While talks and articles about gaming's new found mainstream audience - thanks in big part to Nintendo's DS and Wii - are all over the place, good old PC gaming, as Games Industry's Rob Fahey recently underlined in this article, still remains a pretty big chunk of the business and marketers are not done luring the hardcore gamers towards their products. As a Blizzard exec once told me : "the hole in the middle of a donut is just that, a hole, but without it there's no donut at all."

What's funny is that it's now safe to say that the competitive aspect of multiplayer games, also known as E-sports, has become a trendy line in the marketing approach for upcoming or recently released AAA games targeting the traditional young male demographic. Want names? StarCraft 2, Call of Duty 4 and Crysis all are sold from the get go as "Esports games". While I have no doubt SC2 and COD4 will be, Crysis' future as an Esports platform remains to be confirmed.

Now, you may be wondering what kind of news that is since we've seen pro StarCraft tournaments take place for nearly ten years now and games such as Counter-Strike and Call of Duty have all had their World Champion teams and star players for some time too.

The difference is that before 2007, not one game developer or publisher promoted their upcoming titles as Esports platforms. StarCraft and Counter-Strike as Esports platforms are indeed "accidents" in the sense that they were not intended to be that. Good multiplayer games? Yes! Social phenomenon with self-maintaining communities of millions accross the world? That was not part of the plan.

Blizzard and Valve even took several years to simply acknowledge the phenomenon. Now they have and together with fellow developers and publishers, they're looking at competition in their games as a key selling point and a great way to add value to their IP's.

I'm looking forward to see how this will translate on the market in the years to come.