African esports is one of the most painful subjects for the world audience. The region neither provides professional teams for performing at major LAN tournaments, limiting itself only with sole stars at WESG, nor organizes events that could be welcomed by famous world teams. Valve has already been asked to make separate qualifiers for the African region, but the situation hasn’t moved off dead center.
Technical nuances
The level of development of the technologies and availability of the access to the internet are on a critically low level if we take a look at the African region in general. The fourth part of the continent doesn’t have a connection to the world net and the cost of the service is not affordable for regular inhabitants. Only in some cases, the price of the internet will be compatible with the prices in the CIS countries, even though the high stability of the connection is not always guaranteed.
If we use Dota 2 as an example, there is only one server in Africa (located in RSA), which is a doubtful consolidation for the North part of the mainland. However, it is impossible to run rating matched on the realized server — the game can be run by not more than 200 people, which can result in the abuse of accounts and excessively high ratings.
The majority of African talents have to move to uncomfortable European server where the ping is often from 150 ms and more to demonstrate your potential. As a result, according to the sixe the African community is not even close to South America or Australia which are considered to be lagging regions. The perfect option is to build powerful data centers in the central part of the continent (Kenya or Nigeria), to run the server that will be available for all the countries of the region.
Is there a pro-stage in Africa?
If we consider the African Dota2, all the professional esports organizations exceptionally located only in RSA. The other countries have only several players that just sometimes make it to unpopular stacks in the nearest regions.
The most popular direction must be CS:GO — LeetPro organization even has a female roster. The majority of roster perform using the names of local companies or portals not getting enough funds. LAN competitions are often held as an additional entertainment organized by game exhibitions or young festivals and the biggest part of all the tournaments is held online with a minimal audience.
TOP teams of the African region play for 3-4 thousand dollars at the tournaments that last 1-2 months which is quite small even for Tier-3 teams from the CIS. The most successful esports organization of the region, White Rabbit Gaming, has earned approximately 30 000$ for the period it is existing.
Level of the game
The African teams almost never play in a competitive mode with the stacks from other regions. If we take a look at dotabuffs of the professional gamers from the African region at the European or Asian servers, the percentage is not the most impressive — nearly 50%. One the other hand, we should take into account the fact that the games happen with the ping 130-200 ms which has its own peculiarities.
Maybe, Valve should not think about separate slots at their tournaments for Africa yet, but still, South America also used to be a whipping boy and now it’s representatives can be seen in Top 10 teams in both Dota 2 and CS:GO.
