I watched more Escape from Tarkov before I played it. A hugely popular Twitch Drop event from late December to early January finally convinced me to buy in, and during my first game all I could think of was:
"His palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy ..."
Yes, Eminem's opening line in "Lose Yourself" more than adequately describes the feeling Tarkov invokes as a realistic, high risk-high reward survival game.
I loaded in and encountered a player quite suddenly after they jumped a fence. After a brief battle, I emerged victorious, greedily scooping up their loot for myself, fully intending to add their stuff to my stash after I extracted from the map.
Shortly after, I was eliminated while running around, sent back to the loading screen to try again with my loot, which used to be someone else's loot, now in the hands of the player that took me out.
My next game I took it slow ... deliberate, silent -- annnnnnnnd I'm gone. I never even saw the player.
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It is the hardest game I have ever loved, and its unique gameplay loop, depth and strategy have pushed it into the limelight, captivating streamers and audiences alike. But captivation and calamity often go hand-in-hand in the gaming and streaming world. Server crashes and disconnects, lag spikes and rubber banding, excessive queue times, and an influx of cheaters from China (a region notorious for cheating in online games) accompanied the game's rise.
Sound familiar? A gritty, fun FPS in which a sudden pop of popularity exposed bugs, problems and exploits the developer wasn't ready for? If you're thinking PUBG, we're on the same page.
"It's unlike any other game I think right now," said Benjamin "DrLupo" Lupo. "You can play it a bunch of different ways. You can play it super fast and you'll get punished for it sometimes or you'll win big, or you can play super slow. It has thriller-style mechanics, as you're seeing high tension gameplay."
Lupo is one of the many streamers who have reaped the rewards of Tarkov. He was an early adopter, playing the game about two years ago, which has given him a leg up on in-game knowledge. He knows the loot, the builds, the maps, the common tactics used ... and it all comes together for an entertaining, educational stream.
Because of this, his viewership has more than doubled, he said. Prior to Tarkov, his focus was on Fortnite, in which he was pulling around 5,000 to 7,000 viewers on average. Not only has Tarkov made Lupo a more common streaming name, but the viewership has remained in those double digits after the Twitch Drop event that thrust Tarkov into the mainstream.
"I've wanted this for such a long time, for this game to get noticed in a way that I feel like it deserves," he said.
This isn't the first time a game has taken over the streaming kingdoms, either. The aforementioned PUBG took center stage in 2017. Fortnite made its mark in 2018 behind the AAA studio Epic, capitalizing on its status and resources to produce a largely bug-free, cheater-free, unique, and ultimately fun (read: hugely monetizable) battle royale experience. Now, it seems to be Tarkov's turn in 2020 (it's important to note that the game is advertised as still in beta).
And much like games before it, the popularity has grown to a point where third-party competitions have cropped up. Boom.tv just held its first Code Red $10,000 Escape from Tarkov tournament. The winner was the one with the most roubles (in-game currency) at the end of eight hours of playing (you could only sell to vendors), and dog tags (player-only items you loot off players you eliminate) were worth 200,000 roubles a pop.
Lupo took third, while Australian streamer Pestily took first. Other top streamers like Jaryd "Summit1g" Lazar and Guy "DrDisrespect" Beahm also participated, keeping Tarkov on the top of Twitch for most of the day's tournament. It's unclear how future Tarkov competitions will play out, but for a first attempt, it was a pretty unique take, especially in the era of battle royales like Apex, Fortnite and PUBG.
The developer and publisher of Escape from Tarkov, Battlestate Games, is made up of about 100 people. Front-facing Nikita Buyanov is leading the charge, and even with a few years of work behind the game, BSG was not prepared for how successful the Twitch Drop event would be.
"When the drops event started, the server overloads began and we were busy with work," he said." "It was already clear that EFT was at the top, everyone started posting about it and paying attention to it, but we were not up to it. Therefore, unfortunately, it was not possible to fully experience [the moment the game became popular]."
Twitch Drops allow viewers to earn in-game items by watching streamers play the game. Tarkov's event reportedly pulled in over 30 million hours viewed, with 8.3 million objects handed out. This tabulated to over 1,000,000,000 roubles.
"There was an exact understanding and forecast that the growth of players will happen, but it was difficult to predict what numbers will be exactly," Buyanov said.
Buyanov recalls the rise of PUBG, and the problems that came with it, saying Tarkov is experiencing the same kind of popularity spike. "Indeed, there are examples of projects that have become very popular and experienced problems. Our precautionary measures led to the ability to have everyone set and ready at their battle stations. And this continues up to this day we have to work at night and on weekends."
Unfortunately for Buyanov, they do not deal with the lines connecting the client and servers, saying if the "the servers, data centers, and their employees were ours, of course, the situation would be much better." Servers are continually added, and the game becomes more stable each week, but more problems rear their ugly head -- cheating will always be a concern, something PUBG had difficulty addressing for a while until they introduced region-locking (Battlestate says they have region-locked Asia and utilize BattleEye to combat cheaters). Even today PUBG continues to battle cheaters, performance issues post-updates, and most recently, DDoS attacks.
Despite the exposed digital shortcomings, the game has only continued to grow, and with that growth comes more eyes and critique in the real world. For example, an interview from 2016 was unearthed and quickly circulated where a Battlestate employee stated that Tarkov is only a place for "hardened men" and they "came to the conclusion that women are not allowed to be in the war."
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This was not taken well by the internet, and BSG issued an apology and clarification, saying the employee was "reprimanded and properly instructed."
Still, Tarkov does not have plans to put women in the game as playable characters. On this, Lupo said he's more concerned about balance and competitive edges, but added games can be viewed as art, and it's up to the artists to create and the audience to respond.
"Ultimately, the game that they are making, and I think people sometimes lose sight of this, a video game can easily be viewed as art," he said. "You ever play Bastion? Bastion is an absolute work of art. It's beautiful. This is just as much a work of art, it's just a different art style, and if Battlestate thinks that their piece of art they are making shouldn't have XYZ thing in it, no matter what it is, it's up to them, not us. On the other side of that, it's up to us to react in whatever way we see fit. That could be that we like it, that could be that we're mad about it. I just want to play the game because I think it's fun."
It's tough to say how long the popularity of Tarkov will last, when everything will be fixed, or if the next big streaming game will come before that happens. Lupo streamed the first Destiny for a year and a half because it was good for business. That kind of wear-and-tear can visually impact a streamer and his or her audience, so introducing something that holds the attention of the streamer and the audience like Tarkov is just the injection some streamers needed -- as long the game continues to get better.
"It captivates the viewer in a way that nothing else really has in a long time, I think, from what I've seen," said Lupo. "That's my opinion."
