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There is a catharsis that comes from watching something implode. Like the late George Carlin once remarked, “And no matter what kind of problem humans are facing, whether its natural or man made, I always hope it gets worse. Don’t you? Don’t you... don’t you have a part of you, a part of you that secretly hopes everything gets worse? When you see a big fire on TV... don’t you hope it spreads? Don’t you hope it gets completely out of control and burns down six counties? You don’t root for the firemen, do ya’? I mean, I don’t want ‘em gettin’ hurt or nothin’, but... I don’t want ‘em putting out my fire.”

As of this writing, less than an hour following the conclusion of Canada Cup, my mind’s eye pictures all of Stream Monster Nation in a post-coital daze, unsure of whether to make a snack or take a nap. Hasta la vista, Canada Cup.

I feel absolutely no sympathy for what may befall Vesper Arcade in the aftermath of this tournament. They may be fortunate. Stream Monster Nation has a notoriously-short memory. Perhaps next year, when another Canada Cup is announced, we’ll all settle down in front of our monitors like a shuffling mass of Alzheimer’s victims. I hope not.

What we witnessed today is sunlight in a dark corner that has concerned some of us working along the edge of new media within the fighting game community. What you spent the weekend consuming was a product engineered by a group eagerly exploiting both its audience and its participating talent in the name of simple, potent greed. The team responsible for casting this event extorted everyone involved, spectators and fighters alike.

There is a discomforting precedent looming within unregulated infant-stage technology that promises ad-free content at a premium competing with ad-supported content offered free of charge. On its face, the premise seems similar to the contrast between network and cable television, but the reality we received was far from those familiar concepts.

First, offering an alternative, the same product coupled with superior presentation, creates incentive for the producer to ignore or actively obstruct quality control within its basic offering in favor of encouraging consumers to seek the for-profit product. I voiced concern via social media Friday that Vesper Arcade’s response to selling ad-free content would be to simply run more advertisements on its free stream, but I had no way of knowing just how extreme they would become at pursuing this course of action. The casting team literally beat their viewers with ads, running marketing between every match, at points. Advertisements were allowed to run DURING high profile match-ups.

Here we have individuals showing a flagrant lack of regard for anyone watching their content for free. The message conveyed by running advertisements with unprecedented frequency is obvious : we don’t care about you, we only care about your money, and we are going to actively make your viewing experience so unpleasant so as to force you to consider giving us that money or simply turning away from our stream.

This sort of larceny threatens to transform itself from mild annoyance to genuinely infuriating when considering the quality of product presented to the individuals that did pay to view Canada Cup’s viewing stream. For example, early purchasers experiencing laggy playback on Friday night were being told to take their stream out of high definition playback, when high definition resolutions were one of the selling points for the premium stream to begin with.

Vesper’s stream featured no replay technology (or any new tech of any other variety), no statistic tracking of any sort, inordinate amounts of dead air and down time, forced downtime due to in-venue events such as raffles, and no easily-accessible brackets. My primary source of bracket updates this weekend was UltraDavid’s Twitter feed. In the past month alone, the community has seen both Wednesday Night Fights and Dromstruction featuring completely free casts that blow away anything offered for your dollar this weekend.

Canada Cup offered an exciting first look at a potential new income source for casters and set that model back so far I wonder how long it will be before someone attempts it again. They had absolutely no plan in place for offering content to justify the price tag of their premium feed beyond the ability to avoid advertisements. Who is going to whip out their credit card to pay for a stream that could possibly be inferior in quality to what they’re used to receiving for free?

This sort of money grab was only possible by attaching themselves to some of the world’s most talented Street Fighter players. They knew, full well, that there are thousands of us out there that will tolerate whatever we must for the opportunity to watch that roster. Canada Cup featured a staggering level of talent, probably the best competition you will see outside of Evolution, Godsgarden, or SBO.

That sort of crass manipulation of players adds another disturbing element to our glimpse of the worst of our potential changes. As fighting games teeter on the fence between rough arcade communities and larger eSports status, having top players dangled as bait to fuel revenue casts corporate video gaming and its moneymaking potential into a poor light, unwarranted or no.

Allow me to say, before anyone misunderstands, that the monetization of fight game media is a necessary component to the sort of growth some want to see. It is simply unreasonable to expect top grade content to be produced by amateurs, basically for free, forever. More capital has to enter the caster community in order to fuel innovation and stimulate increased production values. What we saw this weekend, though, was the absolute wrong way of going about that, and it does real damage to the effort to make fight media a profitable enterprise. Blatantly farming out your players and viewers when the community is paying attention to these sorts of issues is appalling.

Now it falls on the community to do what it can to use this as a learning experience. I am heartened to see Twitch TV’s measured - and completely unofficial - response, at the moment, seems to be displeasure. This sort of event reflects poorly on the casting service. Ad-supported casting is something we should all embrace, as it allows producers to create content and be paid for their services. That is Twitch’s business, offering services to facilitate that process. Anything that damages the reputation of ad-supported content is as bad for them as it is for the community of producers that create content to be distributed through their service.

To Twitch, my personal recommendation would be to investigate measures regulating how often ad content can be run when a stream is offering a paid, ad-free option. I know they must be reluctant to exercise that level of creative control over content, but safeguarding the experience of the consumers engaging with their brand has to become a priority.

I don’t want to see this sort of option taken off the table prematurely. I would consider paying for a premium option that was truly that, a premium option. Integrated web content, integrated social media content, real-time stat tracking and bracket updates, and high definition, ad-free video sounds appealing at the right price. Paying for dinner just to get food poisoning, on the other hand, does not.

Stream outfits must head back to the drawing board to prepare their services for a potential pay-per-view rollout as well, avoiding the same mistakes and not allowing potential profits to eclipse their personal ethics or the quality of their product. Now is the time to ratchet up the quality to show just what we have to offer.

However, perhaps one of the most important things to keep in mind, moving forward, is that business as usual must remain business as usual. We simply cannot shift an entire internet community built around the exchange and creation of free content into a transaction-based environment. Doing so would be even more foolish than the RIAA’s battle against music piracy, because that course of action would be the equivalent of the music industry having been founded on torrenting MP3s completely for free, only to then move to an expectation for consumers to purchase product and abandon free services.

Create something worth having, layer it on top of an already rich offering, and then offer all that free content plus the extra layers for a price. Don’t take what was once free and hide it away behind a paywall.

What is offered by this experience might be salvageable, and the learning aspects of its repercussions might be the only positive we can take from it. Perhaps one of the reasons we all enjoy watching things spiral out of control in our day-to-day lives is that we then have the opportunity to pick up the pieces and rebuild, creating something even better in the aftermath.

That and it’s just kinda’ fun watching a blow up. Sometimes you just wanna' watch six counties of real estate go up in smoke. One might even say it’s... Capital.

You can tell Darry how you feel about him on Twitter. He does not apologize for puns.