Broshears 1

Logan Broshears

AJ Ortega

ENGL 2010

3\25\19

Esports; Not just Surviving but Thriving

Throughout the years of entertainment in the world, sports have always had a significant

contribution from the early days of the Olympics to massive arenas filled with people watching

the Super Bowl. It would be difficult to name every activity that’s classified as a sport but they

all seem to have common traits such as rules and a scoring system. Along with all those features

there comes a lot of training in order to perform at the highest level of said sport. That high-level

game play of a sport is exactly what people love to see and they become fans. Those fans will

then spend their hard-earned money on expensive tickets, merchandise, and even the same gear

as professionals in hopes that they can reach that level of play themselves. We see this in just

about every sport out there that has a professional scene, and this turns the organizations that

hosts games and teams into multibillion-dollar industries. These organizations such as the Nation

Basketball Association (NBA), National Football League (NFL), and Major League Baseball

(MLB) are just a few who have impacted millions of lives with the high level of play they

provide. I think it safe to say that the sports these organizations represent have established

themselves as some of the most popular sports in the world. However, there is another industry

that I have seen take the world by storm and brand themselves as a sport as well. This industry is

known as Esports and it covers video games at a professional level. While eSports history is brief

when compared to other big industries, the amount of growth and success it experiences shows

that it can and will out do other sports in the subject of popularity.
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We are introduced to sports at such a young age that it’s no wonder why we are so

attached to them now as adults and video games are no different. We start young with video

games keeping it simple and playing within our parents guide-lines much like regular sports.

Those with a competitive nature will not be satisfied with winning a few video games and they

will do all they can to be not just good, but the best around as would an aspiring athlete. The best

way to look at Esports and its participants is just how you would regular sports and the players

involved. While sport have games such as basketball, football etc. Esports have plenty of games

under it umbrella described by James Candela and Keith Jakee’s academic journal Can Esports

Unseat the Sports Indutry listing off “League of Legends, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

(CS:GO), Halo, Call of Duty, and Super Smash Bros”. These are just the games that have

massive international tournaments and you can just as easily see this pattern in traditional sports.

With that in mind you also have to look at the players of these video games the same way you

would an athlete for any sport, obviously the demands are different, but the scene is the same.

This is the best way to give an idea of what Esports are at first glance and how seriously it should

be taken currently.

As said previously, the eSports industry is new when compared to other big-time sports

so it’s important to note its brief history in this world. According to Dave Consolazio’s article

The History of Esports he shows when the first signs of esports were shown saying “By most

accounts, the first official video game competition on record happened at Stanford University on

October 19, 1972” where they invited people to play a game called Spacewar in a tournament

with the grand prize being “a one year’s subscription of Rolling Stone magazine”. A very

humble beginning but it planted the seed for future events to come. The year 1980 also held

significance in eSports with Consolazio bringing to light the tournament Atari held for the game
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Space Invaders saying that “The event attracted over 10,000 players and helped bring video

games out of the shadows as a niche product and firmly into the public’s eye.” It was an exciting

year for gaming, but the technology of course was lacking to really get any video game

competitive scene out into the world. What is important to note here is the amount of growth the

competitive video game scene received going from a small college hosted tournament to a

successful company (at the time) holding a championship inviting thousands. These are just the

recorded events that are noted and I’m sure that more research would show small tournaments

happening all over the world for a variety of games. The rich but brief history does not stop there

because 2006 was where FUN Technologies hosted a “Worldwide Webgames Championship in

which 71 players competed for a $1 million grand prize” (Consolazio, The History Of Esports).

Suddenly, professional gaming was no longer a fun side gig to satisfy your need for competition

because prize pools are getting huge and a lot can be done in this society with a million dollars.

Soon technology became more advanced and much more affordable for average families to

afford which led to gaming receiving that much more attention. The summer of 2010 was where

Nintendo introduced one of the biggest and longed competition of Esports time using Super

Smash Bros as the main game where “over 400,000 participants” battled it out for over a month.

