E-sports, eSports or cybersport is the name used to designate video game competitions, which have become very popular events. eSports are usually multi-player video game competitions, particularly among professional players. The most common genres of video games associated with eSports are real-time strategy, first-person shooters, and multiplayer online battle arenas (MOBA).
Although competitions have always been part of video game culture, these competitions have experienced a huge increase in popularity, both in participation and audience, since the late 2000s. This increase in popularity has been linked to the development of video games, which is currently focused on facilitating competition between players.
Fighting and arcade genres have been the most popular in tournaments in recent years, although fighting games in particular have been somewhat more distant from eSports.
In 2015 the most successful titles in professional competitions were Dota 2, League of Legends (both in the MOBA genre) and the first-person shooter game, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.
Approximately 85% of those who watch these electronic sports are men, and the remaining 15% are women. Sixty percent of these are concentrated between the ages of 18 and 34.
History
Early Times (1972-1989)
It was the 1960s and video games were science fiction. They were not even conceived in the collective imagination, whether as entertainment, or as a sport. In 1962 a guy named Steve Russell developed something at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology called Spacewar!
It was a program that he made together with his colleagues, all of them university students, to run on a PDP-1 computer. Spacewar! was a “game”, for lack of a better word. In it, two spaceships tried to destroy each other without falling into the gravitational force of a star.
Exactly ten years later, in October 1972, Stanford University held a Spacewar! competition. They called the event the “Intergalactic Olympics,” and attendees drank free beer. The prize for the winner was a one-year subscription to the famous Rolling Stone magazine.
Atari, 8 years later, germinated the seeds that Spacewar! had sown. In 1980 the company organized the first large-scale tournament in the history of eSports. It consisted in getting the best score to the popular Space Invaders (the ultimate matamarcian). More than 10,000 people from all over the United States competed and, given the technical limitations of the time, in person in New York.
The winner of the Space Invaders National Championship was Rebecca Heineman. She became the first person to win a national video game tournament. Later, she developed a successful career as an industry programmer.
During the 1970s and 1980s, video game players and tournaments began to appear on popular websites and magazines such as Life and Time. One of the most recognized arcade game players is Billy Mitchell, known for holding high score records in six different games including Pac-Man and Donkey Kong being recorded in the 1985 edition of The Guinness Book of Records.
During this period, eSports events were broadcast on television including the Starcade program which ran from 1982 to 1984 with a total of 133 episodes in which contestants attempted to beat their opponents’ high scores in arcade games.
A video game tournament was included as part of a television show called That’s Incredible! and the tournaments were highlighted as part of the plot of several movies including TRON from 1982.
Online Video Games (1990-1999)
In the 1990s, they benefited from increased Internet connections, especially PC games. For example, the 1988 game Netrek was a 16-player Internet game. Netrek was the third video game on the Internet, as well as the first game to use meta servers and the first to have persistent user information. In 1993, Netrek was recognized by Wired magazine as “the first online video game sport”.
Major eSports tournaments in the 1990s including the 1990 Nintendo World Championship, which was held in various parts of the United States, with the final being held at Universal Studios Hollywood in California. Nintendo held a second world championship in 1994 called the Nintendo PowerFest ’94. There were 132 finalists who played the final in San Diego, California.
With Mike Larossi as the first prize winner. Blockbuster Video also had its own video game world championship in the early 1990s, co-hosted by GamePro magazine. Citizens of the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia and Chile were eligible to compete. The 1994 championship games included titles such as NBA Jam and Virtua Racing.
The television shows that broadcast eSports during this period were the British television programs GamesMaster and Bad Influence! the Australian program Amazing, which showed two children competing in various Nintendo games to earn points.
Tournaments held in the late 1990s included the Cyberathlete Professional League (CPL), QuakeCon, and the Professional Gamers League. Video games played in the CPL included the Counter-Strike series, the Quake series, and Warcraft.
Current Status (2000-present)
South Korea has established different organizations in eSports, licensing professional players since 2000. Recognition of eSports competitions outside South Korea has been slower to come. Besides South Korea, most of the competitions take place in Europe, North America and China. In Japan, despite its large video game market, eSports are relatively underdeveloped, largely due to its anti-gaming or gambling laws.
In 2013, Canadian Danny “Shiphtur” Le became the first professional League of Legends player to receive a P-1A visa from the United States, a category for internationally recognized athletes.
It is estimated that in 2013 approximately 71.5 million people around the world were watching electronic sports competitions. The wide availability of online broadcasting platforms, particularly Twitch.tv, has been key to the growth and promotion of eSports competitions.
In 2015 the global eSports market generated revenues of 325 million dollars and by the end of this year the amount of revenues is expected to be 493 million; the global eSports audience in 2015 was 226 million people.
The most played and popular competitive games in 2016 are League of Legends, Dota 2 and Counter Strike: Global Offensive.
The highest winning competitive game was The International 2016, by the Dota 2 game with a total prize pool of $20.7 million, of which more than $9 million went to the winning team, Wings Gaming.
In 2017, eSports is a market that is growing at 40% annually in the world and exceeds 500 million in sales, causing more and more companies to sponsor these competitions and also the media to do more monitoring of this sport.
