The Rise of eSports-William Drew (Eco 1)

We all have that one game, that game that we would be so addicting you would not think of anything else until you had completed that game. Well, that’s gaming. Also know as eSports which is becoming bigger and bigger by the year and is estimated to generate approximately $1.2 billion dollars of revenue by 2022.

A key influence in the rise of the industry is caused by a huge rise in Competitive gaming. This has caused a massive increase in views and hype around who the best is and who can prove themselves to become the best. An example of this is the recent top hit game ‘Fortnite’. This massive hit game made a huge $2.4 billion dollars and $1.8 billion dollars in revenue in 2018 and 2019 respectively. Fortnite has recently started making regular tournaments where you can win a lot of money with the added bonus that anyone can enter. They also recently hosted the biggest gaming event in history with the winner hauling in $3 million US dollars. The top four also took home over one million US dollars.

But how does it work?

ESports is basically playing a video game except its against other people and it’s competitive. The three main components to turn a game into a sport is competition, tournaments and spectators. The increase in the number of jobs needed is huge with a rise of 185% in late 2019. These jobs vary from commentators , tech crew, and tournament referrers.

One thing that you need to make an industry successful are sponsors. But how can you sponsor a game? Well, a main sponsor in the eSports world in Twitch, a streaming site that allows people to live stream their game play across a massive platform of viewers. Other main sponsors of e sports are energy drinks such as Mountain Dew and Red bull, and Computer hardware companies such as Scorptec and Centre com.

How does this Affects the Economy?

Well simply when there is such a large amount of money being pulled from an industry it will boost the economy. In the case of eSports there are many affects on the economy. There are thousands of job opportunities created. The massive increase in online views on streaming sites like YouTube and Twitch has caused greater prize money which causes people to want to compete and win. It’s like playing Tennis at the Australian Open with the prize money worth over $4 million dollars. People want to compete. A large number of kids aged 12 – 18 are heavily invested in playing video games. This is fine until in game spending starts to take over. You have all heard of those stories where kids steal their parents credit cards and spend thousands of dollars on a game. When Fortnite was at its peek it was making around one million dollars a day from in game purchases. But what is the opportunity cost? What are these large companies doing with the money? A lot of the money goes to sponsors and and tournaments. But a lot of the money is also going to the game developers and and industry itself. What could people buy rather than in game spending, well this this is where the opportunity cost comes in. Instead of spending the money on Fortnite these kids could be saving the money on investments for latter in life of spending it on other things that may mean for in the future.

In Conclusion eSports is a rising economy worth to be over a billion dollars next year. It is taking over the online world and becoming a factor many peoples professional life.