THE RISE OF

esports
FEBRUARY 2020
 The Rise of esports

MITCH REAMES
Mitch Reames graduated with a degree in journalism from the University of Oregon
School of Journalism and Communication in 2017. He has written about emerging
technology and the esports industry for publications such as AdWeek, SportTechie, Blazer5
Gaming, and Dexerto, and is the founder of the Esportz Network podcast, which partners
with Reuters to report on the biggest stories in esports.

WILL PARTIN
Will Partin is a doctoral student and graduate research assistant at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill. His work focuses on the platformization of cultural production
within the realm of livestreaming, video games, and esports. His writing can be found in
such publications as The Atlantic, Variety, and Jacobin. He is also a consultant for Power
Play, a boutique consulting firm that helps brands find their place in the growing esports
market. Former clients have included Microsoft, AMC Networks, Tribeca Enterprise,
Madison Square Garden, and others.

MAXWELL FOXMAN
Maxwell Foxman is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies studying games, play
and immersive media at the University of Oregon. His research centers around how
play manifests in non-game contexts, including social media, politics, and journalistic
institutions. His work explores the way media makers frame games and play in their
activities and professional lives.

DEMYSTIFYING MEDIA
The Hearst Demystifying Media seminar series was launched in January 2016. Curated
by Damian Radcliffe, the Carolyn S. Chambers Professor of Journalism at the University
of Oregon, it provides a platform for leading media practitioners and scholars to talk
about their work.

Through a combination of guest lectures, class visits, podcasts and TV studio interviews,
the series seeks to help students and faculty at the University of Oregon – and beyond – to
make sense of the rapidly changing media and communications landscape.

Previous speakers have come from a wide range of organizations, including the BBC,
Facebook, NPR and Vox, as well as leading academic institutions such as Stanford, Columbia,
Virginia and George Washington University.

Access the archive at: http://bit.ly/DemystfyingArchive

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 The Rise of esports

Mitch Reames, Will Partin and Maxwell Foxman speaking at the University of Oregon
in February 2020.

What are esports and why are they growing
so fast?
Mitch Reames
esports are quite simply competitive video
games. The ecosystem around it is much
like sports, where you have different titles
that are played by different demographics,
they’re popular in different areas.
Competitive video games have been around
in various forms since the 1970s, 1980s is
when they really began.
Maxwell Foxman
One of the reasons they’re growing so
quickly, particularly in this moment, is
investment by a lot of traditional media
companies, and by companies that would
be interested in traditional sports.
So you see brands like Nike and MasterCard,
you see a lot of these very name brands,
putting a lot of money behind the biggest
worldwide esports tournaments.
What’s the appeal for those brands?
Will Partin
Some of it is you go where the attention is.
One of the things that’s interesting about
esports, and I think of the last kind of
piece of the puzzle of why now, is that they
were this niche phenomenon for several
decades. And then around 2010, we start
to see this totally exponential growth year
after year.

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 The Rise of esports

And one of the really key things here is that
this is the moment when Twitch comes around
here’s a way you can distribute content
that’s not YouTube, it’s not preloaded stuff.
It’s distributing live content at a very cost
efficient rate that lets you actually broadcast
this stuff.
That gets you by a lot of the gatekeepers who
might previously have said, “Well we don’t
want video games. Get out of here.”
What’s the demographic for esports and
the appeal of this audience?
Mitch Reames
That demographic is one of the most difficult
to reach demographics we have, it’s very
young. It does skew male, although you
can reach both genders on platforms like
Twitch and depending on what various video
game you’re using, and it’s the cord-cutting
generation.

