m.garcia9

The Growing Competitive Gaming Industry

August 14, 2018 by m.garcia9 Leave a Comment

Michael Garcia 08/08/18

Years ago, competitive fighting games were only played in basements of someone’s house or in arcades. Now, there are stadiums filled with thousands of fans of competitive video games while thousands more watch from home.

One example is the Overwatch League Grand Finals at Barclays Stadium last month which gained about 20,000 people attending and the stream peaking at around 300,000.

In contrast, last weekend at EVO 2018 in Las Vegas, the Superbowl for competitive fighting games gathered about 10,000 people and a peak stream of 250,000 viewers.

This phenomenon has only happened because of the competitive video game’s dedicated community to keep their respective games alive. With local scenes getting new releases of their games, tournaments are easier to be held by buying consoles and tvs to stay at venues for people to use every week. This then translates to accessibility for newer players, allowing for games to become more popular.

Eventually, popularity to play competitively became mainstream for video game fanatics who want to show their skill to rest of the world. This then lead to media giants such as ESPN and Disney to broadcast eSports (Electronic Sports) tournaments. Not only that, but in 2014, Amazon acquired Twitch, the live streaming platform that continues to be the leader in online gaming broadcasts. YouTube has also jumped into the competitive video gaming community with the creation of YouTube Gaming.

With the introduction of media giants, the growth of a profitable market has surged as of recent. Companies such as Geico, Microsoft, Red Bull, Intel, Coca-Cola, and more have invested in sponsoring players and teams to capitalize on the growing industry. They fly out people to all over the world to compete, along with adding money into prize pools that are already huge for whoever wins it all.

Every sport in history has been built with media companies together and these type of corporations to accelerate their growth. The same thing goes with these global and local partnerships with media and tech companies in eSports.

It’s understandable why traditional media companies would want to capitalize on this trend before it becomes the mainstream. Approximately 300 million people worldwide tune in to eSport tournaments today, and that number is growing rapidly. By 2020, that number will be closer to 500 million, according to Business Insider. Eventually, eSports is expected to accelerate to a $3.5 billion industry by 2021, according to a report from Juniper Research.

Most of this success is owed to game developers who recognize how effective competitive gaming is to profit their brand. They release patches to balance characters so the game is more fair, along with helping fund for tournaments with the money made from selling the game. It increases player engagement, lengthens the longevity of titles, expands franchise awareness, and accumulates growth of monetization for their game as a whole.

The next couple of years will be crucial to ow fast competitive gaming grows into a multi billion dollar business. The key factors of leagues franchising from competition are the utilization of content right sales, merchandise, team/player profitability, and the impact the game has on an amount of people.

As the growth and success of eSports leagues continue to rise, the production of tournaments requires thorough planning and precise detailing. Understanding conceptualizing as well as developing a business relationships with bigger corporations are only just the standard requirements for the eSports industry to grow.

Understanding the culture of video gaming can also have a heavy influence on the success of tournaments. With thousands of attendees and millions of viewers, bigger tournaments have thousands of dollars in prize money on the line. Investors and hosts of such events treat players as they do with traditional sports players, and use similar broadcasting tools, such as livestream broadcasting and commentating.

What started as friends gathering in each other’s homes or arcades has become an upcoming collection of pro gaming tournaments and leagues with legitimate teams and prizes for people to aspire to obtain.

So what will the future of eSports look like? How far can it go? Could it reach the mainstream like traditional sports? Whatever the future holds, eSports is on the brink of becoming a billion-dollar industry and continues to grow exponentially and it will stay like that as long as companies keep investing.

Gentrification with Businesses

August 14, 2018 by m.garcia9 Leave a Comment

Michael Garcia 08/03/18

It is no surprise that there has been a distinct relationship between real estate and neighborhood changes within the last few years.

This phenomenon is called gentrification, which is the process where a neighborhood is renovated so that people who are affluent will want to live in them.

At first glance, gentrification may seem like a positive thing for small businesses. Most people believe that people with higher incomes coming into the neighborhood could result in profit for business, but this is not the case.

When a neighborhood gets upgraded, rental rates for businesses in that area go through the roof. This makes it impossible for small business owners to turn a profit and continue doing business in the neighborhood.

Rent prices have increased 1.2 percent from June to July for NYC as a whole, and is up 1.7 percent in comparison to last year, according to a report by the New York Rent Report.

The data does not show the true effect of rising rent, though. The number of black-owned businesses in NYC, for example, declined from 2007 to 2012 as many gentrifying communities have undergone economic changes. According to a report called The New Geography of Jobs: A Blueprint for Strengthening NYC neighborhoods, in 2007 African Americans owned 13 percent of all businesses in the Bronx and five percent in Queens. In 2012, those figures were down to six percent and three percent, respectively.

