Treyarch Turning Call of Duty Into A Serious eSports Franchise

For the first time in the long history of Call of Duty as an eSports title the game’s development team is consulting the competitive community. David Vonderhaar, game design director at Treyarch Studios, recently posted on a popular tournament and forum website that he was interested in consulting the competitive community regarding creating a universal ruleset for competitive Call of Duty. The post asked for professional and ametuer players for input on both the ruleset, and balance issues in the game. Although Call of Duty’s past with eSports has shown promise, the title has never before had the potential it currently does.

Call of Duty has been played as an eSport since the release of Call of Duty 2 in 2005. In 2007 with the release of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, the franchise started to emerge as a serious eSports title. Late in 2007 Major League Gaming invited 8 teams to compete in their national championships for the game, which was the first major Call of Duty LAN tournament. After MLG, Call of Duty’s successive installments (excluding the controversial World at War) began experiencing huge growth in eSports. All of this took place while the developers remained oblivious of the growing eSports community.

All of this took place while the developers remained oblivious to the growing eSports community

In 2010 competitive Call of Duty players got their first real interaction from the development team. After asking the community manager of Infinity Ward for some patches to address balance issues, they were told that even though the eSports community was loud, that they comprised such a small portion of the game’s players that their complaints would not be addressed until the the complaints of the non-competitive community were addressed.

Photo of Proshot and Slacked at MLG Orlando November 2011

In 2011 Call of Duty took a major step towards becoming a eSports franchise when it was picked up for a full season on the MLG pro circuit. This first full season was however, not without it’s issues.  Several of these events suffered from low attendance, failing to have even 50 teams attend. The pro circuit also put a spotlight on the players, something they were not fully prepared for.  While some players shined, creating brands around their names and images, others character issues that have plagued the competitive Call of Duty community for years.  The pro circuit was also held on the Playstation 3, which is not the prefered platform for competitive Call of Duty.  This particular issue was exacerbated when the Playstation Network went down mid season making it impossible for teams to practice on the circuits native console.  Even with these issues the Pro Circuit helped competitive Call of Duty rise to new heights.
At the behest of the competitive community Treyarch created a competitive playlist that mirrored the rules for the MLG pro circuit. This marked the first time in the franchise’s history that Call of Duty’s developers acknowledged competitive players as something other than a fringe group. This playlist started out well, but soon became sparsely populated, and could not keep up with the ever changing rule sets.
The start of 2012 looked promising for Call of Duty eSports.  Activision held a tournament called Call of Duty XP to feature their upcoming Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3.  This tournament featured a $1 million prize pool.  Call of Duty XP looked to be the the jumpstart Call of Duty needed to become an eSports powerhouse, however the qualifiers for the Call of Duty XP tournament were held through a series of public match challenges, and the tournament itself used non competitive maps and rules.

Even with the let downs at Call of Duty XP players held out hope that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 would be the breakout title in the franchise.  These hopes were all but crushed when the game released without LAN capabilities.  This made it diffacult to hold in person tournaments, as the matches would have to be played online, where the players were susceptible to DDoS attacks that had being plaguing online competitive play for the past year. More than 5 months after the game released the developers of Modern Warfare 3 finally added LAN capabilities. With proper LAN tournaments now possible, the European Gaming League (EGL) emerged as a leader in competitive Call of Duty, hosting two events with over 100 teams in attendance. This was a massive increase in attendance to all other previous LAN tournaments.

More than 5 months after the game released the developers of Modern Warfare 3 finally added LAN capabilities.

With the release of Black Ops 2, Treyarch decided to focus heavily on eSports; seeing it as a market with enormous growth potential. The studio even hired former professional Call of Duty player Mike “hasrt0” Rufail as their eSports Consultant. One of the biggest steps Treyarch took was to create a ranked league system for competitive players, however the league system was not without it’s faults. The issue with this league system is that there are several different rule sets, and the Treyarch’s league play didn’t follow any of them. Seeing this David Vonderhaar decided to address the issue. This is the first time in Call of Duty’s history that the developers have actively sought input from competitive players. This comes on the heels of the first major LAN event for Black Ops 2 where 61 teams showed up to compete for a $10k prize pool. The event topped 19k simultaneous stream viewers.