They give some significant stats and growth based on current trends comparing it to other Pro sports leagues like NFL, MLB and NBA. One major point to take is that they are lumping in all gaming leagues (Overwatch, LOL, DOTA2) together. Now if you were really comparing apples to apples, you would just compare the Overwatch league to NFL for example. This report comes out as companies like Activision are starting to create official leagues for games with some serious sponsorship money. Money to help fund teams that provide a salary to their players. Starting to get real structure around it. This will have game companies looking at longevity for particular games of the competitive nature.
Currently they estimate the monthly audiance market at 167M moving to 276M by 2022 with media rights getting up to $3B by 2022.
Think it has the juice. Longevity of leagues i put into question as it will be dependent on the game dev and public to keep interest in a game. DOTA2 definitely has proven that it is possible.
The report is a long read but has some interesting figures.
Obligatory grumpy old man reply, Back in my day no one paid us to play video games and the only person who would watch me play them was my brother. And he was just waiting for me to die so he could get his turn.
I don’t even understand how this is possible. I guess I’m too old and don’t understand streaming but I’m not giving people money to WATCH them play a game. It truly boggles my mind.
That said, I can understand winning prize money from a tournament in an actual competition. As far as I know, Ninja doesn’t really do those.
Ninja is a rough one to watch. I checked out his stream just to see wtf people were following him for. Maybe I’ve reached my level of dealing with bullshit from running GRG but I couldn’t tolerate him. He just comes off as a whiny, complaining douche when he doesn’t win. Which I find comes off even worse when he stacks a 4 man team with killers in a game with no skill based matchmaking.