What’s important to note about these examples is that the growth never slowed down even when

technology may have been to our terms ancient and when technology advances such as new

gaming consoles or games themselves, so does the popularity.

Growth is a natural process that nearly everything being or idea experiences so

long as it has the necessary resources to grow like plants or people. The same is said for ideas

and industries so an important point to note is the growth Esports has experiences over the years.

The 2000’s were crucial for competitive gaming as far as games being introduced and players
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becoming professional, but it lacked the viewership in order to really get it going. That is until

2011 when Twitch hit the online world and made watching professional gaming a whole lot

easier. Richard Yao gives a great description of Twitch in his article Gaming as a Cultural Force

describing it as “the Amazon-owned live-streaming platform of choice for gamers from all over

the world, now has one million viewers watching others play video games on its platform at any

given time”. Ultimately a platform like YouTube but rather than prerecorded videos, Twitch

brought live streams of players to whomever has a device and internet making competitive

gaming just as easy to watch as primetime sports. With that, several companies live streamed

tournaments of their games with professional teams going head to head in whatever video game

they specialized in. A great example of this would be the League of Legends 2014 World

Championships with staggering statistics showing “the aggregate viewing time of the

championship was 179 million hours with a peak of 11.2 million concurrent viewers” (James

Candela). When the topic of Esports is brought up, League of Legends is a staple for the industry

and these numbers don’t lie. Especially when you consider the year prior where its “aggregate

viewing time was 70 million hours and had its peak of concurrent viewers at 8.2 million” (James

Candela). This is only one of several games out there that rake in these kinds of numbers every

year and of course with results such as these, investors are soon to follow. Big names start

getting involved such as “Alex Rodriguez, Shaquille O’Neil, and Jimmy Rollins” (James

Candela) investing in “NRG eSports” (James Candela) and when asked about this move they

responded with them wanting “to get in super early as they are seeing the giant viewership

numbers that are dwarfing pro sports right now” (Rovell, 2016)” (James Candela). These are just

some of the individuals noticing the growth esports is experiencing and where there is growth

money is right alongside it. There is a certain beauty in this described by Fawzi Itani in his
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article The Expanding World of Esports Sponsorship where he states “the esports space will

continue to nurture a sense of creativity, figuring out how best to serve its audience”. This

statement is unique in the sense that now there is now a way reach out to a community that

hasn’t seen the spotlight of popularity and will now encourage a whole new field of creativity in

people. It’s that type of creativity that brought out a career for Finlay Stewart where he is a Team

Manager for the very successful gaming organization, Fnatic. He manages one of the best

League of Legends team in Europe and insure their comfort and environment are at the highest

levels as any manager for a team would and he describes it as “The life of an esports manager is

an exciting one: I travel the world for free, attend amazing events and meet awesome people. By

the end of 2016 I will have travelled to Katowice, Rotterdam, Cologne, Krakow, Seoul and

America (if we make Worlds). Although at times it can be stressful and there’s a dearth of real

downtime, the tradeoff is absolutely worth it.”. All of that just because people want to play video

games professionally. The growth is real, and it has no intentions on stopping with statistics

favoring eSports by a long shot and countless individuals living their dreams with a stable career

in video games.

The importance of growth for anything is huge but the only way you can really see if it

worked is through success. Defining success can be tricky since many people have different way

of describing it but in this sense, I want to take a deeper look at the money involved. A great

company to always look at when it comes to esports is Riot Games who created League of

Legends. Authors Burt Helm and Lindsay Blakely of the article Company of the Year Riot

Games go into great detail here explaining that “By the end of 2010, Riot Games had rung up

