competitive gaming were raining down around them. I feel the same way sometimes. But weird as it is to say, big tournaments aren't the future of competitive gaming any more than the future of baseball is the MLB, the future of football is the NFL, or the future of soccer is the English Premier League. Those establishments are merely the outlet, and it isn't the institutions themselves that matter. The future of all those sports doesn't lie in organizations, tournaments, or sponsors. The future lies in the next generation, the group of people that we don't know about yet, who are just learning how to play, and lie down in bed with visions of the next goal, touchdown, or headshot dancing in their heads, then wake up the next day and try to play a little better than they did the day before.

Quo vadimus? I don't know. But as long as those people keep dreaming, we're certainly going somewhere.