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So, what’s to be done? Is it simply the case that, in the west at least, eSports will never burst into the mainstream, as it has in Asia?

Not so, suggests LongWalk. “Companies like DIRECTTV are picking up and sponsoring World Cyber Games (WCG) events,” he says. “They’re giving these people more exposure. DIRECTTV is not just a gamers’ market, it’s everybody. If some company started trying to get game tournaments in public media, everyone could get a tiny glimpse of it. It just needs to get more and more exposure and big companies have to pick it up. It is very lucrative. Intel and Microsoft wouldn’t be doing it every year for no reason.”

Talking to the players, commentators and even Blizzard itself at the Regional Finals in Cologne, eSports comes across as a phenomenon still in its infancy. It feels as if, at least where Blizzard’s games are concerned, that the scene is made up of young people who consider it a wonderful bonus but nothing more. No-one at the Cologne tournament, and remember it was made up of the best World of Warcraft and Warcraft III players from across Europe and the US, is a full-time professional gamer. Well, apart from Grubby, perhaps.

“I view it as a really cool addition to playing a video game,” says LongWalk. “It would be nice to make a living out of this. Personally I don’t think I would have confidence in eSports too much at this point to do it. I’m going to a really nice college right now. I feel like I have a nice future and this is just a really fun hobby that I’ll be able to look back on and say, wow you did a really great job, you impressed a lot of people. I’ll be happy with that.”

“There’s just not enough financial support from teams,” SonKiE says. “There are not enough tournaments to live off of it. You’d have to win every one in first place over and over in order to live off of it. It’s pretty difficult. I wouldn’t bank on making that money to pay the bills. But for a hobby it’s pretty good.”

There are some that are perfectly happy with eSports just the way it is. James Harding, 26, from the UK, is an eSports commentator for the Electronic Sports League (ESL). He was the most successful UK gamer for four consecutive years, and was the first ever professional World of Warcraft player. He questions whether eSports needs to break out into mainstream western culture at all.

“Our objective is to keep it stable and growing at its natural pace,” he says. “Some people have come in and tried to apply business models similar to the NFL and other tournaments, but in all fairness it’s come where it has over ten years through the community’s choice of where the passion’s gone.

“I believe that if we just let it continue, it doesn’t have to take over the world by any means. It just has to appease the gaming industry.”

Blizzard’s view? As the company that’s created perhaps the most popular games in the eSports arena, it obviously considers it important (it handed out approximately $200,000 prize money at BlizzCon 2008), but it admits its priorities lie elsewhere.

“It's important because driving and supporting the competitive community gets a lot of people interested and involved in the game when they wouldn't do otherwise,” Chilton explains. “As a player it's fun to watch the top players in the world duke it out and see what happens. It's not core focus for Blizzard, it's just a cool part of what we do. One of our major philosophies to developing games is we want our games to be easy to learn but hard to master. So it's really important to support that hard to master part. Even though it's a smaller and more hardcore part of the community, it's still important.”

Like so many industries, eSports' stifled growth can in part be blamed on the global recession. And, like so many industries, the truth of the situation probably lies somewhere in between those that say it’s going to take over the world, and those who reckon it’s going to die a painful death. With Blizzard’s own StarCraft II, the sequel to perhaps the most popular competitive video game of all time, due out on PC soon, an e-Sports upsurge is not inconceivable. Indeed the playable build of the game on show at the Cologne Finals perhaps drew bigger crowds than the tournament itself.

For players like Grubby, however, such thoughts are far from the mind. With a $2,000 cheque in tow and a plane ticket to BlizzCon 2009 secured, it’s practice time. Like LongWalk, and SonkiE, the green is hard to resist. Just think how big that $25,000 cheque will be…

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