The highly competitive video game world; With its ever-expanding fan base, it has grown rapidly in the last few years and has become an international phenomenon with solid money. Thanks to their live broadcasts and events, ordinary players have even earned hundreds of thousands – sometimes even millions – of revenues and huge brand endorsements.
As such, we decided to take a look at what this competitive video game world, or as it is known, e-Sports is, its history and what awaits e-Sports in the future.
What is this eSports?
To define it simply; The organized competitive video game world, in which participants from different leagues or teams compete in the same game, is called electronic sports or, as it is known, ‘e-Sports’. Millions of people from all over the world can follow the competing players by attending live events or connecting online.
Streamers who prefer to play games such as Fortnite, League of Legends, Counter-Strike, Call of Duty, Overwatch and Madden NFL, which are usually played from home, can share their moments of play with their followers by using broadcast platforms such as Twitch, where most popular streamers have a fan base.
In fact, there are also similarities between the traditional sports we are used to and e-Sports. For example, in e-Sports, where talent and professionalism come to the fore, a professional player, just like a football player or athlete in their own field, has full control of the game he plays.
Players can fight either one-on-one in games such as FIFA and Street Fighter, or in teams as in other games. For example, while two teams of four compete in Halo, two teams of six each compete in Overwatch. Rules and strategies may differ in each game.
History of eSports
The oldest known eSports competition; It was a fairly small tournament for the Spacewar game, held at Stanford University on October 19, 1972. The first large-scale video game competition was the Space Invaders Championship, organized by Atari in 1980, attracting more than 10,000 participants across the United States.
When history came to the 1990s, computer games began to become popular with the spread of the internet. One of the biggest esports tournaments of the 90s was the Nintendo World Championship, which had its finals in California, United States. The simultaneous World Gaming Championships organized by Blockbuster Video and GamePro magazines on their behalf are some of the e-Sports tournaments held in the early 90s. In the late 90s, tournaments such as Cyberathlete Professional League, QuakeCon and Professional Gamers League were organized.
When we come to the 2000s, as a result of the economic crises in the late 90s, especially in South Korea, with the massive spread of broadband internet networks, people who were unemployed turned to video games in order to spend their spare time, which contributed greatly to the growth of e-Sports.
e-Sports since 2010; It started to experience its golden age by achieving an incredible increase in both the amount of views and awards. While the number of e-Sports tournaments held was approximately 10 in 2000, this number increased to 260 in 2010; Many successful tournaments such as Wold Cyber Games, Internal Extreme Masters and Major League Gaming have been organized.
The emergence and rapid popularity of online streaming services contributed to the increased interest in eSports at that time, which online services are the easiest and most common way to watch eSports. With the launch of the popular broadcasting platform Twitch in 2011, popular e-Sports competitions began to be broadcast regularly. In The International tournament, Twitch recorded a record 4.5 million viewers in one day, and each viewer watched the tournament for an average of two hours.
Since 2013, some universities and colleges in America, such as Robert Morris University and Pikeville University, count e-Sports players as university-level athletes and offer them opportunities such as athlete scholarships.
All tickets for the Season 3 League of Legends World Championship held at Staples Center in 2013 were sold out, and more than 40,000 fans attended the League of Legends World Championship held in Seoul in 2014, where the world-famous musical group Imagine Dragons took the stage. In 2015, the first esports arena was opened in Santa Ana, California.
Who plays eSports?
As hard as it may be to believe for those accustomed to traditional sports leagues such as the NBA and NFL, eSports at its best functions similarly. For example, in April 2018, the NBA drafted a bill to launch its new eSports league focused on the basketball-themed NBA 2K game series. During the draft, 102 professional e-Sports players were selected, who will be provided with all the splendor and facilities provided to the athletes on the field.
Universities and colleges are also very active in e-Sports. More than 50 colleges have a variety of esports programs approved by the National Association of Collegiate Esports. NACE championships, for example, offer thousands of dollars in prize money awarded as scholarships to the winner.
Who watches eSports?
