Farming Simulator Esports: A niche scene with €100,000 tournaments

Could farming ever be done competitively? Even better, could a game about driving farm equipment ever be considered an esports title?

Well, Farming Simulator developer GIANTS Software has already answered these questions. The Farming Simulator League is a fully-fledged esports event and one that is steadily going strong despite being looked upon as niche to some esports audiences.

What are the specifics of the Farming Simulator League? Also, how is the title’s esports ecosystem different to other games when it comes to sponsorship opportunities?To find these answers, Esports Insider reached out to Claas Eilermann, Event and Esports Manager at GIANTS Software.

The title’s esports origins can date back to Farming Simulator 17, a game released in 2016. Prior to becoming an official esports event, Eilermann explained that the Farming Simulator League started out as a simple hay bale stacking competition for fans of the original game.

The competition was a standalone game mode built on a simple premise: you stack bales of hay and the player with the better score wins. There were no esports plans then, with the activity planned to be showcased at agricultural events to amuse and entertain. The first time the game’s developers started seeing the game’s esports potential was in 2017 at AgriTechnica, an agriculture fair in Germany.

The activity soon became so popular that the game’s developers decided to put more time into improving the bale-stacking mode, and thus the Farming Simulator League (FSL) was born. As such, the game formula was also changed.

Source: https://esportsinsider.com/2021/12/farming-simulator-esports/