Earlier today I received an e-mail entitled 'what makes a good esports game?' Curiously, it came from a website I swear I have never visited in my whole life. But it's a subject I'd been pondering for this week's column and they're offering prizes for the best entries, so this is my attempt at killing two birds with one stone!

Where better to start than with the staple esports fare, Counter-Strike? It is impossible for most SK readers to imagine a balanced gaming diet without the nearly ten-year-old game, and with good reason.

Balance

You see, most of the current entries in the previously mentioned competition concentrate on very specific aspects. One even goes so far as to complain about "n00b cannons". Sure, weapon balance is important to a game, but when it comes to esports this kind of thing should be taken as a given. If the maps, weapons, races and factions aren't balanced, then the game is never even going to be considered as an esport, whatever the genre.

There are plenty of games out there with weapons just as well balanced as CS, but they don't have the prestige, or indeed the prize money, of our old favourite.

Spectators

What CS has, and what all good esports games have, is a good, innate, spectator mode. Last week I argued in this column that WoW is an esport. But its biggest drawback is that it still does not have an equivalent of HLTV, nearly two years after the start of arena play. The commentators do a great job, but without decent visual aid they might be fighting a losing battle.

The whole point of modern sport is entertainment. If people can't watch what's going on it doesn't matter how exciting the game is. Would SK versus fnatic be such a big deal if nobody saw it? Of course not. Would Grubby versus Moon be less of a rivalry if nobody could watch the games? Absolutely.

That is precisely why a game like Call of Duty struggles on the fringes of competitive gaming. I've never played it myself, so I can't really form an opinion of the game. But I also never played Painkiller and I've seen more than enough of that to make up my mind about its credentials.

Depth

The other thing that an esport title must have, and again CS is a perfect example, is depth. Not too much, and certainly not too little, but just enough depth to keep people hooked. Head shots are great, nice graphics are cool, but if that's all there is then a game will not last very long.

I've used the following analogy before, but it remains very useful in understanding the concept of depth in an esports game:

When there's a football match on TV, anyone can appreciate a great goal. A 30 yard volley into the top corner is the equivalent of an ace round in CS, or a hero surround in WC3. But watching brilliant goals gets boring after a while, because there is no context. The person who actually follows football and understands it would appreciate the inch-perfect pass that set the player up, just like the avid CS fan understands how allen came to be behind the five players he just mowed down.[1]

Conversely, if there is too much going on then players will feel confused. Pumping to patch after patch of new content sounds like a great idea, but change for change's sake does not. Just look at two of the most successful esports games in the world today: CS and Warcraft III. They have been left mostly alone for years and they have thrived because of it, not in spite of it.

HLTV

The biggest, most important change that ever happened to CS came way back in 2001, with the invention of HLTV. Sorry to keep harping on about spectators, but it's the truth. The money system alteration was nice, the new guns in 1.6 were kinda useful, but it was HLTV that made Counter-Strike and made Western esports.

Clearly, though, a single column can't bolt down every single aspect of a game's success. But when it comes to esports, the lesson is loud and clear: the players make the game. Esports is a democracy and no matter what the genre or the style, if the game is right, it is the people who will make it an esport, not the developers.

[1]For visual evidence of this, check out Dennis Bergkamp's goal against Argentina from 1998. The touch and the finish are incredible, but without the pass it would never have happened.

The world's first and only weekly esports column returns next Tuesday.