$17.25 million in revenue, according to SuperData” but it doesn’t stop there when just a year

later “sales had almost quintupled, to $85.3 million”. Revenue multiplying is an extremely rare
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sight especially for a free to play video game so of course the creators took that money and

continued to invest in making their production looks even better to draw in bigger crowds. It is

also important to note that its not just the people watching and enjoying eSports, but sponsors

and branding have also contributed. Brands such as ESPN, Geico, Coca Cola, Samsung, and

TBS have started “adapting to the evolution of the industry by embracing eSports through

broadcasting events, sponsoring teams, and using professional eSports players in advertisements”

(James Candela). Private investors encouraging growth in the eSports industry like Shaquille

O’Neil or Rick Fox is just the ground work but now that the popularity is there, those big

companies will not only invest but they will help stabilize the cash flow. Stability is another key

factor to success and companies like those would never put their money into an industry that they

thought couldn’t stand the test of time. There are no one hit wonders when it comes to this level

of popularity, the risk would be to high for what this industry requires as those requirements are

like legitimate sporting events. To say eSports have been successful is an understatement and the

plans to continue are in full swing with a goal of providing high level gameplay and

entertainment to the public.

Now the claim of eSports surpassing legitimate sports in the terms described is a bold

statement to say the least and could easily be argued. While things may seem to be going in the

way of eSports, we cannot rule out the competition that has been around much longer than any

eSport. People have a hard-enough time as it is accepting eSports as a legitimate industry let

alone a threat. The competition eSports faces are some of the biggest sporting events known to

this world and those would be the Olympics, FIFA’s World Cup, and the NFL. By viewership

alone they have eSports beaten with “37 of the top 50 sporting events rated by viewership, in

2014, came from the NFL” (James Candela) with the Olympics taking “eight of the events”
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(James Candela) and FIFA having “three of the remaining 13 events” (James Candela). People

all around the world have heard of at least one of these three events so its not wonder why they

have secured the top fifty most viewed sporting events as most of them are broadcasted

worldwide. In terms of raw viewers, the World cup raked in “just over one billion people” and

the Olympics had “2.1 billion people” watching “at least one minute” (James Candela). With

numbers hitting the billions its no doubt to argue that eSports has a very little chance competing

with big events like that with their numbers just breaking 10 million. That being said we are still

in early days of eSports and there is plenty of time to catch up and surpass the previously stated

events.

It is safe to say the times are always changing and with that in mind we should be ready

to accept change in any form. In this case it is the shifting of popularity between sports and

eSports. Generally, it is accepted that eSports are here to stay and have planted their feet firmly

in pop culture. Esports is an industry that provides so much opportunity to a wide variety of

people, businesses, and ideas. Gifts and talents can finally be realized that are otherwise useless

anywhere else while investors and companies are safe investing their money due to the rapidly

growing popularity. This does not mean we should turn off our athletic events and move away

from them but rather respect the new form of sport and realize it has the potential to be greater

than any other sporting organization. Video games are not just for fun any more and just like

with anything else, if you put in the time and dedication to be good at that game then its possible

to make a career out of that. The digital age is here and with it comes the industry that will (with

time) surpass the popularity of traditional sports.

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Works Cited

Candela, James, and Keith Jakee. Can ESports Unseat the Sports Industry? Some Preliminary

Evidence from the United States. Choregia, vol. 14, no. 2, July 2018, pp. 55–71.

Consolazio, Dave. The History of Esports. Hotspawn, Oct. 7th, 2018.

Helm, Burt, and Lindsay Blakely. Company of the Year Riot Games. Inc, vol. 38, no. 10, Dec.

2016, p. 68.

Itani, Fawzi. “The Expanding World of Esports Sponsorship”. The Nexus, Oct. 5th, 2018.

Stewart,“Quaye” Finlay. “Life of an LCS Manager”. Lol Esports, July. 28th, 2016.

Yao, Richard. “Gaming as a Cultural Force: How gaming and esports achieved mainstream

popularity, and what marketers need to do in response.” IPG Media Lab, 2018.