What you missed about the Fortnite World Cup
Besides making a bunch of teenagers rich, the tournament gave the general public a glimpse of a 1.1-billion-dollar business.
This week the news were filled with teenage millionaires and perplex, almost outraged adults.
New York’s Arthur Ashe Stadium was home to the Fortnite World Cup, a three day gathering around Gen Z’s favorite multiplayer game. Along with four competitions, there was a mini amusement park, a set by DJ Mashmello, a teaser of Fortnite’s tenth season, people dressed as the game’s characters, gaming celebrities, and many other activations blurring the line between the digital world and reality.
The tournament’s scale was comparable to almost any sports event. It has 23.000 attendees (in the same stadium where the US Open is held) while over 2 million people saw it live through Twitch and YouTube. Epic Games, the developer behind Fortnite, gave out 30 million dollars in prizes.
Kyle “Bugha” Giesdorf, a 16-year-old American boy, was the solo champion and took home over 3 million dollars. For reference, this year Novak Djokovic got 2.61 million at Wimbledon, Rafael Nadal got 2.56 at Roland Garros and Tiger Woods got 2.07 at the Augusta Masters.
The fifth place prize of 900.000 dollars went to Argentine Thiago “K1ng” Lapp, the only Latin American in the Top 10. Lapp is 13, the minimum age to enter the competition, while the oldest contestant was 24.
If these numbers surprise you it’s because you haven’t been paying attention to esports, professional or semiprofessional videogame tournaments. World championships for games like DOTA, League of Legends, Call of Duty, Overwatch or PUBG, for example, also have million dollar prizes, enormous audiences and devoted fans.
Newzoo forecasts that this year esports will generate a global revenue of 1.1 billion dollars, that comprises sponsorships, media rights, advertising, merchandise, tickets and publisher fees.
As the consultancy explains, this business is still consolidating: from monetization strategies to organizing the screens so the audience can see them, there is still a lot of experimenting going on and big investments made in this search have yet to prove their return.
Getting past the mocking attitude and the apparent contradiction between esports and “real” sports (there have been very interesting conversations about that), what we can see is a very lucrative business. Gaming has already surpassed the revenue of cinema, music and sports, and is rising up as a protagonist in the revolution that the entertainment industry is undergoing.
In the words of Guido Farji, CEO at Flame Ads: “For many people video games are still a niche thing, when it’s really the fastest growing entertainment industry in the world, second only to television. We’re talking about a 137-billion-dollar market, based not only on the appeal of playing them, but also watching them.”
