eSports and Traditional Sports

Recently, my roommates have been watching more and more video game streams from Twitch.tv and other sources. Games like League of Legends have more popular, and I find it such a crazy concept that so many people make their living from playing these types of games. Many people today would argue that games like DoTa2, StarCraft, WoW or LoL are not sports, because they do not follow the traditional definition of a sport which involves physical activity. I think this definition will eventually grow to include these games.

In the future, professional video games may even be televised to the general public much like today’s professional sports. So much money has gone into advertisement, donations, and professional play of gamers and I see it becoming and even bigger sensation as more people accept “eSports” for what they are. People follow their favorite teams and players much like the traditional sports we are used to. Stats, pregame/postgame interviews, etc. bring the fans closer to their favorite players and fans are excited to watch their team play every week.

What really surprised me a week or so ago when watching an LCS (League of Legends Championship Series) game with my roommates was the inclusion of musical guest appearances much like a Superbowl halftime show. Granted, Imagine Dragons is a big fan of LoL, but that is beside the point. I just think it is mind blowing that they found enough worth in the amount of viewers watching professional League that they promoted their single on the stream, not television. Like a lot of the general public, I still find “eSports” a hard concept to grasp, but with such growing popularity and exposure from the people around me I have to say it’s growing on me.

As I said, I think this has potential to become a bigger trend and people will grow to include “eSports” in the light of traditional sports, because they have so many similarities. What do you guys think?

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3 Responses to eSports and Traditional Sports

  1. Sailaubekov says:

    The topic of this post is extremely interesting. Personally I think that eSports and traditional sports are very similar, but yet they are not and will never be the same thing. But some my friends who are extremely obsessed with games, especially Dota 2, consider eSports and traditional sports as one common area. They often discuss and compare everything related to eSports and traditional sports. For example, during such discussions they compared salaries of individual players in both types of sport and it turned out that some players in eSports earn more money than professional soccer players such as Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi or Gareth Bale. As for me, eSports are different from the traditional types of sport as sport in general include a sense of competition. eSports also include competition, but that competition is different as it does not require players to sweat, suffer, experience pain and physical struggles. eSports players feel only joy and fun. In addition, as the author of the comment below mentioned, the audience of the eSports consists of mainly males of age 18-34. But the traditional sports’ audience is very diverse.

  2. John Walter Stockwell says:

    While yes the popularity of eSports is growing, I think you misunderstand how far eSports has already come. I say this you seem to think that it’s going to be embraced the same way as traditional sports when the popularity of eSports is arguably already equal to that of many traditional sports, and yet it’s still being treated differently. To treat it the same just wouldn’t make any sense because of the plethora of inherent differences between the two. But to consolidate all those differences, what I think is the most important aspect is simply the marketing value.
    The “eSports demographic” is almost entirely comprised of males age 18-34. That’s perfect if you’re a company looking to influence that age group, and indeed that’s something that’s already happening; gaming hardware companies have been sponsoring teams since the 90s. That’s why “fatal1ty” is still somewhat well known. But the enormous companies that you see sponsoring traditional sports, like Citibank, Johnson&Johnson, or Nike, do so because sports have diverse and enormous fan bases. The age, and income are generally the most diverse aspect, while the primary market for gaming is almost exclusively young adults who inherently have lower incomes.
    To go even deeper, it’s likely that eSports can’t develop a diverse audience for a number of reasons. For one, understanding and relating to the players of a game is difficult to achieve within the timelimit of a given game. For lack of a better word, we can say that anyone who watches a program (eSports or otherwise) has some sort of “empathy” for what’s going on. They understand, and relate to it. For most games, empathy cannot be achieved because a viewer first has to have played the game, and second has to have played it enough to understand and relate. Traditional sports, however, don’t suffer from this because the characters are people, and the rules are comparatively simple. You don’t have to be a sports player to understand sports, but you do have to be a gamer to understand games. Which isn’t to say it’s an exclusive term just that a lot of people aren’t, or monetarily can’t be, passionate about games.
    I’m sure over time we’ll see an increase in the age and income groups of people who watch eSports; simply because people age. But I don’t think we’ll see the kind of sponsorship, televization, or diversity that traditional sports have because eSports are just different. Which again, isn’t necessarily to say that you’re wrong, just that you’re not quite right.

  3. Fernando Vera says:

    eSports are extremely interesting and new to me but I wouldn’t say that I am a fan. I don’t even play the games but I can see the appeal of the eSport world. At its core this events are a spectacle like any other sport, there is some intricate strategy at play and a display of skill that takes an insane amount of preparation to achieve. When I watched my first eSport game I felt something familiar, something that I felt several years ago when I watched my first NBA game. At the moment I was completely unaware to all the action that was happening and I felt completely lost but I knew that there was something special going on. As I became more knowledgeable about basketball I began to understand that players don’t run around just to run around, they move to different spots in the floor for different plays, to get a better and disrupt the defense. I don’t understand anything about games like DoTa2 and even thought I was completely lost watching the game, I could could see that there was something special happening not just players running around attacking other players.

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