READY PLAYER ONE
Forget grass, clay and Astroturf. The playing fields of 2018 are virtual
The midday sun blazes outside but it’s dark in the Sun Arena at Time Square in Pretoria. The only illumination comes from the bright pink and purple artificial lighting and the backlights of screens that cast a neon glow on the faces of the gamers in front of them.
At first glance, what’s going on inside this arena doesn’t seem at all comparable with what takes place at the city’s other sporting stronghold, Loftus Versfeld. But don’t be fooled by the lack of blue face paint, rucks and Steve Hofmeyr songs; Rush is one of the country’s biggest annual tournaments, dedicated to the world’s fastest growing sport, e-sports.
E-sports is the competitive practice of video games among teams of professional players and, yes, it’s a real sport.
Usually, when I venture that statement, I get a stern finger waved at me. “All that Mario and Luigi business is not a sport, it’s brain-rotting nonsense.” Stern finger goes on to insist that a sport is an activity that requires you to be outside, while admitting they enjoy playing squash. Or that in sport you must move around and not just sit in one place moving your hands; yet enjoy watching Formula One. If e-gaming isn’t a sport, then there’s definitely some finger-wagging needed in the direction of ESPN. Last weekend the sports channel screened The Overwatch League’s grand finals live from the Barclays Center in New York.
Outside the ESPN viewership, on July 28, the Barclays arena was packed with 20,000 people. Close to 300,000 more watched via Twitch, Amazon’s online video game spectating streaming platform, as team London Spitfire won the $1m prize. Twitch is in part responsible for the sport’s 38% year-on-year revenue rise. It’s expected to crack $908m globally this year. Considering that more than 1.2 million viewers tuned into the league on Twitch over the course of the 17 days, racking up a total of 12 million views, it’s little wonder that brands have invested close to $700m to align themselves with the esports industry.
Locally, though video gaming is already a R100m industry, e-sport communities are only just taking off. Nevertheless, sponsorship of the two biggest-name tournaments in SA comes from telecommunications companies that try to leverage the online gaming angle to peddle their internet-providing wares. VS Gaming is the esports subsidiary of Telkom, and Rush’s main sponsor is Vodacom’s youth-skewed 4U platform.
“By backing the most popular games in the tournament we wanted to make sure the association was there in terms of Vodacom 4U, to unlock the fact that we want to be the youth’s