If we were to travel back twenty years in time and ask people about their favorite sport to watch, most would probably tell us about basketball, football and baseball. If we were to ask if they would ever watch video games, they would probably frown upon us and ask what that has to do with sports. It just wasn't the time back then, but at lot has happened since, to say the least.
According to Newzoo, a market research company focused on games and eSports, the number of people that view competitive video games will reach 385 million this year. Even though we're comparing to a single event, this is more than three times as much as the number of people who watched the super bowl. Not only that, but we've reached a point in time where some competitive eSport tournaments have way higher prize pools than tournaments in traditional sports, making the players in the teams millionaires from playing games. In addition to this, we're seeing an increasing number of eSport betting sites, which makes it possible to place bets on most of the competitive games - a form of entertainment that is exponentially growing.
The first competitive tournaments (1972-1989)
The establishment of eSports (1990-1999)
Competitive tournaments continued to increase in the 90's with Nintendo holding a world championship for NES in 1990. This included touring through twenty nine cities in the US, where players competed in three customized minigames based on Super Mario, Rad Racer and Tetris. The winner took home $10,000.00, which was quite nice at the time being. A second world championship was held by Nintendo in 1994, this time for SNES.
In the late 90's PC gaming had started to become very popular as it was now possible to compete against other players online. This is when the professional eSport organizations CPL was founded. They started off with tournaments for Quake where the second one had a prize pool of $15,000.00. Tournaments for Quake were also held in a yearly convention called QuakeCon and by the AMD Professional Gamers League. A league that also held competitive tournaments for Red Alert and Starcraft in the late 90's.
Becoming a billion dollar industry (2000-now)
Since the first tournaments on Quake, eSports have continued to grow faster and faster for each year. In the beginning of the millennium we saw the birth of more eSport organizations, such as World Cyber Games (WCG), Electronic Sports World Cup (ESWC), Electronic Sports League (ESL) and Major League Gaming (MLG). These are however just a few of all the competitive video game tournament organizations that exist today.
The past ten years we've seen a huge increase in the number of eSport games and prize pools held for these. The largest prize pool to date is the world championship for Dota 2, "the International", which offered an incredible amount of more than $20.7 million in 2016. An amount that seems to be increasing for the 2017 championship that's being held in August.
While prize pools are increasing for already established eSport games, a lot of game developers are having eSports in mind when they're creating new ones. They are however far from the only ones that see the potential in the rising eSports market.
Another huge industry that has started to invest in the market is the betting industry. As we mentioned in the introduction of the article, the eSport audience is estimated to reach 385 million people this year. With this many viewers, there's been a sparking interest in betting on the matches that are being played. It's therefore possible to find plenty of eSport bets on several different bookmakers these days and the industry is rapidly growing.
Pinnacle was one of the first established bookmakers to introduce eSports betting, which they did in 2010. It took them six years to reach their first two million bets on eSports. The second two million took only 11 months and between October 2016 and February 2017 (4 months) they had a million bets placed. This means that the third set of two million bets seems to be placed in only 7-8 months.
The value of the eSports industry is estimated to reach $696 million in 2017, but these numbers are with betting excluded. Unfortunately there are no exact numbers with betting included, but as the revenue for betting on traditional sports is a lot higher than the revenue from all other instances, it's likely that the same can be said about eSports. That would mean that the eSport industry currently is a billion dollar one.
A continued growth and mobile eSports (the future)
No one can tell for sure if eSports is ever going to replace traditional sports. There are certain barriers such as the games being too advanced, which means that you have to play them to be able to enjoy them. With that being said, there are quite a lot of numbers that certainly seem to point towards eSports. Not only is there an exponential growth in the number of eSport bets placed and not only is the value of the eSport industry growing bigger for each year, but a survey carried out by L.E.K shows that millennial's interest in eSports is as big as for traditional sports.
Only time will tell to for sure, but with youngsters growing up with mobile devices these days, games are certainly easy to come by and play anytime, anywhere. This leads us to a growing market for mobile eSports, which is looking to be the next huge thing. The past few years, several mobile games, such as Clash Royale, Vainglory and Hearthstone have been released. Even though these have all been successful in their own ways, there's a newly released game called Strike of Kings that seems to be taking over the mobile devices.
This game also goes by the name King of Glory, Realm of Valor and Honor of Kings. Even though the game isn't released in the entire world yet, but is mostly played in China, it already has more than 50 million unique daily players. League of Legends, which is one of the most successful eSport games ever have a monthly unique player base of 100 million. That is monthly, which means that Strike of Kings could very well already be more popular than League of Legends, which has been crowned the most played game ever. In terms of revenue, Strike of Kings made €432 million in April 2017, which in a year would be €5 billion. If we compare this to the $1.6 billion that League of Legends made in 2016, it's very clear that mobile eSports have a huge potential to become the next hit.
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