What is E-Sports? Know about E-Sports

A few years ago, when school-college students used to play games, parents used to say what would happen if they played so many games? Can you earn money by playing games? Come on, study properly, then you will get a good job. But now they may not have the opportunity to talk about it! Thanks to e-sports, gamers are now able to earn a lot of money by playing games.

E-Sports

There is a very small difference between normal video gaming and e-sports gaming. Whereas general gaming is playing games for fun on any electronic gadget. Their e-sports is a category within the gaming category where they compete with each other through their skills and talent to win the game league. And this league is also a commercial league like football's English Premier League or La League or IPL of cricket.

Also, thanks to Facebook and YouTube, gaming video views are more than the combined audience of HBO, Netflix, and ESPN. As a result, streamers are getting both their visibility and money through monetization from different platforms by streaming games.

From arcade gaming that started in the 1970s to today's revolutionary cloud gaming, e-sports has taken it to new heights. But before that, let's know a little about the stars of this e-sports.

E-Sports

There are a total of 11 major stakeholders in the e-sports ecosystem. The two stakeholders at the very beginning of this eco-system are game developers and publishers. Sometimes the developers and publishers are the same, like epic games, Fortnite is both developed and published. Sometimes developers make games and different publishers publish the game for different platforms PUBG is developed by Pubg Corporation, and its publishers include Hot Cool games, Tencent, and Krafton. A third stakeholder is leagues, whose publishers allow games to be used as assets for competitive tournaments, in return for the leagues helping to increase the game's popularity. And if the popularity increases, the game's visibility and players increase, and if the players increase, the game's revenue increases. For e-sports, this is done by the World E-Sports League (WSL) which organizes international e-sports tournaments. In 2021 WSL hosted the World Championship of League of Legends with a total peak viewership of 3.5 million!!! From here we get our fourth and fifth stakeholders, who are popular gamers or e-sports players and regular players or small players. From these small players later emerge more competitive e-sports players, as we see in cricket or football leagues. Also because of these players, games get new players and sponsors to organize tournaments.

E-Sports has the likes of Ninja, Shroud, Richard Taylor, or India's Mortal, Scout. Those who play the game get millions of viewers watching and interested in playing the game. Next comes our two other stakeholders for whom e-sports can generate so much revenue, they are streaming platforms and broadcasting platforms. Because of this, leagues and players can be in direct contact with their core, fans of the game, and gamers. And in terms of streaming, this is done by YouTube, Facebook, and Twitch, and broadcasting is now done by ESPN. Usually, these fans are the ones that accelerate the e-sports business the most. Because they play games as well as view and based on their numbers the second phase starts and that is sponsors and merchandise.

That is to say, the more fans, the more viewership, and visibility, and then more sponsors, and more income for leagues, streaming services, publishers, and developers.

So far, it has only been said how the pulse-star inside the game works and the income inside it. Now let's talk about the ecosystem involved. When arcade gaming was launched in the 1970s, it was accessible to very few people. If many people don't know arcade games, let me say for them, many of us in the area have played Mustafa, Kings of Fight, Metal Slag, etc. games with 1 rupee coins. That was a version of the arcade game. A few days later, in 1972, the first console game was released, the current version of which is Play Station, also known as Xbox. Along with this, the personal computer era began and PC games also became popular. In 1989 Nintendo released the handheld gaming system. And in 1997, the first mobile snake game was released, which may be the best game of all time. And in 1997, the path of the prosperity of e-sports may have started through mobile games, you will understand the reason for saying this a little later. However, around 2017 and 2018, VR and Cloud gaming, the two future gaming segments of current technology, began to take off.

E-Sports

The game developers and publishers have finished bringing the game to the market, but the device is needed to play the game, and the circle of the ecosystem begins with the arrival of this device. At the very beginning, when arcade games were released, there was little room for movement in the field of games and it was done with arcade devices, but with the advancement of technology, game development, and new levels were added, requiring modern devices, various consoles came into the market. And its updated version. However, many could not play the game even if they wanted to because the price of the device was not within the reach of everyone that is, accessibility was limited. Still, not everyone can buy a gaming PC or consoles like PS-5 or x-box because of the price. And this is where the mobile plays the game. Anyone can easily play the game if they have a decent smartphone in hand.

Here is the core of our article which we discussed above. The more fans any game has, the more viewership and visibility it will have, and the more visibility, the more sponsors and more revenue. But if the accessibility of a game is not high then even if there are viewers of the game they won't have much fun, because how will the viewer understand that the streamer uses his skills to play a very good game, unless he goes to play the game himself and faces the challenge! But in this entire business model of e-sports, they have created a big barrier in this accessibility. A very limited amount of accessibility was due to the price of the device and console. But PUBG gets rid of this accessibility issue in no time by bringing the mobile version of their game, and the results are immediate!

Game companies generate revenue through CD sales of their games, and in-game item purchases. Like Call of Duty, Fifa games can be played on PC/Laptop, Play-Station, and X-Box. To play these games you either need to buy a good quality PC/Laptop or play station or x-box which is not affordable for everyone. After buying this device you have to buy the game CD, you have to buy various items in it to make the game fun. Now see, how many people it is possible?

As a result, there is a huge barrier at the beginning of playing the game, as a result, the number of players in the game decreases, and if the number of players decreases, the viewers will also decrease, and if the viewer decreases, the sponsor will automatically decrease and the income will decrease.

E-Sports

And this is where PUBG 2017-2018 brings their freemium model and mobile gaming. And as of 2019, where the 10-year-old most iconic game Call of Duty earned $1.1 billion, PUBG earned $1.51 billion!!! The reason for this is none other than accessibility. They make accessibility accessible to everyone by releasing games on mobile and by facilitating free downloads on Play Store. Because of this, when different streamers play the game, its fan base grows very quickly, along with the ease of accessibility, the number of players, viewership, and visibility also increases. Various tournaments are organized along with events, ie sponsors and many more. It also increases the income of all their stakeholders.

This is the same thing, that is, when Call of Duty replicates the freemium model, in just one and a half years, COD Mobile has 500 million downloads and revenue of 1 billion dollars!

And that's why it was said that the beginning of e-sports is the beginning of mobile gaming.

In other words, if all e-sports games come to this SIM model, then this sector will boom easily. No, because of the many limitations of mobile devices, developers can't put much into these games. Many of the best games can't have good features on mobile, does that mean that these games will be out of reach for everyone due to the lack of expensive consoles? Not even that, and this is where all the big tech giants are coming up with solutions. Google, Microsoft, Apple, and many other tech giants are bringing cloud gaming as a solution.