There had been live streaming platforms

around before, Ustream and stuff in the
2000s, but Twitch gave esports organizers
this really robust set of analytics. IT’S THE GENERATION
And so now you could go to a sponsor and THAT IS NOT SEEING TV
say “Hey...” I can’t just tell you, here’s our ADS ANYMORE, THAT’S
maximum viewership and here’s how many
people showed up in person and here’s a USING AN AD-BLOCKER
couple of photos. Here is total hours viewed, ON ONLINE DIGITAL
average amount each person stayed. This
whole rich suite that you can take to a
ADS. SO, INCREASINGLY
sponsor and say, “This is what we think your ESPORTS ARE BECOMING
sponsorship here is worth.”
A WAY, AND BRAND
Maxwell Foxman PARTNERSHIPS IN ESPORTS
And so to sort of put that in perspective, I know EVENTS ARE BECOMING
that at least according to one statistic, an
average Twitch viewer watches something A WAY TO REACH THIS
like 90 minutes of original content per day. DEMOGRAPHIC THAT IS
So that’s like watching one soccer match per REALLY ONE OF THE MOST
day, every single day, every single day of the DIFFICULT DEMOGRAPHICS
week. And you can imagine how appealing
that is to so many people in various media TO REACH.
industries.

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 The Rise of esports
Mitch Reames and Will Partin.
And of course this is a global phenomenon;
and one that is particularly prominent in
parts of Southeast Asia.
Will Partin
We’ve mentioned already that there is this
longer history going back a few decades in
esports, and across the world esports have
grown, but they’ve grown at different rates
and at different times. And a lot of that has
to do with the particularities of each country
and each region’s history.
I really like the example of the first place it
really takes off and becomes sort of a self-
sustaining industry is South Korea and this
is in the early 2000s.
5
And I really like this story because I think it
speaks to how esports tie in with all other
kinds of questions about tech infrastructure
and national policy and media and so forth.
Because there’s this huge financial crisis that
happens in Asia, the 1997 Asian financial crisis.
It impacts all Southeast Asian countries, but
in particular South Korea, and one of the
ways the government there responds is by
putting all of this money down into creating
a national broadband network.
And so now you have this new broadband
network, you have a large number of
underemployed young people. And you also,
because of the longstanding ban on Japanese
goods, you don’t really have consoles in
South Korea.
 The Rise of esports

So there’s no PlayStation, there’s no Can you give us a sense of how big this
Nintendo; that means most people are market is?
playing PCs. And so all of a sudden there’s
this huge swath of young people playing Mitch Reames
PCs, and they’re playing this game, StarCraft, The best numbers we have on the esports
that has this amazing competitive... It’s just revenue come from Newzoo, although they
very well designed. And all of a sudden, that are not perfect numbers and that’s been
becomes a status symbol if you’re really good highlighted in previous reports, but I’ll use
at it, people recognize you for that. their numbers here because I believe it’s the
best that we have.
And so it’s sort of out of this primordial soup
of all these factors that a bunch of Korean
national corporations recognize. “Hey, there’s THIS YEAR GLOBAL REVENUES
something here, we could do something with
this.” And so they build up very quickly a FOR ESPORTS, ACCORDING
whole infrastructure around it. They give it TO NEWZOO, ARE PROJECTED
a TV channel, they give it sponsorships, they
sort of remake a lot of the players who go from
TO TOP $1 BILLION. AND
being kind of scruffy nerds into very carefully SO THE REVENUE IS THE
curated public images almost overnight. BIGGEST MISSING PIECE OF
It’s a precursor of what’s to come elsewhere, THE PUZZLE IN ESPORTS, IT’S
but it sort of happens there for this very STRUGGLED TO MONETIZE;
specific set of reasons.
THE WIDER GAMES INDUSTRY
Maxwell Foxman IS ABSOLUTELY MASSIVE,
It provided also a platform for a lot of BIGGER THAN MUSIC AND
companies that we would recognize today.
So this was a place where Samsung and LG MOVIES COMBINED.
could show off their goods to some degree.

It is worth noting that when we look across
different teams, the biggest teams in esports,
we’re looking at a really global crop of people
in the same way that you might see in
professional soccer, a non-European playing
in a European league.
You can look at the Overwatch League today
and it is dominated by people... A New York
team might not have many Americans in it,
or so on and so forth.
But esports is a very small fraction of that
games audience and the sports leagues are
driven by revenue that goes into the games
themselves, not necessarily the esports
scene, right?
It doesn’t make money on their League of
Legends scene, they make money on the
game, selling skins in the game and then they
push that into esports.

