Electronic sports (esport) has been growing strongly for nearly 10 years and has become a billion-dollar industry, attracting millions of players and viewers around the world with top leagues. High bonuses of up to hundreds of millions of USD, such as DotA 2’s The International tournament, are held every year with rewards of up to 30 million USD.
What is e-sports?
Since the video game industry has developed for nearly two decades, with networking capabilities, players can interact with each other over LANs and the Internet like Starcraft, Warcraft, Age of Empires, etc. The needs to compete each other to find who was the best in the tournaments gradually create the concept of electronic sports.
While regular sports include football, track and field, tennis, swimming, etc., eSports focuses on the most popular games, such as League of Legends, Counter-Strike : Global Offensive, DotA 2, … Athletes are professional gamers, they spend all their time living and practicing advanced skills at gaming-house (focused game training environment).
The benefits of esports
In addition to bonuses, gamers also have salaries from organizations. Organizations that may be specialized in gaming such as TSM, Fnatic, Cloud9 or maybe a famous brand such as Razer, Samsung, SKT, Roccat.
When gamers successfully compete, they sell more products or add sponsors ‘logos on the players’ uniforms and on all promotional channels such as YouTube, Facebook and they extract part of that money to pay for their team members.
There are many players and teams competing in various games such as TSM, Gamers2, Fnatic, and SKT but there are also teams that specialize in only one game. E-sports have taken a leap like today, thanks in part to online television (Twitch or YouTube).
These streaming technology services bring tournaments to a wider audience, and game publishers focus on developing a view to make watching the game more appealing. The organizers recruit professional commentators with knowledge of the game so viewers are increasingly benefiting from watching e-sports tournaments like football matches.
Thereby sponsors spend more money on esports tournaments. It is possible to look at a number of large corporations that regularly participate in sponsoring e-sports tournaments such as Intel processor chip maker with Electronic Sports League (ESL), three famous carbonated water brands namely Coca Cola, Monster and Mountain Dew, manufacturers of hardware and computer components such as MSI, SteelSeries, BenQ, Roccat, HyperX, Razer, and Logitech…