Increasing trend in E- SPORT

 

 

Esports (also known as electronic sports, e-sports, or eSports) is a form of sport competition using video games.Esports often takes the form of organized, multiplayer video game competitions, particularly between professional players, individually or as teams.

Yes now time has come where gaming is also considered skilfull. Any interested and passionate gamer has plenty of data and proof to show to their parents that gaming is not useless and time wasting and currently in India professional gamers earn a huge amount of money , even more than IIM passout. This is because E-SPORT is getting recognition and also the popularity of E-SPORT has increased.

HISTORY

The earliest known video game competition took place on 19 October 1972 at Stanford University for the game Spacewar. Stanford students were invited to an "Intergalactic spacewar olympics" whose grand prize was a year's subscription for Rolling Stone, with Bruce Baumgart winning the five-man-free-for-all tournament and Tovar and Robert E. Maas winning the team competition.

The fighting game Street Fighter II (1991) popularized the concept of direct, tournament-level competition between two players. Previously, video games most often relied on high scores to determine the best player, but this changed with Street Fighter II, where players would instead challenge each other directly, "face-to-face," to determine the best player, paving the way for the competitive multiplayer and deathmatch modes found in modern action games. The popularity of fighting games such as Street Fighter and Marvel vs. Capcom in the 1990s led to the foundation of the international Evolution Championship Series (EVO) esports tournament in 1996.

In the 1990s, many games benefited from increasing internet connectivity, especially PC games. Tournaments established in the late 1990s include the Cyberathlete Professional League (CPL), QuakeCon, and the Professional Gamers League. PC games played at the CPL included the Counter-Strike series, Quake series, and Warcraft.

The popularity and emergence of online streaming services have helped the growth of esports in this period, and are the most common method of watching tournaments. Video game live streaming is an activity where people record themselves playing games to a live audience online. The practice became popular in the mid-2010s on sites such as Twitch and later, YouTube, Facebook and other services. By 2014, Twitch streams had more traffic than HBO's online service.

In 2015, the first Esports Arena was launched in Santa Ana, California, as the United States' first dedicated esports facility.

The most recent iteration of the event, The International 9, is now underway. Teams all over the world are fighting for a slice of an over $33 million prize pool. annual world championship in Dota 2 . This was in 2019 and the total winning prize of wimbledon was $44.9 million.

E- SPORT IN INDIA

If you examine the global data on gaming, you’ll see that the biggest consumer in the gaming industry is China with $34.4 million in revenues. Consequently, Tencent, the largest gaming company on the planet that has a market share of 32.86% and has stakes in majorly popular games such as League of Legends, Fortnite, and Clash Royale is also based in China. Now, it may not come as a surprise knowing how China has evolved into the global powerhouse it is today, but more than that, we are also seeing other Asian countries catching up to this trend; and India, in particular, has been receiving a lot of attention for its dramatic increase in mobile gaming and its significant growth in the local eSports scene.

The past decade has been a pivotal time for competitive gaming as it began capturing the attention of the global market in recent years, but no country has been making remarkable progress as fascinating and as appealing as the Indian gaming scene. From $253.6 million in game revenues in 2014, it gradually picked up speed to an astounding $1.1 billion in 2019 and is predicted by Statista to double its pace by this year with a projection of $2.4 billion. Is that too ambitious? We don’t think so. As a matter of fact, leading company in games and eSports analytics, Newzoo, reported that India has now secured the second spot next to China in the top list of countries with most smartphone users thereby accounting for 345,916,000 users with 25.3% smartphone penetration rate. For India, this means a bigger market brimming with so much untapped potential.

For the past few years, the Indian eSports landscape has been in tremendous growth especially just last year which is its strongest feat so far, when it reached a 180% combined growth across all prize pools for local eSports leagues.

Currently PUBG is the hot favourite in India in E- SPORT and you can trace the reason by looking following table.

1. India	more than 45 crores users
2. The United States	more than 35 crores users
3. China	more than 32 crores users
4. Russia	more than 30 Crores users
5. Germany	more than 22 crores users
6. South Korea	more than 20 crores users
7. The United Kingdom	more than 12 crores users

PMWL(PUBG MOBILE WORLD LEAGUE 2020) East boasts a massive prize pool of $425,000.

Earnings of Indian streamers

If we just talk about tournaments winning than highest price earned by SOUL team in PUBG tournament of $ 60000

But this doesn’t reflect overall earnings of Indian streamers this is just tournament winning. Just take example of Virat Kohli his fixed BCCI package is of 7 crores annually but we all know his total yearly earnings is much more than that.

Naman Mathur, aka Mortal, is one of the most popular PUBG Mobile streamers not only in India but also in the entire world.

Mortal is the In-Game Leader (IGL) of the SouL team that twice represented India in the PMCO Global Finals. Mortal started his YouTube career in September 2016 by uploading Mini Militia gameplay videos, and later on shifted to PUBG Mobile owing to its increasing popularity. Now, he has around 5.57 Million.

 According to Social Blade, Mortal received around 37 Million views on his YouTube channel in the last 30 days. His estimated monthly earnings are about $9.4K - $150.8K, and his estimated yearly earnings are $113.1K - $1.8M.Apart from this, It is not the only source of his income as there are sponsors, super chats, etc. that pay him for promotions, shout outs, and more. SouL Mortal has become the first Indian to be nominated for the Esports Awards.

 You can also checkout income of DYNAMO , SCOUT , SOUL REGALTOS , CARRY MINATI , etc.

FUTURE

By 2021, Newzoo predicts that the annual growth rate of e-sport viewership will be approximately 14%. They also predict that the number of casual viewers will grow to 307 million. And that there will be 250 million eSports enthusiasts, making the total audience 557 million.

In 2018, the average year-on-year increase in total revenue was at an impressive 38.2%. The eSports industry made a total of $906 million in revenue. Out of this, $694 million came from brand investments – both direct and indirect. That’s a 48% increase in brand investment from the previous year. Newzoo predicts that by 2021, eSports will generate more than $1.6 billion in total revenue with $1.3 billion coming from brand investments.

The Olympic Games are also seen as a potential method to legitimize esports. A summit held by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in October 2017 acknowledged the growing popularity of esports, concluding that "Competitive 'esports' could be considered as a sporting activity, and the players involved prepare and train with an intensity which may be comparable to athletes in traditional sports" but would require any games used for the Olympics fitting "with the rules and regulations of the Olympic movement".The sporting world is changing! Esports is becoming so large that even the International Olympic committee (IOC) is beginning to host events.

CONCLUSION

There is no doubt that E-SPORT has a bright future. Especially in India E-SPORT got hype due to the JIO data revolution and PUBG and Indian team has also started  performing better in World leagues. If anybody thinks that e-sport is not a real sport or it is easy, then just try to play one PUBG game and compare your gameplay with professional or watch world leagues. 

Because  playing this type of game required a plan , strategy , team work , reflexes , etc. many teams and players have their analyst and in future you will see that these players will have their coaches , PS , etc. it would be as big as any sport.

We should be happy tha now gaming is also considered as a skill and talent. Because , the pie is growing rather than sliced. So these will create more opportunity for the country and youth.

If you see the story of most popular gaming streamers of India especially  of DYNAMO (Aditya Sawant with highest subscribed gaming channel of India). He started streaming from 2010 and till  2016 he has less than 200 subscribers but he didn’t gave up currently he has more than

 8 million subscribers. His journey was very difficult as he was from a middle class family.  I am attaching a link to a small video where he describes his journey. I insist you watch it. You will find it interesting and inspiring.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9WiFoHDNLw