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 The Rise of esports
Maxwell Foxman.
Now ideally these are mutually beneficial,
and the esports league becomes a part of
fandom and pushes people back into playing
the game and spending money on the game.
That’s how this works in an ideal world, but
right now revenues for esports are lower
than the output, and the main draw is the
massive audience. Because just like social
media startups, as long as you’re having
a bunch of users and a bunch of eyes, you
have value, even if you’re not necessarily
monetizing that perfectly yet.
How do you monetize that better and
more effectively?
Maxwell Foxman
Well, what’s interesting I think on that front,
and this goes to the Newzoo numbers as
7
well, is that a good chunk of that revenue
is coming from investment. So you do
have many brands, many different types
of investors, including traditional sports
leagues investing into esports. And that’s
in many ways driving the direction that the
companies and publishers making esports
are imagining what their products can do.
What’s really interesting is esports treads
align that I think you might not see in
traditional sports between media company
and competitive gaming companies. So
there’s, for instance, Riot Games does many
different types of media partnerships, where
they’re working with Marvel comics to make
a comic, there’s a Netflix TV show about
League of Legends.
 The Rise of esports

Madison Square Garden hosted the League of Legends World Championships in 2016.
(Photo via Carl Scheffel/MSG Photos)

And so these sorts of strategic media
partnerships, that we might think is much
more common in the film industry, we’re now
seeing game companies entering too. And
I think that’s one of the things driving this
investment that we’re seeing
Star players can make a lot of money,
right? Seven figure salaries, there’s a lot
of competition to get them to play on
your team.
Will Partin
For a really elite player... Their revenue
pie is going to include prize winnings,
it’s going to include salaries, it’ll include
endorsements, and then maybe they’re
also streaming on the side.
This varies a little bit from game to game, I
think one of the most interesting things to
me is how each esport almost has its own
kind of economy and the way it works.
So a game I care about very much, Dota;
salaries are not necessarily very good,
but it has the highest payout in terms
of prize pools. So the prize pool for its
kind of version of the Superbowl, the
international, was $34 million last year.
Just enormous, right? And so if you go to
esportsearnings.com and you look up who’s
won the most money in esports, 48 of the top
50 players are Dota players.

