'E-Sports' Can Now Drop the 'E'

'E-Sports' can now drop the 'e'

Video game tournaments attract major sponsors and offer huge prize monies. It's time to take them seriously.

26 Jul 2014 Tom Burns

Story highlights

Earlier this month, Novak Djokovic won $3 million after beating Roger Federer in the men's bracket of the oldest and arguably most prestigious tennis tournament in the world, Wimbledon. Later in July, however, there was an even bigger prize up for grabs, to be awarded to the team who could crush the others' pixels fastest.

DOTA 2, a popular online video game made by Valve Corporation, has just wrapped up its fourth annual tournament. Teams from the Americas, Southeast Asia, China, and Europe were in the running for first-place prize of more than $5 million.

It is the largest single prize and prize pool - more than $10.9 million - of any video game tournament in history.

In 1981, the now-defunct Electronic Games, the first US magazine to

Earlier this month, Novak Djokovic won $3m after beating Roger Federer in the men's bracket of the oldest and arguably most prestigious tennis tournament in the world, Wimbledon. Later in July, however, there was an even bigger prize up for grabs, to be awarded to the team who could crush the others' pixels fastest.

It is the largest single prize and prize pool - more than $10.9m - of any video game tournament in history.

In 1981, the now-defunct Electronic Games, the first US magazine to exclusively focus on video game news, was published. Its second edition reported on what was then the first large-scale video game tournament. The winner would officially be crowned world champion of the single-player arcade game, Space Invaders.

"[Atari's] nation-wide tournament, with regional events in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Fort Worth, Chicago and New York City, attracted well over 10,000 participants. By the time Bill Heineman emerged as World Champion in an expert show-down, hundreds of favourable articles and stories about electronic gaming had been [aired and printed]," Electronic Games reported. "The 'Space Invaders' Tournament established electronic arcading as a major hobby."

But it did more than that. The 1980s saw a boom of interest in electronic gaming in the US and elsewhere. By the early-to-mid 1990s home consoles such as the Super Nintendo dominated the market and were the entertainment systems of choice for the first truly international video game tournaments and would-be world champions.

With the proliferation of personal computing and the increasing utilisation of the internet at the turn of the millennium, players were soon sharing virtual experiences with one another from opposite sides of the globe. Where the players went, competition soon followed. Recent video tournaments have attracted major sponsors, prize pools, and audiences.

A virtual world with real dollars

Sponsorship deals from video game development companies or computer hardware manufacturers were what initially made tournaments, and eventually, professional players, possible. These events, collectively dubbed "e-sports", also attracted a unique - and growing - audience.

In terms of revenue, video games now outperform both Hollywood and the music industry in the UK. Major League Gaming, the largest tournament organiser of its kind in North America, claims they will soon rival traditional sports broadcasting.

"We'll be bigger than the [US National Hockey League] in terms of viewership and revenue in about two years," MLG president and co-founder, Mike Sepso, predictedat a press conference in 2013.

Cable sports mega-broadcaster ESPN isn't shying away from that possibility, either; earlier this year it partnered with MLGto air a Call of Duty tournament. Having established itself as a major spectator sport in recent years, it should come as no surprise that - as well as having the largest prize-pool - this year's DOTA 2 e-sports event also broke records in concurrent online viewership. Even before reaching its grand finals stage, peak concurrent viewership approached 950,000. As a comparison, the 2014 Super Bowl attracted, at its peak, 1.1 million online, and the most recent FIFA World Cup attained a peak of 1.7 millionsimultaneous online viewers.

As expected, traditional marketers are keen to get involved in e-sports' untapped markets, especially as they are made up in no small part by the supposed holy grail demographic: affluent youth. Big advertising dollars, such as offered by Coke, are being injected into tournaments, making them bigger and better. This flows on to create a larger audience, thus making these video gamers even more attractive to third-party marketers.

Such gargantuan tournaments have increased the number of players who are able to make a living off their prize money. Online video streaming of players commentating on their own games while playing allows them to generate a steady flow of advertising revenue between major events - besides, just like any other sport, regular, full-time practice is required if one wants to remain competitive. Combined with a sponsor or two, "gamer" has now become a job title.

Dropping the 'e'

Sports, traditionally conceived, evokes an image of the great outdoors. Grass.Sunshine.Physical exertion.Probably a ball or single object of importance, if not a single objective. However such games, especially team games - which many video games are also - include a seemingly unknowable number of tactics.

Shrewd sporting tacticians have been hailed as among the most salient forces along the road to victory. Relatively static rules might govern the limits of allowable action, but innovative strategies are continually contrived to challenge the opposing side.

eSports in Numbers: 5 Mindblowing Stats

eSports means big money and big numbers – let’s add some real-world context for you.

Research has revealed that over the last year we've racked up some eye-watering numbers in terms of eSports watched, prize pools offered and events attended. To help put them into perspective we've done some handy conversions. Read on to find out the weight of the world's eSports viewers, how many tanks World of Tanks is worth and how many chocolate bars a Dota 2 prize pool could buy...

71,500,000

This is the number of people who watched competitive gaming in 2013. That's more than the entire population of the UK or France and double the population of Canada. If you take the average human weight it's also 4,402 million kilograms of flesh, bone and assorted nerves and fluids all focusing on eSports. Perhaps we should have just left it at the population stuff when we tried to put this into perspective...

2,874,380

That's the number in US dollars of the largest eSports prize pool from last year which came courtesy of Valve's Dota 2 tournament, The International. If you'd prefer to have that figure in pounds it's about £1.72 million. If you'd prefer to have it in terms of how much confectionary it can buy, it's about 2.9 million Twixs. The Alliance made off with the grand prize of $1.43 million last time but they're a Swedish team so perhaps Daim bars or salted liquorice would have been a more appropriate choice of sweet...

32,000,000

The number of people who watched the League of Legends World Championship Season 3. If Riot had invited everyone to watch it in the same place (rather than just the 18,000 people who had tickets) they would have needed a venue more than 350 times the size of Wembley Stadium. Or they could have borrowed the entire country of Morocco.

2.2

That's the average length of time in hours for an eSports viewing session. If watching eSports earned you the UK national average wage those sessions would net you about £28 a time, which is about the same as a dozen classic League of Legends character skins. By comparison, the average YouTube user only watches five hours of online video per month.

475,000,000

The amount of money in US dollars World of Tanks made in 2013. The creators at Wargaming could theoretically spend said money acquiring no fewer than 55 M1 Abrams tanks IRL. That’s not all: Wargaming is expected to increase that to about $506 million in 2014 and $590 in 2015 (58 tanks and 68 tanks respectively, not allowing for inflation of tank costs).