Evidently, people are going out of business as a result of gentrification. With that, store owners have no revenue to rely on to live in the area as well. Comptroller Stringer says in a statement, “The increasing rents and economic distress that accompany gentrification are challenges that we as a city must confront.” Without any money to survive, what are store owners supposed to do?

Some businesses being closed are located in East Village and Tribeca. New York’s gentrified neighborhoods has raised rents in these areas to the point where many people from low-income families can no longer gain profit, resulting in homelessness, or forced moving to a new neighborhood. This is not acceptable at all.

The implications of this affect people who don’t own equity or property too. Lack of affordable housing for anyone in a newly gentrified area leads to a loss of diversity in residents and loss of historic structures to the people who once lived there. It isn’t hard to notice that newly introduced amenities in neighborhoods are to benefit the rich, who are mostly people of white backgrounds and hinder the poor, which is stereotypically the minority.

Some examples of this are hypergentrification, where the culmination of bigger, elite companies take the spots of less wealthy ones. This has been seen with companies such as Starbucks and McDonald’s. According to a data report, there are 210 Starbucks in Manhattan, slightly more than six per square mile. In contrast, McDonald’s has 74 stores in Manhattan.

As a result of gentrification, neighborhoods have lost cafés, theaters, shoe stores, toy stores and gift shops. Tribeca, for example as documented in the Tribeca Tribune, “Many Tribeca residents complain that neighborhood-friendly stores seem to be vanishing before our eyes. Small businesses, aren’t just struggling — they are being targeted for assassination.”

‘This is America’: Satirical Commentary or Subliminal Warning?

August 6, 2018 by m.garcia9 Leave a Comment

**Childish Gambino a.k.a Donald Glover**

Despite the early devotion of white patriarchy to construct an ideal country, the topic of equality has always been a difficult thing to manage in the US. With women and African-Americans seeking the privileges white men have, the demand for equality has slowly, but surely been met over time.

However, racism and discrimination still linger in the world today. To counteract this, many movements started along with creations such as Donald Glover’s “This is America” released on May 5,2018 on Youtube. This satirical criticism of America’s tendencies analyzes what America has come to.

Donald, otherwise known as Childish Gambino, has used his fame to create a song that not only embodies the harsh reality of America, but uses it to help people focus on important subjects such as racism, police brutality, and gun violence. This is done through Donald’s nihilistic view on the world. He expresses this view through the choreography and lyricism of the music video.

One example is in the video where it begins in a very light tone, with repeated lyrics while Gambino contorts his body towards the man playing guitar. Donald dons gold chains, raggedy pants and an untrimmed beard. This alludes mostly to how slaves looked. His sporadic movements into smooth movements, induce a feeling of discomfort that African-Americans feel living in America while police brutality and racism exists.

At the 0:53 mark, the character Gambino plays pulls out a firearm from his back pocket and shoots the man playing guitar. This immediately catches the viewer off-guard. It completely juxtaposes the tone of the beginning of the video into something much darker. The pose he does while this occurs is believed to be reminiscent of a Jim Crow drawing.

Right after the first killing, Gambino places the gun he used carefully into the arms of a young African-American youth holding a red cloth. Two more young adult African-Americans then drag the dead body away from the camera’s perspective. This entails that whoever is doing the killing, which I believe to be America itself holds guns to be of more importance than the deaths they cause. America consistently has protected the rights of guns despite the amount of destruction they are able to do and as shown via the dragging. The youth of the country are then forced to deal with the burden and clean up the messes America makes.

Something really important to take note of after each killing Gambino is responsible for is that there are no consequences. Taking the character of America as a whole, it shows the power it holds in creating destruction and never facing no repercussions in return.

The crimes he commits result in no consequences, making him invulnerable and above the law. This is because Gambino represents white America. In the video, white America is free to kill any black man, woman, or child. It is the grim surrealism that African-American men and women have to face while living in an America where white men control almost everything happening in it.

Also showing what America has come to is the lyric, “you just a black man in the world you just a barcode”. This line references how people gain profit from barcodes. They scan them with the gun and then pull the trigger. It represents that no matter how much wealth or power an African-American may possess, white America will find a way to profit off of you whether it be through music, media, and more.

“This is America” pays homage to the insolence of white America and how the country’s foundation is built on systematic oppression of other races. We all live in the same nation, yet discrimination occurs no matter who you are. Gambino perfectly depicts this rift between races by showing the targeting of black Americans by eloquently orchestrated choreography and lyrics. The country’s alarming rates of inequality is why it will eventually implode.