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 The Rise of esports
And you might say, “Well that means that
Dota has the most money.” That’s not actually
true, because League of Legends is a much
more robust and mature ecosystem. But it’s
a place where people are not necessarily
taking home lots of prize money, but it is
somewhere where salaries are probably three
or four times bigger than they are in Dota, at
least.
Maxwell Foxman
And well it might be worth explaining how
that prize pool is actually collected, because I
think it gets back to Mitch’s point about sort
of fan investment.
Will Partin
Definitely, so part of why the Dota prize pool
is the way it is, is because it’s crowd funded.
So every single year, Valve, the company that
publishes Dota 2, says the International’s
going to happen in August and we’re going
to put out this book called the compendium.
It’s a digital book, it has all kinds of goodies,
virtual goods, little games, announcer packs,
music packs, whatever; this all Dota themed.
And as you put money into it, it levels up the
book, and so a portion of that money then
goes to the prize pool.
So, that means that valve is actually probably
clearing $150 million just on running this
event. And that’s very much how that
company works, its entire business model
is built on externalizing and keeping a very
small labor force at home.
People can watch esports online by going
onto services like Twitch. But if you put into
a Google image search, “esports or esports
competition,” you’re probably going to
9
see a picture of thousands of people in a
stadium watching people playing. Can you
say a little bit about these physical events?
Mitch Reames
I think esports events are the most
important thing for somebody who doesn’t
understand esports to attend, because it
really materializes what this is.
I’ve grown up going to sporting events my
entire life, I would tell almost every single
Duck game I could too. League of Legends
Worlds in Paris was the most rabid crowd I
have ever been a part of and it wasn’t even
particularly close.
THESE EVENTS ARE SO ACTIVE
AND IT’S SO RARE TO BE ABLE
TO ATTEND AN ESPORTS EVENT
IN MOST CASES THAT WHEN
THESE FANS FINALLY GET A
CHANCE, USUALLY IT’S ONE
OF THEIR FIRST COUPLE OF
TIMES THEY’VE BEEN ABLE TO
ATTEND, AND THEY ARE JUST
GOING ABSOLUTELY BONKERS.
It’s this electric energy around it and all it
takes is somebody to go into that crowd one
time and be like, “Okay, yeah, this is massive.
There’s a huge opportunity here and we need
to be a part of it in some way.”
 The Rise of esports
There’s a pretty famous esports article on
how the NBA involvement in esports began
from Jacob Wolf. And it started when League
of Legends held their world final at Madison
Square Garden in 2015, and Adam Silver and
some of the other NBA who’s who attended
that.
And no surprise after, a bunch NBA teams
invested in League of Legends, they started
the NBA 2K League.
A BUNCH OF NBA OWNERS
STARTED ESPORTS
ORGANIZATIONS THAT ARE
SOME OF THE LARGEST IN
THE WORLD. ALL IT TAKES IS
GOING TO ONE OF THOSE
EVENTS, AND YOU’RE
IMMEDIATELY HIT WITH THE
SCALE AND THE IMPORTANCE
OF ESPORTS.
Maxwell Foxman
I actually went to an esports event at
Madison Square Garden and it was truly
electric.
From just a practical standpoint for those
that need to imagine it, you’re looking at
events that are styled often like the World
Cup, in that they are held for either a couple
of weeks.
But they’re in a location where the actual
competitions are players on stage. So, they
are literally elevated above the crowd, you can
see big screens behind you where the action
10
is taking place, there’s often commentating.
And I think one final point, and this is
something that’s been emphasized I think to
all of us, is that the companies are as much
interested in that digital viewing as they are
the live events.
So much of what’s built into the spectacle,
you expect to watch on Twitch, you expect to
have watched on your computer, and that’s
actually the first audience.
And then those rabid fans are just adding
some fuel to the fire and adding some
special magic to it. But, it really is an event
that if you want to experience the first
place is go online.
We’re seeing huge amounts of investment
in this space. You’ve touched on examples
of traditional sports organizations that
have invested. We’ve seen the creation of
special stadia dedicated to physical events
in places like Dubai and Istanbul. Why is
esports having a moment now?
Will Partin
One thing I’m really interested in is finance
and the role that finance plays in this
ecosystem. esports are not separate from
big changes that have happened in who gets
financed and at what level.
One of the things that happens, coming out
of the 2008 recession, is that interest rates go
almost to zero. And also in order to really spur
spending, one of the things the government
and the federal reserve does, is buy a huge
amount of bonds back from investors.
 The Rise of esports

Mitch Reames and Will Partin.

And in theory, this releases a bunch of money
that can then go be put into new investments,
and in theory ones that are probably slightly
riskier than just buying bonds.
That’s sort of the macro-economic background
behind the tech boom of the 2010s, and so
it’s that same dynamic that says, “Hey, let’s
put some money into esports. Who knows if
it’ll work out or not.”
Maxwell Foxman
A cautionary tale, but not necessarily a
negative cautionary tale, is that gaming
traditionally has led the way in terms of how
to finance media and tech.
So in other words, games were one of the
first places where you can see really that
subscription model that is so normal to
something like Netflix, occurring and
finding a real consumer base.
What I’m excited about, and what I’m always
thinking about, is when you start to see
the sort of convergence of media, sports,
gaming, tech happening at such a grandiose
level with some of the game publishers that
we’re talking about with these games, that
bodes at least in my mind for similar trends
that we might see and are already starting to
see across other forms of media.

