Hell ye, why not, let's talk about ESA.

Hell ye, why not, let's talk about ESA.
For those of you unaware - ESA (European Speedrunner Assembley) is a marathon that happends 2+ times a year on twitch.tv/esamarathon. It is generally known as second biggest speedrunning marathon after to GDQ (Games Done Quick). It takes place in Sweden (at least it used to, before COVID) and is generally easier to access than GDQ for people from Europe (especially for me, from Russia, where going to US is a huge pain, due to visas and stuff, basically lots of limiting politics).

Enough introductions though as this is not about it. This paste that I'm writting is generally about my concernes of ESAs future as I think it has been doing great number of bad (at least in my opinion) steps as of lately.

ESA Winter 2020. Happened around February 14. Generally big marathons tend to have restreams for specific language groups with biggest ones being German, French, Russian, Japanese, Spanish that are happening every GDQ for quite long time. So it was for ESAs. Preparations for event were going, commentators were being scheduled (I'm talkin Russian restream here). On Jan 28 we are being told that ESA this year won't be having restreams due to them "hurting more than helping". And so everything was scrapped. It was met with highly negative perception in audience of russian restream due to english being not very widespread language and people simply don't watch things they dont understand and many people were simply forgetting that marathon was happening. People including myself were hoping to have some sort of discussion with organisators at ESA summer, but due to covid that never happened.
What did we want to talk about? Well, first of all - stats. We wanted to know what made ESA turn down such a big part of their community charm? Did it benefit them?(and was it enough, to justify the means?) Can anything be done via twitch? Like sharing ad revenue, some specific settings that would make all ad revenue go to esa? Ability to sub via restreams during event, etc. I won't speak for other restreams, but I can for sure state that most of russian audience turned down on ESA simply because there was no accessible way of watching it. Yes, that might be insignificant to ESA, since russians aren't big donors or subscribtion fans, but they were atleast generating extra views and possibly ad revenue.
Especially due to covid it is hard to say if that hurt ESA or not. ESA winter, judging by socialblade stats, was a success, but the rest of the year - not so much. While GDQ got half of their general event views during SGDQ, which was offline event - ESA got less than a half of views each event (there were 3 past ESAWinter, barely covering what ESA Summer 2019 had), and nearly 1/4 of views compared to ESA Winter 2020.
While I sure am pulling it out of my ass, based on only 1 locale - russian-speaking audience, I do feel that ESA could've had a better year if restreams were had and event information was more widespread due to that. As for why I'm talking mostly about views - I'll get to that a bit later.

Around same time ESA announced that it would no longer allow runners to upload their runs to their YT channels. Before I dive into this, I'll put a small note here - during offline events you were allowed to upload your runs without ESA layout, due to how stream was setup.
So why would they make that restriction? According to ESA organisers it has to do with automated Content ID claims on YouTube. While I do know that this happends a lot on Youtube grounds and a lot of, let's say, Super Mario Bros. runners will have their runs flagged as if it is someoneelse's video, due to content being pretty much same, I still do have a question - how does GDQ handle it? GDQ has been allowing people to upload their runs for how long now? And there hasn't been any changes to that policy - you do run, you can upload it to your channel, good sir.
I do have few ideas on why that might be a thing:
- GDQ actually managed to talk to YT and get it sorted out
- GDQ uploads runs to YT fast enough to be the original uploaded, so that content ID doesn't trigger on their videos
Second one might sound weird to you - marathon uploading runs faster than the performers, that should be totally easy for them, right? Well, not quite the case with ESA, and that's one of my main complaints about events for past 3-4 years. ESA has YT upload schedule, to maximise (that part is debatable and open for interpretation) content views on the runs that they upload. While that might be helping individual runs that otherwise will have close to no views, I do feel like it kills hype about events. Especially now that ESA has been a platform for small community marathons (BSG, UKGS) and those marathons ALSO going into ESA uploading schedule, it takes MONTHS before marathon that took place actually starts being uploaded to YT and I'm not even kidding you. It is 2 (maybe 3 now) runs a day. With average summer esa having ~180 runs it takes 60-90 days to upload entire marathon! By that time there would be an onslaught of runs uploaded and some would simply lose any relevance. Most of videos these days would end up having 1-3k views and even popular videogames with popular runners at this point will struggle to go over 10k, cause most people check marathon channel during marathon and I'd say AT MOST 1-2 months after, but when uploading schedule gets a mix of multiple marathons, which happened months apart, you go in, willing to find videos of ANOTHER marathon that is already happening you just say "fuck it" and either find highlight on twitch, or skip it completely. I personally had a list of runs that I wanted to catch up, but I can't be bothered to watch them at this point, while with GDQs I'm able to start covering my list as soon as marathon is over, since everything is already up. I feel that this current schedule is WAAAY to slow (currently ESA Summer 2020 is being uploaded which happened in July, it will take atleast 2 more months to finish), given the fact of how many side-marathons ESA does host. And I do believe that there has to be something done, so that in future runners can upload their actual marathon runs to their youtube for their audience instead of making them wait for months for runs they might not care anymore since that event is long gone.

