The debate has raged, and will continue to for some time, about whether those who sit on comfy chairs and tap furiously on a keyboard for up to an hour at a time can be considered athletes.
The fact is that no one in the eSports industry really cares about that, and is only interested in growing the already immense audience.
And the growth is worth emphasising, as that is eSports’ main game. Audience, audience, audience. All of these articles on ESPN and attempted broadcast on Fox Sports are trying to tell us something: people are watching this whether you think it’s a sport or not.
In a digital world, everything is becoming increasingly measurable, and people in the industry are starting to love looking at figures for viewership as well as attendance.
Twitch.tv, the main platform for eSports broadcasting, now has a monthly audience of over 100 million users, and reaches half of the millennial males in the US (if you believe their stats). They also so over a million users in Australia.
For whatever reasons, and whether you agree with them or not, the digital world is moving in a few directions. It’s going mobile. It’s going live. It’s going video.
eSports is all of those things that those in the know are predicting will be big, already. It’s available on mobile or desktop or tablet, whenever you like. And when you live in a time (in Australia at least) where your mobile internet is faster than your home wifi, you can watch HD eSports broadcasts at any time, and you know exactly where to go.
Traditional sports in Australia has not yet built out that capability. There’s confusion in our part of the world over live streaming; whether it’s an inferior product, whether it’s worth the resources, whether you can reach the scale of audience that you can on traditional television.
They simply haven’t made the call whether to dive in the ocean.
You can. eSports already has. The trail has already been blazed.
What eSports has done well is improve the product. Continually, unerringly, and for the sole purpose of advancing the industry. The commercialisation of eSports is nowhere close to the level of ‘traditional’ broadcast media, or even close to ‘traditional’ digital media. But it’s getting there, and it’s taking an absolutely giant and engaged audience with it.
But getting the money isn’t the hard bit – demonstrating value in the digital market is about people voting with their feet. Enough people means enough money.
eSports has already captured the minds of people. Platforms like Patreon, among others, have sprung up due to the liberalisation of content production. The biggest streamers and events make hundreds of thousands in donations and ad revenue. The money is coming.
And whether you believe it or not, the people taking part in eSports are competitors, and very very good at what they do. They fit a hell of a lot of definitions of athletes, even if they don’t fit a number of others.
But while we’re worrying about that, content creators, hosts and players in the eSports scene are just wondering how they can make it bigger. It’s not a debate, because they’re not arguing back. They don’t care about definitions, only making the scene more successful.
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