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 The Rise of esports
So, for me there’s a lot of connections
between something that we’re seeing with
Disney+, how it’s built, how it’s interacting
with other intellectual property, and what
we’ve already seen companies like Riot and
Epic doing.
I think you can learn a lot from the steps that
these esports companies are taking.
Mitch Reames
On the investment front, one of the big
draws is the absolutely skyrocketing value
of sports franchises.
In the last 10 years, the sports franchises...
You can pinpoint the moment, it’s when
the Clippers were sold. The previous record
high for an NBA franchise was 595 million
for the Milwaukee bucks. The Clippers, due
to a racist story that came out from Donald
Sterling, forced him to sell the team. It’s a
good team, and a major market, and it sells
for $2 billion. The second that sale happens,
it jumps the value of every other sports
organization because now you have a market
price for this, it’s almost four times as high as
the last sale.
And so that happens, and it also skyrockets
all these other valuations. Then you see that
you have this esports thing where you can
get into esports on the ground level for
pennies, compared to what it costs to get
into sports. And people just see it as an
awesome investment opportunity, given
the consistent growth of sports franchises
and basically every single major sport.
And so esports is now that same thing, it’s
why we see a bunch of sports owners get
involved into it because it’s a small price to
pay that could pay massive dividends in the
future.
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What are the key implications for brands,
media companies and journalists with the
growth of esports?
Will Partin
One story I really like is about an ad
campaign from Arby’s, the fast food
restaurant chain.
To preface this a bit, this is a story about how
you can actually adapt your brand... Esports
is a culture, and it’s self-regulating in some
ways, in like what’s acceptable, what’s not.
And a lot of the fans are keenly aware that
they’re sitting on a gold mine, basically.
And that a lot of people are going to try to
capitalize on it, and that not all of them may
or may not have good intentions.
So a lot of times people talk about the
authenticity of this culture, which is a word I
have issues with, but I think there’s definitely
some truth to it.
AND SO WHAT ARBY’S DID HERE,
AND IT’S BIZARRE, BUT THEY WERE
SPONSORING A TOURNAMENT
CALLED ELEAGUE, WHICH IS A
COUNTER-STRIKE TOURNAMENT,
WITH TERRORISTS, COUNTER-
TERRORISTS, GUNS, ETC.
AND WHAT THEY DID IS THEY GOT
A COUPLE OF THE PLAYERS FROM
THE LEAGUE, AND TOOK THEM
OUT TO A SHOOTING RANGE, AND
JUST HAD THEM, WITH ASSAULT
RIFLES, SHOOT SOME ARBY’S
SANDWICHES AND THEY HAD A
HIGH SPEED CAMERA OUT.
 The Rise of esports

Newzoo’s 2020 Global Esports Market Report projects revenues

to exceed $1B USD in 2020.

I’m trying to imagine the meeting with the
Arby’s executive, where some ad agency
comes in and says, “We’re going to shoot the
sandwiches.” But esports fans loved this, and
it was a huge...
I think a real lesson for that brand of like,
“Get a little bit out of your comfort zone.”
It kind of created this massive buzz and
hype; I’m still talking about years later.
Mitch Reames
esports has the highs and lows of brands in it,
which is one of the coolest things.
If you do it well, like that Arby’s thing, it pays
massive dividends and they love you for it,
they’ll carry your brand onto social media for
you, they’ll carry it into Twitch chat for you.
Now if you do it poorly, like you said,
that authenticity thing, it comes up every
single time you talk to anybody who’s ever
advertised in esports, but it does actually
matter. If you come in, slap a logo on
something, and people start making memes
out of your content...
Here’s a good example about the meme thing;
Mercedes sponsored an ESL tournament a
ways back. The S class was what they were
trying to advertise, and Twitch chat made
it a whole meme, and they were kind of
getting roasted a little bit, they didn’t feel
like they belonged in this space.

