The recently purchased Apex League of Legends Team after winning the North American Challenger Series
With the Philadelphia 76ers recently announcing their purchase of established Esports brands Dignitas and Apex on September 26, the amount of involvement from professional athletes and teams in esports is heavily growing. Just last year, Rick Fox (formerly of the LA Lakers) announced his purchase of the League of Legends team Gravity to field his own roster under the moniker Echo Fox in addition to the announcing of Shaquille O’Neal’s and the co-owner of the Sacramento Kings’ investment into the Esports brand NRG. So why are big names in conventional sports investing into this new realm of competition?
The 2015 League of Legends World Championship Finals hosted at the Mercedez-Benz Arena in Berlin
Esports, by definition are the competitive tournaments of video games, especially among professional gamers. As trivial as this sounds, events like the 2015 League of Legends World Championships amassed over 334 million unique impressions online and through television. In addition, this event had a peak concurrent viewership of 14 million during the finals, rivalling the same statistic for the MLB finals of that year. This is why more and more sports franchises are investing into esports; they are growing at astronomical rates that even surpass some conventional sports. I believe that this is due to the great increase of youth looking towards the internet for entertainment instead of the television.
The 2014 DOTA International Event
Companies are also realizing that esports are a way to reach out to the notoriously difficult to reach market of 18 to 35 year olds that spend much of their time online. Major sports leagues such as the NBA and NFL are not streamed online, so many look towards esports as an alternative. Like conventional sports, people are excited about these competitions. Millions of dollars are being put into both the prize pools and production of esports. They are able to root for their favourite team and associate themselves with a community that they feel they are able to be involved with. However, much of this demographic is unable to identify with conventional sports, either not having experience in playing them or having disinterest in the sport itself. However, competitive video games are increasingly easy to access with games such as DOTA2 and the aforementioned League of Legends being free to access. Therefore, they are able to align themselves with a professional organization with players that share a common interest as them- the video game they play. Therefore, these big name figures and organizations are investing into esports due to the ability to reach out to an exponentially growing new customer segment that may not necessarily overlap with the market of conventional sports. Esports are definitely on the rise to overtake conventional sports in viewership, especially due to the financial support behind the scene that is finally starting to take shape.
Word Count: 450