It's safe to say that there is a healthy amount of skepticism going into Splatoon 2's prospects as an eSport. First alluded to in the announcement trailer of the Nintendo Switch, showing a jam-packed Colosseum of rabid Nintendo fan's watching pro players sit down for Splatoon 2, the game's eSports potential was seemingly hampered by several factors – the game's niche appeal, the competition already in the eSports market, etcetera.
But, if last weekend's Global Testfire for Splatoon 2 was anything to go off, its technical specifications aren't up to snuff either.
As one person on Twitter discovered, Splatoon 2's Tickrate (which measures the amount of time, per second the game is updated via the server) is 12.5Hz. The standard Tickrate for competitive online games is 60hz.
Just like losing a few frames per-second, this is likely to go unnoticed by the casual observer or player, but professional players, the type of player that would ostensibly be involved in an eSport, will certainly notice, and it's the type of defect that could completely derail any hopes of becoming an eSport.
Does Nintendo need to get in on the eSports market with the Nintendo Switch? Perhaps not, but they certainly want to. I point this out all the time, but eSports is about to become a billion-dollar industry. Any game studio, especially one that just put out a new console that it would like to see succeed, would want a piece of that pie.
They certainly have time to improve that, as we're still several months away from Splatoon 2's launch. But whether or not they will is anyone's guess, and it also could be the deciding factor on whether or not people take Splatoon 2 seriously as an eSport.