Who watches eSports? In short, there is a sizable esports audience, mostly people from North America, China and South Korea. E-Sports, which had 235 million viewers in 2015, was watched by 323 million people in 2016, and this number, which was approximately 385 million in 2017, reached approximately 590 million people in 2020. In 2016, only the League of Legends world final match was watched by 43 million people, while the NBA finals remained behind this number with 31 million viewers.
According to 2017 data, 71% of esports viewers are male, while 39% are female, and the average age of viewers is between 21 and 35.
e-Sports in Turkey
Turkey’s first known e-sports team is the Dark Passage team, which was created for the Counter Strike game in 2003. The same team also formed a roster for League of Legends in 2012. With the increase in demand for e-Sports, Beşiktaş ESK, 1907 Fenerbahçe e-Sports and Galatasaray eSports also started to support e-Sports teams for the League of Legends game, apart from independent teams. Team Tranquality, founded in 2005, and HWA Gaming, founded in 2008, can be given as examples of active e-Sports teams in Turkey.
Space Soldiers, the e-Sports team founded by Bünyamin Aydın in 2014, has achieved international success by representing Turkey in many tournaments in the CS:GO game. Tarık Çelik, of Turkish origin, was a CS:GO player in the staff of OpTic Gaming, one of the most well-known international e-Sports teams, in 2016-2017.
The e-Athlete license has been granted to the competitors who will compete in the professional league since 2014 by the Ministry of Youth and Sports-General Directorate of Sports of the Republic of Turkey, and the players who have this license are considered as professional players.
Established in 2011 with the Turkish Digital Games Federation, e-Sports, recognized by the state at the federation level, fell to the vice-presidential level with the closure of this federation in 2013. ; however, Electronic Sports Federation was established in 2018 and the institution started its activities on April 4, 2018 with its first president, Alper Afşin Özdemir.
According to Bora Koçyiğit, Director of Riot Games Turkey, the second most watched sport in Turkey is e-Sports after football, and the support from big teams such as Beşiktaş, Fenerbahçe and Galatasaray played a crucial role in the increase in interest in e-Sports.
According to a report by Newzoo, which analyzes the worldwide e-Sports and mobile device market, the number of e-Sports fans in Turkey exceeded 4 million in 2018. According to a presentation by Gaming in Turkey, more than 29 million of more than 46 million people with internet access in Turkey are actively playing games. According to the presentation, this potential contributed to Gamescom 2016’s selection of Turkey as a partner country and Steam’s starting to accept payments in Turkish lira.
What awaits eSports in the future?
Although we do not know exactly what awaits in the future, e-Sports, which is an industry with endless potential and can be considered quite young, we think that it would not be wrong to say that it will continue to grow and develop at full speed. After all, the first e-Sports tournament held in 1972 was a one-year subscription to the Rolling Stones magazine and free beer, but today this award has seen millions of dollars. Today, the global esports industry is valued at nearly $1 billion, and the winners of the most famous tournaments receive millions of dollars in prizes.
According to Newzoo, the esports industry will continue to grow unabated for the next 5 years and in 2023, esports revenue will reach 1.6 billion with 15% annual growth. Newzoo also predicts that growth will be driven by sponsorship revenue in the future as it is now.
The fact that many heavyweight brands, including BMW, IBM, Levi’s and Marvel Entertainment, entered the e-Sports field in 2020 shows us that the interest and interest in the e-Sports industry will continue to increase in the coming years.
It seems that the next 5 years will determine how e-Sports will take its place in the future. The mobile gaming industry has been on the rise lately, and this rise also contributes to the growth of the esports industry in general. The rise of hugely popular games like PUBG Mobile; mobile e-Spo also signals that it will gain an undeniable place in the future.
Think about it; Games like Fortnite and Valorant, which didn’t exist just a few years ago, now dominate the entire esports market. As we said, we can easily say that e-Sports will have a very solid place even if we cannot predict where it will come in the future. At least, that seems to be the case for now, given what e-Sports promises.
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