The Rapid Growth of eSports
Over the past couple of years, eSports has increased in popularity very quickly. The two articles linked both talk about the status of eSports, but one of them is from 2013 and the other is from 2015. One of the statistics given is about The International, a major tournament for Dota 2, a free-to-play multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) video game. The total prize pool for The International was around $2.6 million, $10 million, and $18 million for the years 2013, 2014, 2015 respectively. Along with those big jumps, the amount of time spent watching eSports worldwide has increased from 1.3 billion hours to 3.7 billion hours from 2012 to 2014. There are many other numbers that show the rise of eSports, but I want to talk about the reasons that could have caused it. Twitch, a free live streaming site launched in 2011, and the easily accessible games play a major role.
In a way, the spread of eSports can be shown using the cascading behavior of networks. We can call the people who first started playing games competitively and the organizations who supported them the initial adopters of eSports. Now for eSports to spread these initial adopters would need some way of showing it to the rest of the world. Streaming websites like Twitch allows the initial adopters to connect to anyone who wants to watch the tournaments or anyone who just wants to watch the players practice playing the game. This means the network for eSports would have many connections coming from the initial adopters therefore grabbing people’s attention. The cool part about eSports is that you do not just have to watch the competitions. You can also pick up the game and work to try to be in one of them. You can stream yourself playing the game even if you are not a professional. Most of the games in eSports are free-to-play or easily accessible. For example, League of Legends and Dota 2 are free-to-play and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is $15 and can be bought for under $10 during sales. Also, most people have a computer now and these games do not require much to run. This makes the cascading effect even easier for the eSports network because there is no big cost to pay to join. Viewers can pick up the game themselves and then start practicing and streaming themselves. Eventually a few of them could become a professional player. eSports has grown rapidly the last couple of years and shows no sign of stopping.
Sources: http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/07/25/the-rise-of-esports-in-america
http://espn.go.com/espn/story/_/id/13059210/esports-massive-industry-growing