Esports on the Rise: Can it Soon Surpass Real Sports?

Esports, also known as electronic sports, is a form of sport that consists of video game tournaments. Esports have often organised online video game tournaments involving professional players, either individually or in teams. This blog will discuss Esports and whether it will soon come to outdo conventional sports.

The Beginning of Esports

Amateurs mainly organised these tournaments until the late 2000s, when professional gamers and fans saw a massive rise in popularity by competing and broadcasting live. Thanks to computer games’ success at the time, several game developers were actively creating and designing games and providing funds for competitions and events by 2010.

ATARI held a Space Invaders Championship in 1972 that drew 10,000 entrants, and 50 million internet fans were glued to their screens in 1998 to watch the StarCraft 2 tournament on PC. Twitch accounted for 17 million of those fans. Esports are popular for a variety of reasons:

  1. Video games are addictive.
  2. The accessibility and inclusiveness of gaming are attractive.
  3. The quality of video games.
  4. Gaming is a social activity.
  5. The diversity of the games.

Esports count as a professional sport like football in the same way that video games count as real entertainment because most people do not perceive Esports as a real sport or work. Gamers win money from competitions funded by investors or game makers. They are compensated in the same manner as Mercedes compensate professional athletes like Lewis Hamilton. Putting down hours of playtime and playing alongside the right people is the perfect way to stick out in the Esports world. Being a professional gamer isn’t the only available occupation in Esports. There are also jobs in advertising, operations, administration, event organising, social media managing, and coaching.

There Are Massive Winnings in ESports

There are many Esports games. These are the top five categorised by their total winnings in 2020:

  • Counter-Strike: Global Offensive: $14.75M
  • Dota @: $8.87M
  • League of Legends: $8.00M
  • Fortnite: $7.87M
  • Rainbow Six Siege: $5.02M

Since the epidemic, most sports have come to a halt. Still, Esports has remained untouched and has experienced continued development, and continues to do so. With games like League of Legends attracting a whopping 100 million viewers in 2019, it has since peaked at 44 million fans. Meanwhile, the Wimbledon men’s final peaked at about 9 million viewers in the same year. Fortnite, on the other hand, has an astounding 78 million monthly players and professional tournaments.

Another example is the NBA, which has 400 million supporters and viewers worldwide. Still, Esports has exceeded it by attracting up to 500 million fans in 2020 alone. It is doubtful that the pandemic will be eradicated anytime soon or that life will go back to how we knew it. With this in mind, Esports will continue to expand rapidly, eventually surpassing all conventional sports.

Inception and Effects of Online Gambling

In 1996, a few companies were founded to offer online sports betting, which was the beginning of online sports betting. InterCasino was the first to open a real money online casino. Since then, online gaming has accounted for more than a fifth of the entire gambling industry. Gambling is not only popular with adults; it is also popular with children, particularly now that it is possible to bet on Esports. Many niche bookmakers now sell bets on Esports tournaments.

In the United Kingdom, betting sales increased a whopping 30-fold between March 2019 and March 2020. The global Esports betting market is worth up to $19 billion, up from about $13 billion in 2016; this development, fuelled by online ads, nearly tripled during the lockdown period. Esports fans are on average 20-30 years old. Seventeen percent of gamblers in 2019 were between the ages of 18 and 24. These figures have quadrupled over time, and this comes when children in the United Kingdom play video games for at least three hours a day, as the number of fans and Esports supporters increases by the day.

According to research undertaken by GambleAware in partnership with the University of Sussex, and the thinktank Ipsos MORI, 85 percent of Esports betting-account followers on Twitter are between the ages of 16 and 23. Therefore, this suggests that a sizable proportion of Esports betting-account followers are under the age of 24. Unlike in professional sports, where gambling ads are prominent, Esports betting relies on memes, retweets, and gifs, essentially concealing gambling incitement.

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