How Did Esports Become So Popular Over the Last Years?

Competitive video gaming has been around for decades. However, in the form it exists today, it can get called a fairly new entertainment form. That primarily gets owed to its spectator aspect, which was not a thing until the early-2010s. Yes, people have played video games in various contests for money prizes since the 1980s, but it was not until the invention of streaming platforms like Justin.TV that these competitions gained a worldwide audience. Naturally, for that to occur, internet speeds and penetration had to dramatically expand to a point far beyond the heights this technology could achieve in the previous two decades.

Today, the Esports sector pulls in global revenues of 1.3 billion, which is a number that should grow by five hundred million in the next two years as this sector continues to swell. Interest in competitive video gaming ranges dramatically over the globe, with Americans showing less curiosity for it than those residing in the Asia Pacific region, where esports is all the rage among young adults and teens, particularly males.

That said, in 2023, projections put the number of people from the US that will watch Esports at around 46 million, representing a 20 million increase from the 2018 figure. The global Esports audience gets estimated at 640 million, with many of these individuals getting further exposure to video game competitions at sportsbooks that offer free bets. Nowadays, thousands of these sites are active, with most of them providing live streams for the events whose markets they list. Hence, there is no doubt that they also are playing their role in the rapid expansion of this sphere.

Below, we look into the evolution of Esports, how it attained its current-day prominence, and what are its highest-profile tournaments running right now.

The History of Video Game Competitions

Hard-core video game historians like to cite Spacewar, which ran on the PDP-1 computer, as the pioneering title used for the first-ever formal gaming contest. Developed by a group of MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) students, this game was at the center of an event held in 1972 at Standford University that gave the person who excelled most at it a one-year subscription to the famous music magazine – Rolling Stone.

It goes without saying that this was a pivotal milestone in the evolution of video games, as nothing like it before had occurred. Yet, the most renowned large-scale gaming contest got organized in 1980. It transpired across multiple US locations, including metropolitan cities like Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago, featuring over ten thousand participants who competed in Atari’s Space Invader machine.

While this may not have been the original mass-player video game competition on the planet, it was the one that received the most press, won by Rebecca Heineman, whose grand prize consisted of a free trip to Japan, to see Taito headquarters, the company behind this game. Space Invaders and the discussed event became synonymous with video games for quite some time in the 1980s, and they helped usher in a new era in arcades and the coming-of-age phase of American youth.

Following the success of this tournament, others popped up in the United States, leading to the creation of the US National Video Game Team in 1983. And then, the following year, Centuri and Konami held a joint Track & Field arcade game contest that drew over a million players from North America and Japan. Fighting arcade machines, such as Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat, aided in this realm breaking new popularity ground. Once the internet began to gain traction via first-person shooters like Quake in the early 2000s, South Korea emerged as a substantial Esports market, with China following suit in the 2010s.

The Rise of Esports

As stated in the intro, the debut of Twitch (the video game section of Justin.TV) is what likely catapulted Esports into the stratosphere. For that to have happened, a surge in online gambling and various technological advancements, of course, preceded it.

Before Twitch, and to some degree, YouTube, became prime hubs for displaying Esports action, gluing millions of eyeballs to screens, the video game industry made multiple wise moves to reach the point it did before these two entities became factors. These included the introduction of video game consoles that would remain viable for years and exposed vast demographics to gaming as an affordable pastime. With the promotion of titles primarily targeting multiplayer gaming having equal importance. And as this sector’s user pool grew, so did investments for venture capitalists in this industry.

Justin.TV launched in 2007, and it got dissolved seven years later. But in 2011, it moved its gaming section to a novel website named Twitch.TV, which blew up almost instantly. It now has around 31 million active users and averages a concurrent audience of 2.58 million.

Going by the latest stats, most Esports fans tune in to Twitch streams to watch contests from popular gaming leagues that revolve around games like Dota 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Overwatch, and League of Legends. Undoubtedly, Dota 2 has been and still is the video game that draws the most attention, as its tournaments offer the highest prize pools.

What Are/Were the Most Recent Top Esports Events

Boasting a reward pile that exceeds $40 million, The International, a Dota 2 tournament run by the Valve Corporation, is the current most-talked-about gaming competition, one that many await each year with bated breath. The Fortnite World Cup also has an impressive prize distribution whose total comes to a little over $30. And this was an event organized by Epic Games, Fortnite’s developer and publisher, held at Arthur Ashe Stadium.

Riot Games organizes the annual League of Legends World Championship in autumn, and it has done so since 2011, with this tournament acting as the culmination of each LOL season. Its prize fund usually hovers around $5 million. Other events worth noting are, Activation’s Call of Duty World League Championship ($2 million prize pool) and the Overwatch League Grand Finals ($3 million prize pool) run by Blizzard Entertainment.