The culture of Esports as a social trend

40 years ago, gaming was a niche, “Nerdy” hobby. Many people purchased game consoles such as Atari and Amstrad to play with friends and spend time with the family. In 2017-8, gaming is known as a multi-million industry, one of the fastest growing in the world alongside others like Fintech.

The Story

The first video game was “Tennis for Two,” a virtual table tennis game by W.Higginbotham in 1958 in Long Island, NY. The technology for video game consoles came in the 1960s and was very popular in the 1970s, with the “Pong Arcade” video game created by N.Buschnell [2], the man who has launched the Gaming Industry Revolution.

Gaming created a competitive spirit between friends and family members at home and made games, video and board ones, popular. Video games competitions expanded in the arcades in 1980 and more than 10,000 people were involved in the likes of “Space Invaders”, the first big Arcade competition [3]. Since then, arcade video games started becoming very popular and many video game publishers created iconic video characters with some of them being Donkey Kong and Mario by Nitendo, Sonic by Sega, Mortal Kombat by Midway and Street Fighter II by Capcom.

Local Area Network (LAN) parties started in houses and arcades, and between 1990 and 2000 they moved to the Internet cafes – and that’s when online gaming was born.

In the last 10 years, in South Korea television, the term eSports was consolidated in video games such as Starcraft and later with StarCraft II by Blizzard Entertainment. ESports has not been so popular in Europe and the rest of the world, but video game publishers have stepped up their online participation over the last 3 years. The fast growth and visibility is now bringing in companies outside gaming and technology. For example, Coca-Cola will be the largest brand in the world sponsoring the League of Legends Championship Series (LCS) in 2017 and Red Bull and Nissan are also preparing its appearance.

Sport or entertainment?

When talking about Esports, there are two strong opposing views.

Some people think Esports is a kind of modern sport. The teams of professional e-athletes, the “pros”, have hand-eye coordination, play and tactical understanding, and team up to play hard – just like athletes do in football and other traditional sports [4]. They improve their skills at the training camps, as do athletes of classic sports. Advertisements and sponsors are major sources of funding as in all major sports -NFL and Bundesliga to name a few [5].

They also have fan clubs. People watch ESports live on the net or on TV; These fan clubs also travel to the venues to see the matches live, just as the fan clubs do in classic sports. For example, the 2015 LCS Endgame took place in the Mercedes-Benz Arena in Berlin and 17,000 people travelled to see it live. Another 36 million people saw the play online on YouTube and Twitch TV streams. [6]

Other people believe that ESports is not a sport. The players are not professional athletes and the teams are not “pro”. The main reason is that gaming is no physical exercise sport. Another reason is that Esports is a niche and does not spread much like traditional sports [7]. Even though so many people watch the online tournaments, it has no potential and it’s just an entertaining video game that costs a lot to sponsor. [8]

ESports in Germany

Germany has a strong ESports fan base. More than 20 percent of German network users are aware of ESports, and this is best viewed among video gamers, where a fifth are not just video gamers, but watch competitors on the Azubu and Twitch TV ESports platforms [9].

ESports is quickly establishing itself in the life of German gaming players and companies looking to market to this gaming community have many attractive options to reach the target audience: live stream platforms, live events, in-game commercials and professionals and members sponsors. Germany hosts a lot of regular ESports events created by the most “famous” video game houses worldwide.

The video game creation companies in Germany are in the top qualified ones in the world, with Hamburg and Berlin being the “hotspots” of these clusters. There are around 31,000 people working in the German video game industry. Of those, one third works directly for well-known video game developers and publishers. This demand created around 150 PC oriented courses at German universities and the number of students studying computer science at universities increased dramatically [10].

Germany is the country with the largest number of video game members in Europe. These are 22 registered clubs in the country and, according to sources such as Wirtschaftswoche and Die Welt, many German football clubs such as FC Schalke, Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund wanted – and managed – to catch up with ESports in 2016 [11] [12]. These organizations treat ESports as a social device for video game fans. However, they are not interested in “first person shooter” video games because they look out to protect their younger fans from bad influences and direct aggression.

When an ESports endgame is broadcasted live, fans will gather in houses or coffee/net cafeterias to watch tournaments with friends, meeting new people with the same interests whilst enjoying themselves. For the past 2-3 years, meetings of that kind have grown and it is all thanks to those events. “Meltdown Bar” in Berlin is famous for streaming video game tournaments and is very famous in the LoL and Hearthstone community [13] [14].

The future of ESports

The ESports scene is worth more than €1 bn and viewers are expected to grow globally to 600,000,000 by 2020 [15]. However, there is a need for the industry to be recognised as a sport and start getting regulated when more clubs and companies join to generate good sportsmanship.

In addition, ESports will grow even bigger when Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) start becoming part of the video games norm. This will make the virtual sports industry stronger and the followers of all ages will be increased.

So it’s only a matter of time for Esports to become a professional sport.