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 The Rise of esports

And at the very end, Mercedes tweeted

something out showing that they heard BUT THE FACT OF THE MATTER
Twitch chat and they had this S class thing
and it involved one of the players. I can’t
IS THAT WE’RE REALLY
remember the entire details, but it went LOOKING AT SOMETHING
super viral. It had 40,000 likes, and it gets to THAT CONTINUES TO BE
a key thing, which is embrace the meme.
FRAMED OFTEN BY THE
They’re going to meme your brand, and MEDIA AS BEING NICHE
as long as you’re ready for that... And it’s
something that we’re seeing a lot of fast food
OR BEING OUTSIDE OF THE
brands do on Twitter as well, with Wendy’s NORM, WHEN ALL THESE
snarky social media. EXAMPLES JUST POINT TO
That’s the kind of thing that works in the HOW NORMALIZED GAMING,
esports audience, and if it works, it really AND THEN AS A SIDE NOTE,
works well, but it’s a dangerous place for a
COMPETITIVE GAMING.
brand that doesn’t understand the space as
well.
Is that the biggest misconception that you
Maxwell Foxman want to shatter?
What I really like about these two examples,
in terms of lessons to be learned, is that Maxwell Foxman
there’s no question that if you’re a brand, a Well, I think to that point, the myth that I
major worldwide brand, you have probably think needs to be shattered is thinking that
already looked at competitive gaming. If gaming publishers are not approaching
you’re a growing brand, it might be worth their product with the same finances
looking to competitive gaming. and perspective that a traditional media
company, like a Disney, like an ABC, like a
Similarly, if you’re a news outlet, there’s Fox, approaches their product.
reason to think that this is an important
beat that should be covered. Probably the These are large companies with so
best example of this is looking at what the many different types of creative talent,
Washington Post has done recently with programmers, PR, communications, et
Launcher, which Will has done some writing cetera, and they approach their product in a
for. very, very similar manner.

The cultures are different, but we can say the

same thing about any sort of entertainment
culture.

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 The Rise of esports

And so part of what I think audience members

should take away from this also is to try to There are very few 35 year old’s that
understand that culture sort of in its totality. understand esports and most of them that
are, are in VP roles, or something like that.
You’ve touched on saying, brands, if they’re You have people like Ryan Wyatt, who was a
not already looking at this space, then they caster for Call of Duty, now he’s the head of
should be. What about for students in a gaming for YouTube.
journalism and communication school?
How should they be thinking about this It’s these kinds of success stories that you
sector? see from very young people in their twenties
that I think is a huge reason why students
Mitch Reames should care about this, because it’s a
As a fairly recent grad of this school, the best massive opportunity to do work that even
thing about working in esports is that big you wouldn’t be able to do normally.
newsrooms don’t have somebody in it.
I came out of the sports broadcasting
I would not be at AdWeek two and a half program and I wanted to go do esports. Now
years after graduating, if I wasn’t the guy that esports has led me back to sports; I’ve
who could report on esports. That was my done articles on Shaquille O’Neal that are
“in”, writing about violence in games and completely separate from esports, and it
brands on Twitch. was not something I would have gotten to
without esports.
THEY DIDN’T UNDERSTAND So I think that’s another misconception is
THIS SPACE, AND THEY that you’re choosing one or the other, in
reality the esports and sports circles have
NEEDED SOMEBODY WHO
a ton of overlap, and you end up doing both
DID. AND THAT’S TRUE FOR even if your specialty becomes esports.
A LOT OF PUBLICATIONS,
Will Partin
A LOT OF MAINSTREAM There’s a particular kind of paragraph that
PUBLICATIONS, SO FOR occurs in a lot of legacy meeting writing
YOUNG STUDENTS IN A about esports. I don’t have a name for it, but
I should come up with one.
VARIETY OF AVENUES,
ESPORTS OFFERS AN The reporter is in the venue and there’s all
this stuff, there’s people competing, there’s
OPPORTUNITY TO DO people cheering…. but it’s a video game. This
SOMETHING THAT DOESN’T has been done like 10,000 times and I get why
HAVE NEARLY AS MANY they do it, but it’s an interesting thing where
a lot of legacy media reporters when they
GATEKEEPERS IN THE WAY. come to esports spend a lot of their word
count justifying why this is important.

