Esports is a type of sports too. Maybe some of you will think that it is just a video games and it is not a real sports but it did affect a lot of industries in a good way. There are so many of them even who think that Esports is only people playing video games on stage , it is hard for the older generation to understand it.
1.What is Esports?
2.Career of Esports
3.Impact of Esports
What is Esports?
Ten years ago, may be only a few people believed that playing video games as a professional sports can become a huge thing, but this is what happening nowadays. Esports is a form of sport competition using video games, especially team based games. The scene of Esports is growing rapidly and become larger and larger with million of fans and dollars nowadays , and it becomes more common , a international phenomenon. Also there are a lot of different type of games. Esports means that teams of people playing against each other in a professional level, the team who win in the huge competition always get a lot of money from the prize pool. The professional players need to sign contract to become a player of a organization, and once the contract ended, they may sign to another organization, or the may get transferred just like football, basketball or baseball. There are a lot of small or big competition in a year and sometimes the prize pool may go up toa million US dollars .So far the largest prize pool in Esports history is ‘The International 2019’ competition of a game, Dota2, it had about 34million US dollars and there were 18 teams in this tournament.
Each Esports organization usually have multiple teams in different games. For example, Fnatic it has about 10 teams on different games, and others top tier Esports organization such as, G2 Esports, Team Liquid, Team Cloud9.
Career of Esports
If we talk about the career of Esports, everyone will only think of professional players, but in fact, except professional players , there are many other job options in this carer too, like coach, content creator, agent, event management, commentator. Let’s talk about the professional player first. Any multiplayer games can be Esports, and almost every games have a rank mode, once you get to the highest rank, or you joined some local lan competition and won , you may slightly have a chance of getting contracted by the big Esports organization.
Why becoming a professional player is so attractive for the teenagers? This is the question of many people. The answers are you can earn a lot and become popular all over the world. Last year, a battle royale game, Fortnite , had their first world cup, and it ended with $30 million of prizes awarded and a 16 years old teenager won $3million as Fortnite world champion. The top player of highest earing have already reach 6.9million overall for now. Every professional athlete have the time of retiring , including Esports players. The second thing is the popularity of the players, the players who play for the best teams in the world , they can always join the world tournament, major and these tournaments were streamed in different platform, and above million of viewers will watch it in internet, this is how they can become more and more popular.They still have lots of job options in this career after they retired such as becoming a coach, livestreamer, caster. Casters and team coach are also a good choices for the players after they retired.
Livestreamer, is a very popular choice of those professional player will choose, not every players are winning the competition and get a huge amount of prizes, so streaming become a way to use their popularity gain from the tournament .For example, the formal player from Team Cloud9,Shroud, he is a famous professional player from CSGO ,a FPS game. During his time of a professional player, he started to streaming his gameplay and after his retirement , he had average 20k of viewers that keep watching his stream and the donations ,the income from advertising is making him earn a lot. Everyone can start streaming , provide good contents to people. There are several platforms that people are using to stream, like Twitch, Facebook, Youtube , but Twitch is the most popular platform, and if there are some big events like world championship the viewers at the same time may above 500k people. In fact, there are a lot of people who are streaming everyday and it is a part of their life, their job already.
Impact of Esports
Esports can have a great impact on the economy. The world championship of Esports can be held on different places. For example , the world championships of League of Legends were held in 7 different countries, including America, China, German, Korea. We can see that the Esports competition viewers are growing rapidly. In 2017,it was estimated about 335million of viewers and by 2022, the number of esports viewers globally will grow to 645 million . Those tournament can really attract more people to travel to the country only to watch the tournament. The travel industry may have a good impact , just like the Olympic Games, it also attract a lot of people from different countries to travel to the host cities. According to Newzoo , The Esports Economy will generate at least $465 million in 2017 and it is expected to make more than a billion dollars in revenue in 2020.Esports also made impacts in different industries. The major sources of many Esports organization are from sponsorships and advertisement on the player’s jerseys, similar to traditional sports. Some famous companies like Audi, Marvel entertainment, energy drink brands like Monsters or Red Bull are willing to sponsor the esports organizations. We can know that the advertisement through Esports is a effective way to promote themselves, it may be more effective than television.
In Korea , Esports industry is well developed because the support from Korean government, with the help of government, they have a comprehensive system in the Esports industry. If you want to know who is the most famous player in the world right now, I would definitely say Faker, a professional player of League of Legends ,from Korea. The popularity of Faker has grown as fast as the Esports industry, His team, SKT T1 under the lead of him, have already won 3times of world championship, and Faker earned average2.5 million a year too, he became a celebrity and considered a God of League of Legends , just like the K-POP culture, the popularity of Faker also attract more and more people to travel to Korea, and the travel industry of Korea did have a good benefits.
Predicting the future is a difficult thing to do, but we can sure that the growing of Esports industry is unstoppable, and it will only become bigger in the future. Esports became the part of Asian Games in2018, and I think all of the gamers want to see Esports appear in the Olympics Games.
