— SEAN ZHANG
of Legends World Championship three times and earns an estimated US$4.6 million every year, which includes sponsorships and winnings. At the Dota 2 International tournament in Shanghai last year, 20-year-old Australian player Anathan ‘Ana’ Pham and his team of five won US$15 million. “He walked away with more money than Novak Djokovic did at the Australian Open. That’s the kind of money that’s in the esports space now,” says Zhang.
The trajectory for esports earnings is on the up, and the professional sports industry is taking notice. To marketers and enthusiasts, esports is a golden goose that presents the rare combination of a shiny brand-new market and a gameplay they already know like the back of their hand. If you still have questions about the legitimacy of esports, perhaps this will sway you—in December 2019, the International Olympic Committee announced that the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris will feature demonstration esports events. Not quite ready for spell-casting elves and orcs, and certainly not games that glorify violence, the committee has stressed that the focus will be on games based on traditional sports like basketball and football. Still, that’s a pretty big deal.
Colleges and universities are also seeing the value in grooming esports champions, offering scholarships that aren’t dissimilar to those for football, basketball and other sports. It’s not just fringe schools, either. University of California Irvine was the first to open a dedicated on-campus esports arena, while UCLA, University of Southern California, Cornell University and the University of Texas at Dallas, to name a few, each offer scholarships to esports athletes.
Currently, the Golden State Warriors, Houston Rockets, Philadelphia 76ers, Sacramento Kings and Cleveland
“I know what it takes to be a high-level athlete. The dedication and obsession for the game is the same in esports”
Clockwise, from opposite page: Esports tournaments draw thousands of fans to stadiums; Chinese esports team Funplus Phoenix in action; there’s no shortage of excitement and suspense in esports; South Korea’s T1 is the world’s top
team
Cavaliers have each invested in teams. Players like Steph Curry, Shaquille O’neill, Michael Jordan ... even Canadian rapper Drake, a die-hard basketball fan, have put their money on it. “There are NBA
esports teams, so you’ve got real-life NBA and then Playstation NBA leagues,” explains Tham. “A lot of these people grew up playing video games, so the prospect of owning a team is pretty attractive to them”.
In 2019, the esports industry generated US$1.1 billion in revenue, according to Newzoo, a market intelligence firm covering global games and esports. Of that, US$456 million came from sponsorship deals alone—a 34.3 per cent increase from the year before. Major companies like T-mobile, Intel, Toyota and Coca-cola sponsored The Overwatch League, while State Farm, Honda, Mastercard, Red Bull and Bud Light sponsored the League of Legends North America Championship Series. This January,
Nike became the official sponsor for South Korea’s T1 Entertainment & Sports, for whose team Faker plays. In April, BMW signed deals with five major esports teams: California-based Cloud9, Uk-based Fnatic, Beijing-based Funplus Phoenix, Germany-based G2 and South Korea’s T1.
So why is it that companies are happily pouring millions of dollars to back these kids battling it out behind computer screens?
Viewership figures from Newzoo show that in 2019, there were 201.2 million esports enthusiasts (viewers who watch pro esports content more than once a month) and 252.6 million occasional viewers (viewers who watched less than once a month). Of these figures, 52 per cent of esports fans are aged between 21 and 35 and 20 per cent of them are between 10 and 20 years old, both ideal demographics for marketers. For this reason, Talon Esports started a dedicated creative studio and marketing agency focused solely on esports and gaming.
Even the luxury sector has caught esports fever. In 2019, Louis Vuitton teamed up with for a series of collaborations including the skins of two in-game characters designed by Nicolas Ghesquière, Louis Vuitton’s artistic director for women’s collections. The house also created a monogrammed trophy case for the League of Legends World Championship in Paris— the esports equivalent of the FIFA World Cup or NFL Super Bowl—in November, and in December revealed a 40-piece capsule collection inspired by the game, dubbed LVXLOL.
The value in esports isn’t only monetary. From a social standpoint, esports is far more accessible than traditional sports. “You don’t need to be a seven-foot-tall basketball player, men and women can play on the same team, and as far as resources go, all you really need is a computer and a good internet connection,” Tham explains. But esports isn’t without its faults. Online harassment and trolling are rampant, and can take their toll on players—particularly women. T L Taylor, a sociologist at MIT who’s researched and written about esports culture since 2003, told
last year, “The internet side of it amplifies the worst parts of the historical pattern of exclusion that women and girls face when it comes to equitable participation in so many aspects of our culture”.
Zhang, when asked about this, says, “It’s definitely a real problem that many players face, but we do our best to offer a strong support system and remind them to keep their focus on the game and let their work speak for them.”
For some players in Asia, however, the rise of esports represents a validation on the global stage unlike anything they have experienced, even with gains made by athletes in many professional sports. For them, victory is sweet.
“I never imagined that I would make a living playing video games,” Hotdog29 muses. “I’m pretty lucky.”