Third on our list is ADS. ESA started doing that a bit over year now as far as I know (since ESA Summer 2019), but I might be slightly wrong with dates and it might also be this year's special - running ADS in a middle of a run. Normally ESA would have a 2 minute ad break after each run, and this is totally normal, I believe GDQ operates the same way, letting the ads flow when there's nothing to miss. During that time hosts are silent and only music plays (in case of GDQ, some donations can be read, but that's about it). The idea behind the adbreak is quite simple - get ad revenue, while not steal from the entertainment. But running them during the run has possibility of killing a moment by completely shutting the view of stream, completely breaking the immersion and it is not really based on anything other than greed, atleast I can't see it being any other way. I'm truly thinking this is made to boost subscriptions rate, as subs don't get ads. That in combination with complete shutdown of restreams makes a bit too much sense. Have more views on main channel - run ads, people watch ads or sub, they have no other way of watching stream. I also have a vague memory of someone from ESA Staff talking about that and saying something like "it's part of out contract with twitch". I though was unable to find actual part of that conversation, but it might still be on ESA discord, though I also do hope I'm wrong, regardless - I can not see what kind of contract is that? Does ESA get some special cut from twitch? Can anything be done about that ad rule? Since that is abysmal and noone in their right mind would defend that kind of practice. I did reference that in my feedback post for ESA Winter 2020 (so did other people), which you might check if you wish: https://www.speedrun.com/esa/thread/kj6es/1#kmwnj

Another thing worth bringing up is reruns - rebroadcasts of old events on ESA channel. While I think idea is fairly decent to have something running on a background from time to time - ESA takes it to new level. Stream is always running as "online" which might be making it hard to follow when event actually happens, as the only significant notice if you don't follow ESA on social media is rise in viewers. But I totally won't be surprised if you came by, or wanted to watch event and then suddenly you run into a vodcast, do it couple times and you might aswell be ignoring channel completely. From Planks's own words: "Twitch isn’t able to set streams as re runs unless you use the re-run tool. Thanks for your feedback, but nothing will change unless Twitch changes it’s platform to show rebroadcasts as re runs and enforces that as a rule"
While I'm struggling to see why not use rerun tool? My only guess would be - they want to be repeating certain "intermission" segments from time to time and twitch tool only allows video to be put once every now and then. But then why run rebroadcasts all the time? How many people genuinly watch them? Also I'm not sure, but if they run some twitch ads in that time they would be getting some sort of passive income constantly, even if it is relatively small, compared to events. It is basically milking of content - it isn't getting YT release for months and it is buried under other marathons in twitch VOD section. And on top of that if that is actually generating some seizable revenue - why run ads during actual marathon? Again I have no confirmation about ads, but that is still something to worth keeping in mind here.

It would also worth mentioning that ban drama that happened this summer was absolute shitshow and was handled exceptionally poor, up to the point point that few people dropped their runs from ESA Summer Online to not be assosiated with that mess and I myself was also considering doing so, but didn't in the end. I won't go into details of that whole thing and take sides or call names, but brief retrospective would be - 4 people got banned from ESA from things unrelated to the event, then one of them was pardoned a day after. The reason I'm mentioning it is because as of lately it has been hard to understand the reasoning behind certain ESA actions. It is hard to understand how feedback gets handled. And there's simply a lack of "moving forward" updates or Q&As.

I don't want to end this on a sour note and I'll still say that ESA provides fantastic experience for communities to come together when world isn't under the global pandemic. I'm grateful for its existance and I only wish it to grow bigger to have will to run these events. Many of my good friends are involved with it and do fantastic job on helping event out the way they can. I just see that many decesions lately have been very poor and I can't help but complain, try to raise awareness in hope for brighter future. I'd still go to offline events and participate in online ones, I'm not writting all this to say that I'm boycotting ESA. But I do want them to listen or to atleast have a more clear feedback FOR our feedback.