Photo courtesy of Red Bull.
The Rocket League Championship Series — RLCS — was first held almost nine years ago. Back then, the world championship event was small. Only eight teams competed at the event, all residing in Europe and North America.
At its peak in the 2022-23 season, 24 teams attended the RLCS World Championship from around the world. The event was preceded by three splits of regional events that served as qualifiers for international majors and the world championship.
Regional events were held online being livestreamed to fans almost every weekend. Majors and the world championship were held in person and livestreamed around the world.
Naturally, the RLCS World Championship with the most teams in attendance was also the most-watched event in the history of the esport — which is why it made no sense when Epic Games announced they were cutting an entire split from future seasons.
In the two years following the cut, viewership and prize pools have dropped significantly, entire rosters have been cut by organizations to save costs and the scene as a whole seems to be rapidly approaching its end.
So who started this collapse — and is seeing to it that the scene as a whole ceases to exist? It seems the blame falls on both BLAST and Epic Games.
Both have a hand in the gutting of “Rocket League’s” esports scene, as well as the continued degradation in quality of the game as a whole.
Starting with BLAST, the tournament organizer company has already shown its shortcomings in another major esport — “Rainbow Six Siege.”
In late 2022, Ubisoft hastily made BLAST the new tournament organizers for its esport. At the time, viewership numbers were on the rise and the scene had a similar three-major, yearlong schedule to “Rocket League.”
Immediately upon entering the scene, BLAST gutted the third major, increased the number of guaranteed spots at majors for regions many fans view as being less competitive and prolonged the offseason between majors to be several months with no announced minor events during the downtime.
If this is sounding familiar, it’s because BLAST did the same thing to “Rocket League.”
The year before BLAST took over was the most successful in “Rocket League’s” history. Despite this, it gutted the third RLCS Major, guaranteed spots for teams from developing regions at the world championship by cutting the wildcard, and created two multimonth droughts between the second major and the world championship, as well as the offseason.
The prevailing idea pushed by BLAST and other talking heads was that the community would fill these gaps in with events like the Esports World Cup — EWC.
Standalone events don’t really have rivalries and storylines. Those have to be built up over the course of regionals leading up to a major.
The resulting event suffers, with a group of professional teams coming together for a weekend to go through the motions at a tournament that has no bearing on their qualification for future events. Fans respond in kind, and the EWC in 2024 did not reach the 100,000 concurrent live viewer mark.
This was partially a result of the timing of the event, with the EWC being poorly advertised and taking place right before the world championships. It doesn’t change the fact that international events suffer when there aren’t regionals taking place beforehand.
BLAST’s poor track record prior to taking over “Rocket League” tournaments — and current track record with worse performing “Rocket League” events — speaks for itself. It warrants asking why Epic Games brought them on in the first place.
For that answer, you have to look at how Epic Games have treated every other game they’ve bought.
At this point, most people who don’t live under a rock know what “Fortnite” is. Being Epic Games’ most popular release, and one of the most played video games of all time, many other games developed by other companies have tried to copy every facet of the game — from 100-person battle royale-style game mode to the battle pass structure.
Epic has worked to make the games it has bought less like the games they used to be and more like “Fortnite.”
Since Epic Games purchased “Rocket League,” item trading and loot boxes have been removed from the game. Shop item prices have skyrocketed to exorbitant amounts and focus was redirected toward developing the “Rocket Racing Fortnite” game mode rather than maintaining the game itself.
This is all while servers for the game continue to be OK at best. Smurfs — skilled players who play against players below their skill level — and cheaters run rampant through ranked matches. Through all these issues, it appears no progress has been made to fix anything. Also, “Rocket League’s” developers have announced no progress in more than three years on moving the game to Unreal Engine 5.
These negatives underscore how badly Epic has butchered the esports scene by inserting BLAST as the new tournament organizer.
BLAST has organized many successful tournaments for “Fortnite,” that can’t be denied. Since taking over as tournament organizers for “Fortnite,” BLAST have helped bring “Fortnite’s” tournament event viewership back to a similar point to their early competitions at the game’s first popularity peak.
“Rocket League” isn’t “Fortnite” though, and butchering an esport for the sake of making it similar to “Fortnite” will only lead to a sluggish, agonizing death for the scene. As the RLCS continues to bleed out, so will the loyal fans who not only religiously watch events, but have continued to play the game through its ups and downs.
If you deliberately spit on the most loyal part of your fanbase, your product will die out. As Epic Games and BLAST continue to show blatant disrespect to fans of the RLCS, more will choose to stop tuning in. Without a devoted fanbase, fans who are already less invested will lose interest in the scene more quickly, bringing about the death of the scene and the game as a whole soon after.
