Repeated growth in revenue and competitors has allowed the esports to expand consistently, and it doesn’t look to be slowing to a halt any time in the near future.
The esports industry has flourished over the last decade and is estimated to reach a value of $1.1 billion this year, with universities, professional clubs, and organisations fielding teams across multiple games.
Data analyst site Newzoo, which specialises in esports, projects not only a growth of $150 million from 2019 but also a boom in audience numbers to 495 million people globally“.
I believe the biggest impact on the industry is when gaming publishers started to release games for free,” said Morgan Ashurst, marketing manager at the British Esports Association.
“Over the years, more brands are starting to get involved in sponsorship which is increasing the global knowledge of esports as a whole.”
The University of Manchester’s esports team has also grown significantly in the years since its creation in 2014, from 100 members on Facebook to 1500 across Facebook and Discord, a digital distribution platform, today.
While the team was initially a space for League of Legends it now fields players in multiple games, including Overwatch and Counterstrike, two of the most popular.
The team also runs the annual King of the North tournament, a ‘free to enter’ competition for university students, which this year included the above games as well as Rainbow Siege: Six.
“Esports is a rapidly growing industry and in the next few years I see it becoming much larger,” said Jon Chia, president of the University of Manchester’s esports team, “I feel that esports will become a household name.”
When asked how the industry can progress, Ashurst said: “We’ll start to see more non-endemic brands start to get involved within the industry.
“I think one of the biggest things about esports right now is the viewership, and one way in particular this can look to change is changing the viewer experience during live streaming.
“YouTube gaming, Twitch, Mixer and Facebook are all massive streaming platforms for the gaming space. More and more people are turning into players live streaming or posting gaming-related content.”
And gaming content is taking a far more prominent role on platforms than before; in 2018, YouTube recorded 50 billion hours of gaming content and in the second quarter of 2019, Twitch recorded 2.72 billion hours to YouTube’s 736 million.
“The next step is to break into the mainstream,” said Dan Shields, secretary for the University’s esports team “and hopefully be shown alongside traditional sports.”
Esports come in a vast array of different games, with sport versions such as the FIFA or Madden franchises, first-person shooters like Call of Duty, or League of Legends styled online arena games.
The significant variety in games and requirements is something which Chia highlighted as part of what makes esports so different.
“Esports are unique to each other and to regular sports since they are very dissimilar in nature and have their own unique aspects to them that make them interesting.”
Although, Chia continued, the ability required from the players involves a combination of calm under pressure and mental strength, which likens it to more traditional sport.
Chia’s views were echoed by Shields, who said: “Esports differ from traditional sports in only really one way: physical exertion. In all other ways, they can be compared quite closely.
“Both require good communication skills, hand-eye coordination, team tactics, and critical thinking. More recently, we’re seeing fitness development also becoming a key aspect of professional sports organisations.”
And not dissimilar to other sporting clubs, the esports community is close-knit, with many people joining for the social aspect of playing or watching.
Additionally, the community, Ashurst notes, creates an excellent atmosphere at the events and cheering for their teams, and helps the evolution of games into a competitive space.
But one key point is the lack of female members of the community, although Chia noted this is a typical problem throughout the esports community but believes esports are a space where gender should not be an influencing factor.
To this end, there are a number of initiatives put in place to increase the involvement of females, said Ashurst, which has grown year on year, partly due to programs such as Women in Esports and AnyKey.
“At the minute it leans heavily towards male players,” said Shields “but we see more and more female players joining each year so hopefully this gap becomes smaller over time.”
