This picture is from a Dota II tournament held July 2014, in Seattle.
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Image IV
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The reasons in which eSports should be considered a sport, greatly outweighs the reasons on why it should be left in the past. After extensive research and interest into the controversy, some major trends appear within the research. All the research points to the increase of popularity of eSports, and why it should be considered a professional sport on a global scale. The trends that appeared were available revenue, amount of viewership
increase, and government allowing visas. The increase of eSports popularity is not limited to these trends, there is other equally important facts that help show the reasons why it should be a professional sport.
Image V
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ESports covers a major variety of different types of games. Image V shows the names of the games and the amount of revenue that the players receives from tournaments. Within this picture the top five games cover a wide verity of diffrent type of games; Dota is a, real time strategy (RTS), League of Legends is a, multiplier online battle arena (MOBA), Counter-Strike is a, first person shooter (FPS). Each and every one of these games is different in their own way. Manly the argument for eSports is focused on the bigger games, such as, Dota, StarCraft, League of Legends, Counter-Strike, and Call of Duty.
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Revenue
The amount of revenue available is split between the players and the company that supports the movement of eSports. The players make enough money between streaming and tournaments that they can make a living on playing their game; “tournaments awarded more than $15 million around the world, up from over a $1 million a decade ago" (DiChrstopher). This increase is a huge increase of money being spilled out for these eSports tournaments, this is even enormous when split between the team of five. Matt Kasten, a writer for SportTechie, states “gamers themselves bagged a total of $25 million in 2013 from competitive tournaments, a 350 percent increase over the past four years.” In addition “a team at an event in Seattle bagged $5 million” (Heaven 17). For this particular event each player of the team left the tournament a million dollars richer. If these figures look big, the revenue for the supporters is even bigger. These companies are making hundreds of million dollars of this eSports boom. Nick Wingfeild states, “global revenue for games is $20 billion higher than the music industry’s and is chasing that of the movie business.” Also, “Twitch.com, which is a streaming website for gamers, was bought by Amazon.com for $970 million.” Kasten adds “Riot Games, are making hundreds of millions of dollars in yearly revenue.” In addition, “Riot games made $624 million in revenue for League of Legends in 2013” (Breslau). All three of these sources show what is out there for revenue for eSports, and it shows the companies that have stuck there necks out have made hundreds of millions of dollars. In Breslau statement he is only saying the amount that Riot Games has made from one game, which is a staggering amount of money. Also Image V helps show the revenue for each particular game. If eSports hadn’t moved into the right direction then these companies wouldn’t have reached out and tried making money, and without these companies reaching out then eSport would have never have grown.
Amount of Viewership
The next trend found within my sources is the amount of viewership increase between the players and the tournaments that these players attend and preform in. The players get staggering amounts of viewers by streaming on a website called Twitch.com, which is a free streaming website used by gamers. They released a report in January that stated that “12,000,000,000 minutes watched per month… twitch users watch on average 106 minutes of content per day” (Breslau). Even though the viewership for the players is impressive the number of viewership for the tournaments is staggering.
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Image VI
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The eSports tournaments sell out the arenas that they take place in, and sometimes attract more of an audience than traditional sporting events (Wingfeild). Wingfeild also adds, “73,000 attendees at a four-day tournament.” Seventy three thousand people watching an eSports event is a massive attendance, that’s more than what attended the NCAA national championship final. Kasten states, “the 2013 League of Legends Season 3 World Championship’s 32 million viewers surpassed both the BCS National Championship and Game 7 of the NBA Finals by 7 million and more than doubled the viewership of the World Series.” Also, “total competitive gaming viewership of that calendar year reached a staggering 71.5 million viewers across all platforms.” Before eSports grew, the participants would be lucky if they received half the amount of viewers. This increase of eSports was only possible because of the increase in technology. Without it eSports becoming a professional sport wouldn’t even be an augment.
Government Granting Visas
Video IV
This is a video from a player in a tournament, that shows how into the game the broadcasters/players can get. |
The United States government allowing visas for international players is the leading step for eSports players. This is step is big because this is how international professional athletes get to play for American sport teams. Like David Beckham, as Shawn Knight reports “non-American players may soon be able to join U.S. teams.” Throughout the research the point about the government allowing visas has arisen from more than one article. Paul Tassi reports that “it’s another cog in the wheel of the eSports machine that continues to grow.” This is the biggest point to the argument because of the fact that this is how international athletes can play in the states, and because of the fact that it is the U.S government that is seeing these players as professionals.
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