As eSports Hurtle Towards The Mainstream, It’s All About The Money

It feels like any nuanced discussion of eSports has to examine the scene’s tendency to romanticize mainstream acceptance. For all that eSports has matured over the last few years, there’s still a childish naivety permeating the idea that watching League of Legends in a pub or Counter Strike in a casino is a verifiable benchmark of social acceptance. What does that really prove, apart from that eSports fans are just as obnoxious as fans of regular sport?

Cynicism aside, the last few years have seen eSports go from strength to strength. In a cultural sense, eSports has never been closer to the mainstream than it is now. However, the relationship between that normalization and the sector’s financial growth isn’t one of exact correlation.

In Australia at least, there have been scores of big professional eSports events like the recent League of Legends OPL Finals in Sydney and the more regular, unofficial community-run events like Barcraft and MOBAR. While the latter make up the majority of events, it’s the former that garner the most media attention and bring in the most money.

And the cliched truth is that it really is all about the money. The local eSports communities may breathe life into the scene on a regular basis but it’s the enormous sums of cash being pumped into the sector that ultimately keep it growing. Funnily enough, it’s a lot like regular sports.

In fact, if anything should be taken as an indicator of eSports acceptance in mainstream culture, it’s the money tied up in it. As a society, we’re quick to glorify the profitable — and, like regular sports, the profitability of eSports comes on multiple fronts. There’s the ticket sales, streaming passes, official merchandise, advertising opportunities and, of course, gambling.

If you want to judge the perceived legitimacy of any sport or game, a good place to start is the amount of gambling that surrounds it — and on this front, eSports delivers. The last two years have seen more and more professional gambling websites and firms open up the floodgates for professional video games — whether they understand the games or not. In this case, supply creates its own demand and traditional gambling companies are more interested in profiting off that than they are learning about team composition in DOTA 2 and adjusting the odds accordingly.

Looking beyond gambling, I think there’s a case to made that eSports next big move will see it invade terrestrial media like television. I admit it sounds strange but anyone who’s looked into the financials of professional football knows that broadcasting rights are where the money is at. The presence of more-established sports like soccer or tennis on TV is often assumed to be ironclad but really it’s entirely tied to their continued popularity and relevance of the sports themselves. If people want to watch it, the networks will find a way to broadcast it — and this same principle could apply to eSports.

With traditional TV platforms having a harder and harder time getting the attention of younger audiences — it wouldn’t be that surprising to see TV eSports emerge as a response to this. Live sports arguably have just as important of a place in the television ecosystem as something like Game of Thrones does and eSports can offer network television an opportunity to reach out and gain the attention of the audience they’ve long assumed lost to the age of streaming-services and smartphones.

The perhaps-ugly truth is that, like regular sports, the money being invested into eSports acts as the most compelling argument for its normalization. Perhaps once we accept this, we can set ourselves up for the real culture war: accepting that all sports, digital or physical, are all equally ridiculous.

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