15
 The Rise of esports
And that’s something I try to push back
against when I do writing for these kinds of
publications, where I don’t have to throw in
three paragraphs of stats about revenues,
numbers, whatever, you show it.
And you show it through the story, you show
it through the content that you’re actually
creating. And one, it spares you this totally
cliched thing that every esports fan looking
at it is going to roll their eyes at. But two, I
think it also spurs you to do more show don’t
tell, and that’s just good writing.
Maxwell Foxman
If you look at the history and scholarship of
game journalism, this is a longstanding trend
of this kind of explainer paragraph, explainer
story, vilification or praise of video games
that has existed now for easily 20 to 30 years
of game coverage. So I credit both of you for
going beyond that traditional mode.
ONE OTHER THING THOUGH
THAT I THINK IS A GOOD
LESSON FOR STUDENTS
COMING INTO THE J
SCHOOL, IS A LOT OF WHAT
WE CAN SEE IN ESPORTS
AND ESPORTS COVERAGE,
ACTS AS BELLWETHERS AND
TRANSFERABLE SKILLS FOR
THE NEXT GENERATION OF
REPORTERS AND MEDIA
MAKERS.
16
One of the things I like to emphasize to
my students is, you can take something
like Twitch and start to think about how it
might have applications beyond gaming to
traditional reportage.
I also think that you can see the making
of a virtual environment becoming an
increasingly normalized. And so the ability
to actually work within and use 3D objects
interaction with objects in a meaningful way
is something that you can see most major
outlets have experimented with, whether
it’s with virtual reality, augmented reality, or
even just making traditional news games.
So I think that these are interesting innovative
skills that whether you’re covering esports or
not, you can transfer into your next media
profession.
How do you see this sector evolving? What
should we be keeping an eye on?
Mitch Reames
I’d say the biggest advancement is going to
be mobile technology. Mobile esports are
the biggest growth sector, and what they’re
also going to do is they’re going to globalize
esports.
This is already a global industry, but mobile
is way more accessible to underdeveloped
regions.
Right now, a huge push in esports is into India
in the game PUBG mobile, especially. It’s the
biggest game in India, and there’s 1.3 billion
people in India, something like that. That’s a
big market that is now adopting esports and
that’s also true for South America, I think we
see that more in Africa as well.
 The Rise of esports
Mobile technology is so accessible that
it allows a whole new group of people to
become a part of esports where they don’t
have to get a high quality gaming PC. They
don’t need an Xbox or PlayStation, they
have a mobile phone, they can play games
on it, and suddenly the esports scene
around mobile games, is progressing very
quickly.
We went from mobile games being very bare
bones, Candy Crush, your tap and plays, to
Battle Royale, which is a hundred unique
players loaded into one server all loaded at
once while you’re doing complex controls.
So that’s how far mobile has gone, and that’s
only going to keep growing and networks
are only going to keep reaching new places,
so I think mobile esports is the huge growth
potential.
Maxwell Foxman
I’m really interested, on the U.S. side,
about the deepening of infrastructure and
institution that is happening with esports.
The expansion of leagues, to the college and
high school level in particular, and the way
that that’s being supported by publishers, is
something that I’m definitely going to keep
an eye on.
And it’s something that’s happening here
at the University of Oregon, but it’s also
something that you can see at local high
schools, local malls etc.
Will Partin
Like Max [I am] certainly, very interested
in the way that esports will continue to
increase its integrations with legacy media
17
institutions, be those sports firms, be those
traditional media conglomerates.
But also part of the story to me is thinking
about the growing ambitions of the
IT sector as a cultural industry. This is
certainly expressed in all of the rush to
create first party content from groups like
Apple and Amazon and so forth.
And we see one of the stories from the
last month is that Google bought away the
broadcast rights for Overwatch League from
Twitch/Amazon.
And part of the appeal of that is it didn’t just
come with the broadcast rights themselves,
which are now on YouTube. It also came with
a deal that brought all of Activision-Blizzard’s
games onto Google Cloud instead of Amazon
Web Services. So this is a really interesting...
This is a media conglomeration question,
but it’s a slightly different media
conglomeration because Disney, as far as I
know, is not out here selling cloud servers…
not yet. But that becomes very interesting
[to] me, how do these tech firms act when
they are these vital figures and making
monetizing and distributing culture?
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