Pulse
ESPORTS ESPO
Esports: setting a new standard for consumption and fan engagement
Espo, a tech company building fan engagement applications for the esports community, has dedicated significant resources into researching the market trends of traditional sports and esports.
Henry James, Espo's Founder and CEO, explains why this research substantiates his belief that the future scale of esports and its global audiences will dwarf that of traditional sports within the next two decades.
Unlike traditional sports that involve real-world gameplay, esports involves virtual gameplay that has become an ever-more thrilling spectacle to watch as video games have increased in the depth of their strategic sophistication.
Clocking global audiences of 474 million in 2021, esports viewership speaks for itself. Our proprietary research has led us to make predictions that the future scale of esports and its global audiences will dwarf that of traditional sports within the next two decades, much like how the video gaming industry has over the music and film industries.
With the advent of YouTube, Twitch and other popular video streaming sites, traditional sports are increasingly being faced with the challenge
P108 WIRE / PULSE / INSIGHT / REPORTS
of acquiring new lifelong fans amongst younger generations who either don’t watch TV, or don’t even own a TV. With ageing fanbases, the question for traditional sports is whether they will manage to innovate and adapt their business model in ways that will be able to compete with esports in the future.
Noting the explosive popularity of esports, traditional sports have been closely examining the fan behaviours, habits and interests of esports fans who are predominantly made up of millennials and gen-z. Despite the impressive viewership, esports is still a very new and fragmented landscape that will standardise and mature with time among its key stakeholders and fans alike.
It’s during this period of nascency that traditional sports have a window of opportunity to learn and adapt quickly to the rising digital consumption and engagement trends of these younger audiences before experiencing the serious threat of negative balance sheets from rapidly deteriorating viewership. Esports popularity has been catapulted by multi- billion-dollar video game franchises and a lack of cost-prohibitive sports TV channels.
At the time of writing, the annual League of Legends World Championship has recently got underway in Reykjavík. Last year’s event hosted in Shanghai experienced a peak of 46 million concurrent viewers and – like all esports
tournaments – was free-to-view. Whether esports will be able to transition into pay-to- view models as achieved by UFC is a debate that only time will tell, but our analysis quite firmly points to esports forever being consumed on personal computers and handheld devices, not TV.
METAVERSE Responding to the calls of esports fans to engage
more deeply with their favourite teams and players online, our company has designed a metaverse for these parties to co-exist and interact inside a vibrant 3D animated virtual world. EspoWorld will be a place where users can play, collect, navigate and socialise in a safe environment where engagement and collaboration is rewarded with mechanisms such as play-to-earn, curate-to-earn, share-to- earn, play-to-keep and other alternatives thereof.
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