When you consider that Rocket League is a game in which flying rocket-powered battle cars slam oversized low-gravity footballs into virtual nets, it's surprising how good it is.

As with any skill-based competitive pursuit, the setting is largely irrelevant — winning requires mastery, and mastery necessitates practice in order to achieve mastery. In the same way that all esports titles require thousands of hours of training and refining intricate mechanical movements, the contours of Rocket League's physics must be slowly and diligently seared into the muscle memories of those who wish to compete in it, Rocket League Fennec Designs requires thousands of hours of training and refining intricate mechanical movements.

Rocket League began as a small game with limited resources. The sequel to 2008's Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars (or 'SARPBC' for the uninitiated) was released six and a half years ago and was developed on a budget of less than $2 million (£1.53 million) at the time of its release. Psyonix's revenues had ballooned to $110 million (£83.3 million) by mid-2016, according to the most recent publicly available figures before the company was acquired by Epic Games in 2019.

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With commercial success assured, Psyonix redoubled its efforts in the esports arena. The Rocket League Championship Series (RLCS), the company's flagship tournament, has grown in size and prize money with each of its five years as a professional competition.

After going free-to-play in 2020, the game attracted even more attention to its esports ecosystem, thanks to a well-executed campaign of in-game advertising and item rewards for viewers.

During those formative years, Rocket League established itself as a distinct, mid-table 'Tier 2' esport with a strong following.

Even though there is no official list or set of criteria, the esports tier system is an informal hierarchical ranking of the subjective popularity of different esports titles — as determined by an equally informal consensus of the esports hivemind — that is used to determine the rankings. The majority of esports fans agree that Tier 1 is reserved for esports titles with the most developed ecosystems, the most viewers, the most lucrative brand partnership deals, and the largest prize pools.

Rocket League Item Trading Prices, like its Tier 2 counterparts, has failed to stake a serious claim to the coveted Tier 1 status held by rivals such as Riot Games' League of Legends, Valve's CS:GO and Dota 2, or even Valve's own CS:GO and Dota 2.

Psyonix is shifting gears now that it has reaped the benefits of the hype — and the money from Epic Games.

There are numerous advantages to the sport-action hybrid. Because it is a video game that is almost entirely played online, its simplicity has resulted in a significant amount of attention being paid to esports.

According to the story, one of its most significant appeals is that it is user-friendly. Once you get past the absurdity of the setting, anyone who has ever watched football will recognize the underlying premise: hit the ball into the net more times than your opponent.

In contrast to MOBAs and first-person shooters, non-gamers can follow the action in Rocket League. It serves as a fast track into a world of competitive gaming that is anything but welcoming to outsiders — a gateway drug into the esports experience, if you will.

Even more lucrative is the fact that it is brand friendly. With an ESRB rating of E for Everyone and a distinct lack of guns, bombs, or even death, it's a safe bet for brands looking to gain esports clout without the stigma associated with violent games like Call of Duty.

Esports Insider spoke with Cliff Shoemaker, Esports Director at Psyonix, who described how "it's actually wild that our sport can attract such big brands."The fact that so many big big brands and partners want to be a part of this means that we don't even have that many endemic esports brands in here. They are aware that we speak to an audience that includes people who are interested in hearing from them as well.

It gives us great pleasure to know that a young audience can participate and enjoy it. We're extremely pleased with the fact that there are very few boundaries to where our game can take us."

Psyonix has been striking esports partnerships with car brands left, right, and center (as well as in a variety of other directions) for quite some time now. While universal appeal is one advantage, it also appeals particularly well to one particular segment: the automotive industry.

According to Shoemaker, "I think it's hugely beneficial to the growth of our sport that we can talk to those brands and get in front of those guys and have their audiences feel engaged."The fact that it is unique among other esports is what makes this sport so special. It's a big part of why I'm here, and it's one of the reasons why I remain so optimistic about it.

In a way, it fulfills all of the requirements. It's an esport that appeals to not only players, but also sponsors and teams because of its competitive nature. There's a perfect balance between how highly skilled the sport is and how accessible it is at the same time," says the athlete.

With all of the boxes checked, Psyonix pressed the pedal all the way to the floor.

RLCS was initially expanded in 2020, and in September 2021 the developer announced yet another highly-anticipated major expansion that would see three new regions added to the global circuit — the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), Asia Pacific (North and South), and Sub-Saharan Africa — as well as support for the continent. The RLCS also received an increase in its annual prize purse, which now stands at $6 million (£4.3 million).

Since its introduction into Europe in January, RL Free Credits's collegiate league has established itself as perhaps the first esport to host an international intercollegiate championship.

Psyonix Esports Product Manager Cory Lanier expressed his thoughts on the game's development: "To be completely honest, I think we were a little slow to get things going.""However, this is simply due to the fact that we were a smaller game studio with an incremental change philosophy as one of our core values. We have no intention of taking another step back."

Psyonix's sluggishness does not appear to have slowed the company's progress. Recently, a large number of well-known esports organizations, including Misfits, Evil Geniuses, Natus Vincere, Luminosity Gaming, and Complexity, have (re)entered the fray, bringing their collective experience to the table.

These organizations are hoping to profit from the release of 'Away' decals, a new set of esports team skins that players can purchase for in-game cars as part of Psyonix's revenue-sharing scheme, among other things. Psyonix has allowed esports teams' sponsors to be featured on the in-game skins themselves, similar to how sponsors are featured on the skins of professional motorsports teams — another first in esports that could be argued to be a first in the industry.

The sponsor-branded skins available in  are a valuable and authentic form of in-game advertising. They give fans the opportunity to represent their favorite team, while also providing teams with new sponsorship activations, direct revenue from sales, and increased sponsor visibility, among other benefits.

Creating inventory for rocketprices teams to sell sponsorships — ranging from in-game decals and team name rebrands to on-air broadcast exposure — is an intentional part of Psyonix's business strategy, according to Murty Shah, Esports Manager of Operations at Psyonix.

According to Shah, "what we want teams to do is look at the entire RLCS season and say things like, 'hey sponsor, instead of us cramming your brand name into this esport in weird, random ways, Psyonix has created all these different inventory pieces for you to join the esport in a super authentic way.'"

While buy Rocket League items has enjoyed a string of recent victories, it is important to remember that the game's overall esports viewership continues to lag behind that of other major esports titles.

Two of the most recent international LAN tournaments had peak viewerships of around 280,000, according to data from Esports Chart. These were the Real Life Championship Series Season 8 World Championship and the 2021-22 Fall Major, both of which took place in the United Kingdom. That's orders of magnitude lower than the majority of Tier 1 (and even some Tier 2) esports events, which routinely attract millions of viewers at their peak.

Even though it was a lower level of competition, the Fall Major last year nearly doubled the number of hours watched of the Season 8 World Championship, which is an encouraging sign for what's to come as LANs resume and the Winter Major takes place this weekend at the YouTube Theatre in Los Angeles, which sold out in less than an hour.

has already arrived in the eyes of many in the game's ardent fanbase; it has established itself as a genre and league unto itself. What are tier lists? Validation in the mainstream? What is the expert's opinion? We don't require them. For a large portion of the Rocket League community, waxing lyrical about the game's current state is standard operating procedure.

Psyonix, on the other hand, is more measured."We recognize that it is still relatively new in the grand scheme of things, and that there is still a great deal of work to be done," Shoemaker acknowledged."However, we're getting smarter and smarter about how we're going to get this thing to where we want it to go every day."

"My role here is to make it as simple as possible to achieve the goal of making it an unquestionably upper-tier, Tier 1 esport in the future," says the author.