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Home > Sunday Mid Day News > These youths have turned their love for e commentary into a career

These youths have turned their love for e-commentary into a career

Updated on: 06 November,2016 09:12 AM IST  | 
Kusumita Das |

They are the Harsha Bhogles of the gaming world. Meet the youths who have turned their love for e-commentary into a career

These youths have turned their love for e-commentary into a career

Nishant Patel casting for DoTA 2 at his gaming studio in Dadar. Pic/Sayed Sameer Abedi
Nishant Patel casting for DoTA 2 at his gaming studio in Dadar. Pic/Sayed Sameer Abedi


It's around 8 am on a weekday. Twenty-seven-year-old Nishant Patel is getting ready for work. Jeans and Tee on, he straps on his bag and heads to a gaming studio a few floors down, in the same building. There’s a board on the door that reads “AFK Gaming”. It opens to a compact two-monitor setup with a camera on a tripod, headphones and microphones. There’s a green screen, a white board, light stands and wires strewn around, besides plenty of snack packets stacked in a corner. This is Patel’s ‘work station’ where he clocks in about eight to 10 hours a day.



He takes on the mike and goes: There’s an uninvited guest inside the dire base, but they are gonna make the most of it as Swifty (player) gets jumped upon and the Abyssal Blade stops Blizzard (player) dead in his tracks...

Patel is one among the growing breed of millenials, who have found a way to monetise their passion for gaming, by finding a career in video game commentary, or casting as it is called in gaming-verse. Patel, like many of his ilk, is a self-taught caster, who picked up the skill initially by aping international casters for kicks, and eventually polished his craft out of sheer interest.

Currently Patel and his team of three who are casters for the game DoTA 2 (Defense of The Ancients), are busy as the 48-day long Indian eSports championship is on. “This is a multiplayer game where the players could be sitting anywhere, as long as they are connected to the gaming server. However, it helps if they are sitting nearby, the speed is more efficient that way, as data gets transferred faster,” he explains. Each game has two casters who introduce themselves on live-camera attached to the monitor before the game begins. The game cannot begin until the casters have taken position.

DoTA 2, we learn, is an online battle arena, where two teams of five are pitted against each other. “Both teams fight to destroy the opponent’s main building which is called the Ancient. The entire game is played on a map. As casters, we have complete control on that map, we can zoom in on whichever player we want to, focus on a fight of our choice — the viewers see the game through our eyes. That’s one way, where casting is different from on-field sports commentary,” says Patel, who goes by the gaming alias Cloud X. Typically, a DoTA 2 game lasts for 40 minutes, but structurally, it doesn’t have a time limit. “There have been times when it has gone for nearly three hours,” Patel says.

The commentary is usually of two kinds — a hard-core strategy commentary concentrating on the live action and in the more laidback moments, it’s more of “coloured” commentary, revealing insights into the game. “The biggest challenge for us is stamina, the audience is more demanding than a live-action audience, and you need to constantly feed them something. Every five seconds a fight breaks out on screen. It’s high-speed, high-decibel talking for about 40 minutes,” Patel says. Also, in this field, one needs to be a master of the game. “As it’s highly technical, you need to understand and play the game really well to be able to do this, unlike in real sports, where the commentators don’t need to be players themselves,” he adds. One of the most popular platforms to watch these games is the gaming channel, Twitch.TV., besides live streaming on YouTube. One can even watch the game through the game software — every game has a play and a watch option.

Casting was not Patel’s first career choice. He used to be an avid gamer in his adolescent years when it was “no more than a hobby”. He went on to work in stocks and finances, even did a summer school programme at the London School of Economics. “I had no idea how to make casting my bread and butter. This was in the mid-2000s. Eventually, the gaming scene began to pick up here and slowly, some money-making avenues opened up. I dragged my feet on the day job for a while, and then one fine day, I quit. This was in April 2012. In October, the same year I started AFK Gaming with my two friends. It took us a while to find some ground beneath our feet. But with more tournaments springing up, things are getting better,” he adds.

The Indian eSports finals are just a week away and “it’s an absolute gaming frenzy now”. The team makes around R3,000 per game and during peak seasons, each day, they cover about 8-10 games. “Whatever we make, we invest all of it on a ‘leased line’ Internet connection which ensures premium connectivity. As casters, we cannot afford to lose connection even for a second. Poor Internet connectivity poses a huge roadblock for Indian casters trying to make an impact on the global scene,” he adds.

In Bengaluru, Sudhen Wahengbam is another big name in the casting circuit, both in India and South East Asia. A core member of eSports company SoStronk, the 29-year-old started out as an engineer before taking several detours and finally making this a full-time career two years ago. As a caster for Counterstrike, Wahengbam stresses on the importance of breaking down the game for the audience. “There is a constant influx of new audience, and if you continue to be highly technical and intense, you run the risk of losing them. It’s crucial to find a language that speaks to both newbies and the hard-core gamers. You need that balance.” He points out how many upcoming casters take to swearing that gets them “an influx of fans”. Wahengbam has done casting for tournaments in Hong Kong, Tai Peh and Malaysia and is now waiting for the ESL (E-Sports League) later this month.

Having a Western accent helps and that’s another Achilles heel for Indians in the game, Patel points out. “The Indian accent alienates the Western audience,” he says. Wahengbam, with his pronounced Western accent, seems to have got lucky. “I grew up in Manipur where we wouldn’t speak English at all. So I never got exposed to Indian English. Whatever I learnt, was only from cartoons, international sports and movies. I happened to internalise that and now I have grown a mixed accent of sorts, which works, as they cannot pigeonhole me as an Indian voice,” he says.

Patel adds, “The eSports market is growing here and a lot of commentary that we do is unpaid — but that is to generate more audience online. It’s a slow process to find people in a high-potential field that also happens to be low-pay,” says Patel, who with his team, started out by taking the live feed from international games, repackaging it with their voices and streaming it on their channel. “That gets you the audience and helps your voice get recognised. For professional assignments to come to you, you need to be a well-known voice,” says Patel who goes by the gaming alias “Cloud X”. Wahengbam has us intrigued with his alias “Bleh”. “Everyone would have these heavy-duty names like ‘Terminator 100’ and ‘Death Killer’ spelt with all these special characters, making them so hard to read. So I just went with ‘Bleh’, as my little rebellion,” he says with a chuckle.

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