The Gears of War Pro Circuit Revs Up This Weekend, Who Knew?

The most recent event in the Gears of War Pro Circuit was this past weekend, as the Las Vegas Open kiced off Friday and ran until Sunday. A prize pool of $200,000 awaited pro Gears of War teams from across the world, including top names like Ghost Gaming, Echo Fox, OpTic, and Rise Nation. This sounds like a pretty big deal for Gears of War’s esports scene...but who among you outside of the hardcore Gears crowd even knew about it?

Much like its brother in Xbox Halo, the competitive Gears scene has been an afterthought in the minds of many esports fans, and viewership on Twitch and other channels won’t sway any opinions. While writing this piece before the event I searched for Gears of War 4 on Twitch, just to see how many people were watching the game at that given time. I assumed I’d see a couple of hundred viewers, maybe a thousand, with the next Pro Circuit being so close. How many did I find?

Thirty-eight. Barely over three dozen.

Those thirty eight viewers were spread across twelve channels as well, meaning that five of the twelve had only a single viewer. Meanwhile, the recently announced MIster Rogers’ Neighborhood marathon was pulling in 579 concurrent viewers at the same time. One of the most storied game franchises in the last two console generations, and a pillar of Microsoft’s esports scene, being overshadowed on its own online turf by an old television show about puppets and a man in a sweater. That...is disheartening.

OK, so off-peak viewing may not be the most relevant benchmark of success, let’s go back and look at the last major event in the Circuit before Vegas. The official Gears of War Twitch channel shows that to be the Mexico City Championship from January 2018. The eight hour broadcast from that event sported 3,928 total views before the Vegas Open, a stone’s throw from 4,000. Better than the Halo Sydney Regional we talked about in that Halo piece, which still sits at just under 3,000 views, but not better than March 25’s Halo World Championship 2018 Columbus Finals, which already had 3,994 viewers in a much shorter time.

Oh, and how did the Las Vegas Open do? As of posting the view count sat at 1,269 for Friday's stream, 1,044 for Saturday, and 1,661 for Sunday. 3,974 across three days. Yikes.

Of course, both of these games are falling flat on their digital faces when compared to the most popular games on Twitch, games with hundreds of thousands of concurrent viewers like Fortnite and PUBG and League of Legends. These games are dominating the streaming scene, leaving legacy franchises in the dust. That momentum doesn’t look to be slowing any time soon, particularly in Fortnite’s case which gains a new celebrity streamer every single day. 

The question then becomes: what can the Gears Pro Circuit do to bring in the viewership and keep them engaged during competitions? One simple idea was employed during the event over the weekend: give stuff away! Take a look at what the official Gears of War Twitch channel gave away just this weekend, per the event’s website:

Skins, controllers, and even a brand new console were up for grabs simply by watching a competitive Gears  tournament. That’s a decent way to raise the viewership numbers...but it’s also completely transparent. It’s almost like a bribe: watch this and maybe we’ll give you something for it. The top drawing games we mentioned earlier don’t need gimmicks like that to keep the crowds, those numbers are built on interesting gameplay and the personalities drawn to that gameplay.

That’s not to say people don’t still find Gears of War interesting, but it’s too familiar. I know at a glance when someone is playing Fortnite; I don’t know which Gears game is being played in that same amount of time. The tastes of the general public have changed, moved on from the experiences that made the online shooter what it is today and moved to the next evolution, and perhaps it’s time for the communities of legacy franchises like Gears to ask for the same evolution.

The future of online competitive gaming is becoming more clear, and unfortunately with Halo and now Gears of War it’s becoming more and more apparent that a name alone will not earn a spot at the table. If these tenured titles are going to keep their standing, they need to give their communities more to play with. Otherwise they’ll be left with waning viewership watching gameplay from a bygone age, and the esports world will leave them in the dust.