I’m a big Dota fan.
I’m not very good at it and I most certainly cannot carry a game, but I do enjoy the support role and I feel remotely useful when playing with my friends who are miles above my MMR rank. I tune into Twitch almost every time a Dota Tournament is live and find the professional matches a real blast to watch. I get super hyped for the legendary International Tournament, which last year raised more prize money than any other eSports game ever with a total prize pool of 18,429,613 dollars!!!
I’m not a big fan of other MOBA’s, like League of Legends, Heroes of Newerth or the relatively new and popular Smite, but they have completely sealed their place in the gaming universe for providing hours of fun game play for either free or a small price to unlock characters.
The questions I am looking to answer are: How big is esports?? Will it one day become as big as main stream sports??
In the western world, sports are dominated by Football (or Soccer if you’re American), Rugby, Tennis and funnily enough, the ever boring Cricket. In Asia, eSports are huge. Tournaments are aired on television and attract the best players from all over the world to compete for large prize pools. In fact, Asia has fully embraced the eSports phenomena and some players have celebrity status! South Korea has the largest eSports status on Earth, with its biggest celebrity being Ma Jae Yoon, a StarCraft 2 player who has his face on billboards, magazines, posters and even credit cards. South Korea’s national sports are Table Tennis and eSports, which include StarCraft and League of Legends. That’s crazy, StarCraft, a national sport!
So… we come to the western world. How big are eSports in Europe and the United States? Well, as I said above, The International, a Dota 2 tournament in 2015 raised the largest prize pool ever seen in an eSports tournament. Dota 2 teams vary from regions including Europe with Natus Vincere (Na’vi), Team Secret and Team Liquid, all these teams have won a major Dota 2 tournament in the last 3 years. North America provides the current Dota 2 champions Evil Geniuses and another great team Complexity Gaming. America produces some of the best StarCraft players. The top StarCraft 2 player ever is a Dutch guy who is the only player to win the World Cyber Gaming competition and the eSports World Convention Title back to back. The biggest YouTuber’s and games commentators are American, two of these individuals are John Bain aka Total Biscuit, A Cynical Brit and iJustine. Total Biscuit is a video game reviewer and StarCraft 2 commentator and even manages his own StarCraft 2 team. iJustine got her big break from hosting the Call of Duty XP Championships in 2011 and has since become one of the highest profile female gaming presenters.
Will eSports ever be as big as mainstream sports here in the western world?
In my opinion it depends on three main points. The first is whether it can be monetised, and I don’t just mean for players or presenters. Every eSports Team has its sponsors but what is unclear at this time is how much money they make through sales based on being a sponsor, this information isn’t widely available to the general public in a reliable way at the moment compared to mainstream sports. Current sponsors of eSports Teams and events are companies that focus on products based for gaming, unlike sponsors for mainstream sport who can make various products from cars to alcohol to electronic items. If eSports want to become more popular in the western world bigger and better known sponsors would have to commit to advertisement.
My second point is the crazy idea that video games can be associated with acts of criminal behaviour and violence. You only have to look at American media after a major shooting in the States to see some high level government officials and high profile celebrities speaking out against, and at times even blaming video games for some whack job who decides they have had enough of this cruel world and goes full T800 on innocent people! Here in the UK… we usually follow trends that start in the United States, however we do not have easy access to fire arms and thus we don’t see the same level of violent shootings here. We do however have our fair share of violent crimes, but here we have a little more common sense to not blame an entertainment medium for the acts of unbalanced nutters! My point here is that as long as the uninformed, high profile people who have personal opinions that shed a bad light of video games, are still speaking out publically every time and idiot decides to shoot people we will not see any major gains made. It is worth noting that eSports have made a significant impact in the western world in the last 5 years but if it’s to reach mainstream level the above uninformed individuals need to do more research and learn that there preaching isn’t supported by research and science.
My last opinion has to do with the youth of today. I started gaming at a young age. I was given a Sega Mega Drive by my cousin because he didn’t like gaming; his loss is my gain, thanks Steve! As soon as I played the system I fell in love with gaming. In today’s age video games are much more in the public domain. The Video Game Medium is now one of the biggest entertainment mediums in the world and is a multi-billion dollar industry. Last year video games made more money than the music and film industry combined and was one of the best years for game releases ever! That’s a huge amount of money! As gaming becomes more and more popular and as the aging population leave us we will see the demand for eSports grow. Ask yourself this, when you have children will you introduce them to gaming… yes? Of course you will and if eSports were on TV, would you watch it? Of course you would. Again my point here is that as young people grow up they will bring culturally popular trends with them and as gaming is very popular with young people one can only assume that gaming will follow them.
Finally… I can only hope that eSports take off in a big way here in Europe and also in the United States. British TV is pretty boring and I would take watching Dota over any Football match any day of the week and twice on Sunday’s!
Written by: Robert “theOzman” Oswald
Dedicated Gamers shack 