The current state of e-sports

Hello everyone, hope that the week is going well for all of you! Today we are going to talk about the current state of E-sport, and what to expect from E-sport in the upcoming years. So let’s go ahead shall we? :)

You have probably heard of e-sport. E-sport is a video game competition where the best gamers (or team of gamers) compete playing a specific video game. This is a fairly new industry that is growing extremely fast. The most popular games in E-sport are League of Legends (LOL), Dota 2, Counter Strike, Star Craft 2, World of Warcraft, Overwatch. Let’s not forget that the game Fortnite is becoming more and more popular, even in e-sports.

1- Current market cap of video games and E-sport.

The video game industry today is to be taken very seriously. As a matter of fact, its market cap is now higher than the movie and the music industry combined [1] [2] [3]. Hence, last year the market cap was estimated to be around $108.9 billion market revenue. Many video game developments have budgets above $100 million dollars such as Grand Theft Auto IV or V. Many famous actors now have very successful careers in video games such as David Hayter (Metal Gear Solid Series) or Jesse Williams (Detroit become human).

(David Hayter, Metal Gear Solid voice actor)

The market of E-Sport is also growing like crazy. Just 6 years ago, its market revenue was estimated at 130 million dollars. Well it is estimated to reach 1.650 billion dollars by 2021, which will be almost 12 times more in less than a decade! Since video games (as shown earlier) are getting more and more attractive to the general public, I can only see e-sport benefiting tremendously from this.

2- Salaries in E-sport

E-sport is a very competitive field, in fact I personally do not think that there are that many other fields that are that competitive to be honest. As an example, there are about 100 millions LOL players around the world and very very few among them can make it to the top and remain at the top for a long time. It is actually extremely difficult and rare. Faker, is one of the players that was able to do that and he is definitely considered to be one of the best (if not the best) e-sport players of all time for a reason. Having said that, salaries in e-sport are fairly low if you do not make it to the top. However, many of those who cannot make it to the top (again because it is extremely competitive) become successful video game streamers, which is actually very good news [6].

(Faker, LOL player and legend)

Top e-sport gamers can actually get very high salaries. It is estimated for instance that Faker (from SK Telecom T1 team) makes about $2.5 million a year, sponsorship and tournament winnings excluded [4]. There was even some rumors that some teams in China offered him up to $4 million base salary, but he declined. Also, the Dota 2 Internationals competition which is the most prestigious Dota 2 competition had a prize pool of $24,787,916 last year [5]! The pool is actually expected to be higher this year.

3- Sponsors in E-sport and Streaming platform

There are more and more sponsors in E-sport, given that it has a very wide audience. Last year there was 165 million of frequent enthusiast e-sport viewers and 215 million occasional viewers [7]. So it is definitely a lucrative business for sponsors. For instance, Gaming makes up well over 50% of Nvidia business, which makes expensive but very powerful GPUs [8]. In fact NVIDIA has a lot of partnership in the video game industry and offers many services to gamers [9]. There are many powerful sponsors in e-sport such as Intel, Coca Cola, RedBull, T-Mobile [10] etc …

Streaming e-sport games is becoming more and more widespread. In fact, the average viewership on Twitch was estimated at 962,000 people in January of this year [11]. If you want some perspective, the total viewership per day on Fox and ESPN was around 1.5 million and 885,000 for MSNBC.

4- Increasing attractiveness of E-sport

E-sport is becoming more and more attractive to the general public and big tech companies. There are so many factors and reasons why, but here I am going to discuss two.

The first reason is Artificial Intelligence (AI). With AI becoming more powerful, complex e-sport games are now widely used to train AI. OpenAI which is a non-profit AI company, regularly trains one of its AI algorithm with the DOTA 2 game. In fact, they will be participating in the Dota 2 International competition next month (See the link here [12] where I talk about it if you want further details). This definitely increases the attractiveness of E-sport in the tech industry.

The second reason is that with the growing popularity of games such as Fortnite or Call of Duty among athletes, e-sports now have a new audience. Let’s not forget that those athletes are followed by million of people on Twitter or Instagram. This is for instance the case for the famous French soccer player Antoine Griezmann who regularly talks about Fortnite on social media and even celebrates like a Fortnite character everytime he scores a goal (see the picture below). This definitely increases the popularity of Fortnite and e-sports in general.

(Antoine Griezmann imitating a Fortnite character)

5- More games will become e-sport.

Video game publishers are sensing the popularity of e-sports and many of them are transforming there former games into e-sport games. This is for instance the case for the French publisher Ubisoft, which adapted its Rainbow Six franchise into an E-sport format. Ubisoft is clearly working very hard on the format of their Rainbow Six game to make it more attractive to E-sport players and I think that in the upcoming years it will grab more and more market shares in the e-sport market. Let’s not forget that Rainbow Six is a quite popular streamed game on Twitch.

My conclusion

I cannot say for sure of course, but it appears to me that the e-sport industry is still at its infancy. I expect a lot of growth and sponsorship over the upcoming years (unless there are major external factors). I also expect e-sport to be even more discussed by mainstream media. I also think that over the next years E-sport will become more and more competitive, but on the other hand more people should be able to make a career out of it due to its overall increasing market revenues. This is good because the games will be even more entertaining to watch than today, but also there will be more opportunities and accessibility for the average professional gamer.

OK that was it for today guys, I hope that you guys liked the post. Let me know what you think of the current state of e-sports.

I will see you all tomorrow! :)

[1] https://www.tweaktown.com/news/57455/games-industry-earn-108-9-billion-2017/index.html

[2] https://www.statista.com/topics/964/film/

[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/267784/music-downloads-revenues-since-2005/

[4] https://finalkill.com/league-of-legends/faker-salary/

[5] http://dota2.prizetrac.kr

[6] https://dotesports.com/general/news/esports-vs-streaming-money-career-31144

[7] https://www.statista.com/statistics/490480/global-esports-audience-size-viewer-type/

[8] https://www.investors.com/news/technology/click/nvidia-early-winner-in-esports-boom-video-game-publishers-to-follow/

[9] https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/02/02/nvidia-is-capitalizing-on-a-growing-pc-gaming-mark.aspx

[10]https://www.businessinsider.com/top-esports-sponsors-gaming-sponsorships-2018-1?r=US&IR=T&IR=T

[11] https://nordic.businessinsider.com/twitch-is-bigger-than-cnn-msnbc-2018-2?r=US&IR=T

[12] https://steemit.com/science/@juv79505/openai-bots-will-be-competing-at-the-dota-2-internationals

Pictures

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Picture 2 was taken from https://goo.gl/Bym5ka

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Picture 4 https://goo.gl/79Dp5G

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Picture 8 taken from https://goo.gl/53WZug

Picture 9 taken from https://goo.gl/NxGhAB

Picture 10 taken from https://goo.gl/HHv7mr

juv79505 sincerely thank you for reading this article. Please feel free to comment below in case you have ideas, questions, suggestions or simply want to criticize this article. Also, note that all pictures used in this article were extracted from the google section “pictures labeled for commercial reuse”. Stay tuned for more articles on health, environment, artificial intelligence, video games, technology in general, books, graphic novels, geography, history, sports and much more!

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