Everyone knows about sports, even if its just knowing that they exist. Some people get really into watching their favorite teams in football, basketball, and baseball. This can also be said about eSports, new phenomenon that has emerged within the last 18 years. Esports stands for electronic sports, and just like there are many different sports out there, competitive gaming has many different categories under it. For example, League of Legends (LoL), which is a team-based multiplayer online battle arena game that is 5v5 and is currently the most watched eSport. Or StarCraft 2 which is a 1v1 real-time strategy game that is extremely popular is Korea.
The first known video game tournament was in 1972 on October 19 at Stanford University. It was the first large scale video game competition with over 10,000 participants around the U.S. The tournament was over Spacewar! The winner of the tournament would receive a yearlong subscription for Rolling Stone. The winners were Bruce Baumgart with the free-for-all tournament, and Tovar and Robert E. Maas winning the team tournament.
The popularity of competitive gaming is phenomenal. It is so popular that the 2022 Asian Games will make competitive video games a medal sport. This was announced at the Olympic Council of Asia. The games to appear at the event are FIFA 2017, League of Legends, Dota 2, and StarCraft 2. Over the past 18 years, eSports has gone from a few hundred watchers and active fans to global recognition, tournaments being broadcasted worldwide on ESPN, twitch, YouTube and so much more. In the year 2018, the global esports market generated $906M of revenue, this is almost 40% more than what was made last year. And, it is expected that the eSports revenue will grow to 1.6 billion by 2021.
The industry has grown beyond what many thought, growing to millions of viewers and hundreds of professional teams. But this is only the beginning for eSports; the industry is projected to continue to grow more popular than traditional sports. Only time will tell if the eSports industry is the new frontier.