E-Sports: Its not just a game anymore
Michael Shahin
Professional gamer. It’s a term many don’t recognize as a real thing, or anything to be looked at. However, the gaming industry is a fast growing industry, and this is becoming more of a real thing, and less of a joke to the gamers of the world and large businesses.
In 1990 if someone said that there would be a video game so popular, a business will be able to host a tournament for it, and crown someone a champion it might be hard to believe; just like in the NFL, NBA and MLB. The game isn’t the big point for businesses, the money is. If it can generate revenue somehow, some business person will find a way to bring it to the public.
While there are plenty of video games, there are a few that stand out for professional gaming. A few popular titles include League of Legends (LoL), DotA2 and the newest Call of Duty (CoD) game for console players. The world championship for DotA2 just passed, and a winner was crowned. The maker of the game, Valve hosted this tournament with 19 teams, across the world. The prize pool started was at a little over $1 million, but
Valve added a little feature. When gamers would purchase items within the game, any compendium booklets, and things that go with the game like cloths or toys would increase the prize pool for the game. This year the prize pool shot up to about $11 million; this was surprising to many.
“Gaming is becoming more and more powerful. It was kids just playing, and now it’s looked as a real e-sport. Look at LoL, Riot had their first big tournament back in 2011, and we’re barely in 2014 and look how huge that one game is,” said Gamestop employee Chris Blaisdell. “They sell out in the Staples, and were able to have over 30 million people watching live on Riots’ website. If that’s not enough to draw more businesses in, I don’t know what is.”
Streaming for video games has blown up recently, Valve had every game of the tournament being streamed live on Twitch.tv, and ESPN even made its own section on their website and had ESPN announcers there to broadcast the video game live for their website. Many people were blown away by ESPN’s coverage. A lot of fans were shown at the arena cheering on their favorite team or players they wanted to succeed, just like one might see in a NFL or NBA game.
“I like the way gaming is going, more people playing tournament style games. Even making sports games into tournaments and making it into a gaming party,” said MCC student Efren Chavez. In the past month there has been a lot of speculation over the services of Twitch.TV being bought out.
This is a website that provides gamers with a way to stream their content to gamers of all kinds, and all consoles/pc platforms. It also allows the users to have advertisements, donations and other forms of payment for the
stream to earn some revenue. Over the last month, we’ve heard rumors about Google offering $1 billion for the service, and had also gotten the attention of Jeff Bezos of Amazon. Monday August 25, Amazon purchased
Twitch.TV for $970 million. These companies are seeing the huge increase in gamers wanting to view other gamers possibly testing new content, or want to see if they should make the $60 purchase of a video game.
