If you came to learn about "free to play games", you will be disappointed. The title is misleading, this movie only covers one game, defense of the ancients and small group of teams in their efforts to win a million dollar prize. It doesn't even do this very well, it really just amounts to just the equivalent of a puff piece bio on each "athlete" you see on sports channels.
You learn nothing about the games or why they matter. Strategies are only mentioned, nothing on screen demonstrates any of this, to a lay person, its just a confusing mish mash of random violence and button mashing. It fails to show why these "sports" matter or why anyone should care.
Its a constant problem in this film, you are told things, but you aren't shown them.
This film just doesn't cover any new territory. The idea of gaming as sport is not new, and coverage of south Korean star craft tournaments and the rest have been a thing for years, so there is nothing here that has not been covered before. The ratings are heavily skewed because steam heavily promoted this film on their service, and being that it was free and the peak number of simultaneous players for that game exceeds 500,000 each day, there are a lot of fans who are more than happy to just rate this thing a 10 just because they are grateful for the attention. Its why at this point 84% of the votes are a perfect 10, which this film is very far from being by any rational measure.
Much better documentary films to watch are "King of Kong" or "Senna" or "Exit from the Gift shop", each gives you some insight into an area of expertise even if you weren't a fan of racing/donkey kong/or graffiti art, each film brings the viewer into that world, and gives them an understanding of why it matters and why they should care. You watch "King of Kong" and you feel some understanding of how they play and what they have to do to be that good, and a few of their strategies. In this film however, you just constantly told these people are the best and that they have strategy, but none is on display. When they decide to show gameplay, its the most generic and context free footage possible, zoomed in to show action, not strategy, for a non dota 2 gamer it has no meaning, then they take it a step further and tart up that action by rerendering in CG.
The title of the film is just misleading. Nothing about the free to play model is covered, this is merely coverage of a few teams playing for a million dollar prize and not a very interesting one at that. Tournaments for games have been going on for over a decade now, starcraft tournaments in south Korea being the most prominent, and this has been covered in countless other "video game" documentaries and such. This isn't new territory.
You learn nothing about the games or why they matter. Strategies are only mentioned, nothing on screen demonstrates any of this, to a lay person, its just a confusing mish mash of random violence and button mashing. It fails to show why these "sports" matter or why anyone should care.
Its a constant problem in this film, you are told things, but you aren't shown them.
This film just doesn't cover any new territory. The idea of gaming as sport is not new, and coverage of south Korean star craft tournaments and the rest have been a thing for years, so there is nothing here that has not been covered before. The ratings are heavily skewed because steam heavily promoted this film on their service, and being that it was free and the peak number of simultaneous players for that game exceeds 500,000 each day, there are a lot of fans who are more than happy to just rate this thing a 10 just because they are grateful for the attention. Its why at this point 84% of the votes are a perfect 10, which this film is very far from being by any rational measure.
Much better documentary films to watch are "King of Kong" or "Senna" or "Exit from the Gift shop", each gives you some insight into an area of expertise even if you weren't a fan of racing/donkey kong/or graffiti art, each film brings the viewer into that world, and gives them an understanding of why it matters and why they should care. You watch "King of Kong" and you feel some understanding of how they play and what they have to do to be that good, and a few of their strategies. In this film however, you just constantly told these people are the best and that they have strategy, but none is on display. When they decide to show gameplay, its the most generic and context free footage possible, zoomed in to show action, not strategy, for a non dota 2 gamer it has no meaning, then they take it a step further and tart up that action by rerendering in CG.
The title of the film is just misleading. Nothing about the free to play model is covered, this is merely coverage of a few teams playing for a million dollar prize and not a very interesting one at that. Tournaments for games have been going on for over a decade now, starcraft tournaments in south Korea being the most prominent, and this has been covered in countless other "video game" documentaries and such. This isn't new territory.