eSports revs up the auto industry
Show attendees race and win prizes in the Forza Motorsport 7 video game
The 2018 Canadian International AutoShow is embracing eSport gaming with a competition open to all attendees.
Ten ticket holders at a time will be able to race in the popular Forza Mo
torsport 7 video game. The player with the fastest track time each day will qualify for the grand finale on Feb. 25, when 10 racers will vie for prizes valued at $10,000, including a $1,000 cash prize for the winner, as well as sponsor packages.
The auto show’s first eSports competition is being organized by Juliana Chiovitti, partner at marketing firm The Motorsport Agency and a former race-car driver.
Eight months ago, she began visiting various eSport competitions and came to believe such an event would hold plenty of crossover interest for this show’s hundreds of thousands of attendees.
She received buy-in from sponsors including BMW, Xbox and retailer Canada Computers, as well as computer hardware company Asus and its gaming division Republic of Gamers. Now it’s, “ladies and gentlemen, start your (virtual) engines.”
“We had tremendous enthusiasm from our partners,” Chiovitti said in a statement. “I’m sure we’ll see this feature be one of the talking points at the show and likely expanded in future years.”
She points to last year’s launch of the F1 eSports Series as a measure of gaming’s growing acceptance by the racing community.
Formula One promotes the professional league, which competes in the F1 2017 video game and crowned British teenager Brendon Leigh its inaugural winner at the finals held in Abu Dhabi in November.
Real-world racing teams now use eSports as a recruitment tool. Twenty-five-year-old Dutchman Rudy van Buren recently won McLaren’s World’s Fastest Gamer series and secured a job as McLaren’s F1 simulator test driver. It also got him an invitation to get behind the wheel of real race cars and go head-to-head against racing notables such as Juan Pablo Montoya and Helio Castroneves on a parallel track at the Race of Champions in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, earlier this month.
ESports events draw big crowds, such as the 15,000 spectators who packed the Air Canada Centre in Au- gust 2016 for the North America League of Legends Championship Series Summer Finals.
While some might find it hard to understand why so many would pay to watch others play video games, insiders don’t see it as strange at all.
Tamir Kastiel, project manager at MediaXP — which is producing the AutoShow competition — points to the 100 million-plus viewers who regularly tune in to the Super Bowl. “They’re watching people play sports, and those people who went to the Air Canada Centre see their event as a sport, as well,” he says.
And if it is a sport, it’s one that’s growing rapidly. Games researcher Newzoo pegs 2017 global eSports revenues at $660 million (U.S.) — a number it sees climbing to $1.5 billion by 2020. Just as millions of Canadians tune in Saturdays to watch
Hockey Night in Canada, massive numbers of gamers follow the exploits of their eSports heroes on digital platforms such as Twitch.
Newzoo sizes the current eSports audience at 385 million, divided evenly between enthusiasts and occasional viewers. It estimates 22 per cent of U.S. males ages 21-35 watch eSports, which is about as many who watch baseball and hockey. It’s no wonder the NHL has reportedly held discussions about establishing a footprint in the industry. Meanwhile, the AutoShow has partnered with Twitch to stream competition highlights at autoshow.ca/esport from 2 p.m. to 8 p.m. every day of the show. Kastiel promises eSports stars will be dropping by, although he did not provide any names.
There will be other gaming stations and racing simulator pods on-site for attendees to try out. The competition stations consist of equipment most players use at home: PCs and Xbox One controllers, and they will race select BMW cars.
The eSports arena will be on the 700 level, Room 715 A/B of the South Building at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.
Chiovitti and Kastiel are optimistic eSports will become a regular feature at the show and have batted around ideas. The competition could be opened up to players across North America who would qualify at local dealerships or gaming tournaments. And if that succeeds, it could go international.
“An enormous amount of people play these games and they are highly competitive,” Kastiel says.
“There is also an enormous amount of investment from the automotive industry. Pretty much every major automotive manufacturer is represented in Forza. There’s so much potential here and we’re excited to dive in and see where this exciting new combination for gaming can go.”