ESPORTS SPECIAL
IS ESPORTS THE
NEW GOLD RUSH?
With a huge and fast-growing male audience and the biggest tournaments already filling arenas, eSports
is being hyped as the new frontier for betting companies, but is it really a new gold rush for operators
and affiliates? iGaming futurologist Mark McGuinness gazes into his crystal ball for iGB Affiliate.
THERE IS NO doubt eSports currently
resembles a tsunami, sweeping everyone
along in its path. Which is hardly surprising,
as video gaming is a multi player, multibillion dollar business of the kind iGaming
executives and affiliate marketers dream
of. And of course, watching people play
professional eSports is already popular
in Asia, one of the most lucrative betting
regions for many years now.
But why so much fuss over eSports
at the moment? Well, competitive video
gaming looks to have finally come of age in
America, where it’s no longer suffering from
its previous image problems, of stereotypical
computer nerds or hackers playing in their
basements in unlicensed tournaments, eking
out a questionable living.
eSports is being given the Hollywood
makeover big-time, basking in the
razzmatazz, branding, glamour,
aspirational lifestyle, fast cars and all the
other trappings of fame and fortune. It’s
the new American Dream. Previously
chastised and downtrodden video gaming
Millennials can now realize their dreams –
they are the new ‘rock gods’ of this social
economy and now generation. Of course,
let’s not forget for the more cynical of you
out there, it’s all about the money, and
there is lots of it swirling around in this
fast-growing industry.
It’s hard not to get swept away with
the market numbers for eSports. In 2014,
Riot Games’ League of Legends world
championship boasted a reported 27
million streaming views. To put that into
perspective, it was more than the average
number of viewers for individual games in
the World Series of Baseball, which is the
second most viewed sport in the land of the
free. The number of eSports tournaments
worldwide more than tripled from 430
in 2013 to 1,485 in 2014. These 1,485
tournaments got viewed by more than 100
million global viewers, demonstrating how
huge a spectator sport it has become.
eSports viewing is therefore now on
a par with other traditional broadcast
sports. Twitch, the world’s largest video
game streaming platform, acquired by the
behemoth Amazon for near to $1 billion
last year, recently reported that the average
trend of people enjoying watching
each other’s content or day-2-day life
activities, instead of professionally created
content. This is reflected in the success
of RudeTube, Goggle Box in terms of
programming content and of course
something that has been prevalent in video
gaming for several years – namely POV or
point-of-view, where the game experience is
viewed through the character’s perspective
or an embodied second person point-ofview. Nowadays, everyone is creating and
sharing content – it’s now innate behaviour
“P-2-P exchange betting could see the more sophisticated
bettors trade the inevitable markets which will develop
as more data points are created around historical
tournaments and individual player and team performances.”
Twitch user spends around two hours a day
on the site, with some spending upwards
of five hours watching the major players
and events. What is more, Twitch generates
more than 100 million unique views per
month, with Twitch viewers racking up
some 20 billion minutes of viewing time
of the more than 11 million streams which
are broadcast on the platform. The Twitch
app has been downloaded more than 23
million times since its launch in 2011.
That is a volume of eyeballs and potential
advertising revenue that a traditional
television network executive can only
dream of being able to sell to brands.
Several factors are combining to form
the perfect storm and drive this rapid
growth. Gaming is second only to music
on YouTube in terms of viewing and
engagement. There is a growing social
in the social economy.
Perhaps a more deep-rooted or primal
driver can also explain its growth and
popularity. eSports is the new Gladiatorialstyle spectator sport that exhibits the same
or similar ‘Tribal’ culture and behaviours
epitomized in other sports, by athletes and
fans of football, NFL etc. alike. Perhaps
also reflective of the era of the Third
Industrial Revolution popularized by
Jeremy Rifkin, where there is widespread
disruption of traditional industries and the
masses, no longer wishing to be subjugated
by the current regimes, are turning in
droves to other forms of alternative
entertainment such as eSports.
We also know eSports attracts a
predominantly male audience, a muchsought-after demographic for many brands
both within the eSports ecosystem and
iGB Affiliate Issue 51 JUNE/JULY 2015
43