Esports: Expert Guides and Resources

When it comes to streaming games and esports, the most important element to your overall presentation is the quality of your source material. Playing well and being charismatic are important, to be sure, but how entertaining or engaging your stream is won’t matter if your video quality is bad, your sound is muddy, and you are uploading at a speed that causes your stream to hiccup and time out.

Historically thought of as highly competitive games, racing games have little representation in the esports landscape. Players mark this as a commentary on the skill-to-luck ratio in playing racing games, and most manufacturers still see racing games as suitable for living room play, and not as much for major competitions.

Use this Cheat Sheet to help you as you enter the world of esports. Here you can learn some of the key esports lingo, find out about some professional teams worth watching, and see how to get started playing a mobile esports title, Clash Royale. ©Gorodenkoff/Shutterstock.comEsports LingoOne of the most confusing elements of entering the esports world is getting used to the language.

Since it started in 2005, YouTube has been ever present as one of the most popular sites on the Internet, usually second only to Google in network traffic. You no doubt know what YouTube is, and the role of YouTube in esports is exactly what you probably think it is: Gamers upload videos (and sometimes livestream).

To be an active esports streamer, you need to know and work with three sites: Twitch, YouTube Gaming, and the newest streaming site, Microsoft’s Mixer. Here, you see how to set up an account at Mixer and how to gather the information you need from Twitch and YouTube so that you can get started streaming to your audience.

Esports gamers have used numerous Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services over the years, from Ventrilo to TeamSpeak. A VoIP is a service that allows numerous people to speak via vocal chat over the Internet. The most pervasive, and most functional, VoIP option mixes voice communication with a clean chat interface.

Twitch is the name most often mentioned in esports spaces, surpassing even Twitter. Co-founded in 2006 by Justin Kan and his partners Emmett Shear, Michael Seibel, and Kyle Vogt as Justin.tv—which livestreamed Justin's life 24/7—and relaunched as Twitch in 2011, Twitch.tv was born from the idea of streaming media live.

John Madden Football debuted in 1988 as an Apple IIe game (see the following figure). The game didn’t gain wide recognition until 1990, when John Madden Football was released for the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo consoles. In 1990, the Madden game for Genesis was considered the first “killer app” for that generation of the console wars, ranking as one of the highest-rated and highest-selling titles for the life of that console.