The World of E-sports
Welcome to the fascinating world of e-sports. In a basic definition, one could simply describe the e-sports as competitive gaming, but it is much more than a bunch of people just playing games. E-sports is, in reality, a rapidly developing scene in the world becoming more and more like an actual sport. League of Legend’s eSports scene is probably the largest out there. With its ability to sell out massive venues such as the Staples Center within an hour and gather 50,000 viewers on a live stream for it’s Season 3 World Championships, one is forced to recognize the popularity of esports. Looking at League of Legends in particular, one can see that it has become largely an international scene with teams from places such as South Korea, China, most of Southeast Asia, Large portions of Europe, North America, and even Brazil. All these countries have had at least one team participate in a world championship.
Competitive gaming is slowly becoming bigger and better, even growing into a career for some. For League of Legends, publisher Riot Games has created a two regional circuits,one for EU and another for NA. Each circuit lasts for two seasons of 12 weeks. With 10 teams of five players in each circuit, a total of 100 players get to play competitively as a top tier team for a prize pool of $100,000 USD per season. Each team has their own owner, managers, coach and sponsors and could easily be considered a company or organization itself. Big companies such a Alienware, Steelseries, Razer, Kingston HyperX, and even Samsung each sponsor one or multiple teams. Individuals in the team can also make thousands a month just from people watching advertisements during their streams of the game. Other regions also have their own leagues each with a varying prize pool: China and Lol Pro League(LPL), Korea and On Game Net(OGN), and South East Asia and Garena Premier League(GPL). Not to mention, an annual World Championship is also held by Riot Games with a total prize pool of $2,000,000 USD. However, being amazing at a game isn’t the only way to make a living out of esports. Riot has their own camera/production crew for the streaming and broadcasting of tournaments and shout casters for live commentary of the games. There are also hosts and interviewers for each league. As the more time passes and the professional gaming scene grows, esports will become a more realistic career choice. In fact, it may even become as big as an olympic sport one day.
Dear Vincent,
I found it very interesting that you explored and described a topic that most people have little to no knowledge about. As someone who knows nothing about video games, I found it intriguing how there’s a completely different side of gaming that brings communities and people all around the world together. Your blog has the ability to provide others with a change in mindset by allowing them to see that gaming, in fact, can be used as a career and is not an act of being antisocial.
Although your blog is very interesting, there are a few ideas that you write about that makes it difficult to follow along to what you are saying. One of the ideas I found difficult to understand was when you talked about League of Legends. For those in your audience that don’t know what League of Legends is, it’s difficult to understand what you’re referring to in your blog. A brief explanation of this topic would be beneficial to the reader’s comprehension of the importance of e-games. A description of your personal experience (if you have one) with e-gaming or how you discovered the art of video games would be a very interesting addition to your blog.
Sincerely,
Sidra