Esports In Performance
Just this past month, thousands of fans flooded the Accorhotels Arena, ready to watch their favourite sport… Parisian locals may say the thousands of fans are seated at the concert hall to watch their local hockey team play. However, for this event, all 20,300 seats of the Accorhotels Arena were filled by fans across the planet watching the 2019 League of Legends Championship Finals. Although Riot Games has not released the official unique worldwide viewership numbers, it has been rumoured that it far exceeds the 100 million unique viewers that tuned in to watch the tournament in 2018. Give a warm welcome to the newest spectator sport in the entertainment industry: esports.
Despite being a relatively new industry, esports — or professional electronic sports — has been gaining traction ever since its creation less than a century ago. I have dedicated most of my life to esports thanks to my personal association with the industry — I have been an avid gamer since a young age and founded an esports company, Aether United, the summer of my sophomore year in high school. In this paper, I will explore how performance influences and plays a role in esports through the observation and analysis of esports’ largest game, League of Legends.
Before jumping into detailed analysis, however, we must address the stigma attached to esports: the stigma that competitive video gaming is a sinkhole of time and energy. As Matthew Walther, an esports critic writing for The Week, writes, “Gaming is not only a compulsion… [it’s] a simulation of being an expert” (7). My previous article, A Future in Esports, explores sceptics’ views and compares esports to traditional sports. To summarize that paper, I concluded that esports has indeed become a successful industry through the analysis of variables such as its current and projected growth, gross income, and investment. Moreover, esports draws parallels with traditional sports in its career opportunities as Mai-Hanh Nguyen, writer for Business Insider, introduces them in 4 distinct categories: Athletics, Marketing, Event Planning, and Broadcasting/Streaming. Interestingly enough, performance plays an enormous role in these four career paths and this paper will unravel each category and analyze the importance of performance.
Before I analyze these careers, it is important to define what I mean when I say performance. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, performance is the calculation of “how well a person… does a piece of work or an activity”. As such, a good performance is one that keeps the audience interested, one that entertains, sparks curiosity, or encourages thought. Ultimately, good performance is what drives growth in all entertainment-based industries, which is why it holds such importance in a growing industry like esports.
Athletics
In League, two teams of five participate in professional games played throughout the season. While on stage, these individuals perform through their computers and are displayed to the live audience on massive screens. Fans at home can also tune in on streaming platforms such as Twitch and YouTube. Of course, these competitions are League’s main product and all profit is earned through selling the competition: from ticket and merchandise sales to outside advertisement and investments, all of it stems from viewership. Given that esports is part of the entertainment industry, the actual entertainment value is critical for high viewership. Therefore, just as the entertainment value of an actor or singer is shown through their plays and concerts respectively, the value of an esports athlete is also attributable to their performance on stage.
However, an athletes performance does not end after they leave the stage. In the words of Bridget Davidson, senior esports manager at Riot Games, “[being an esports athlete] is not just playing this game at a professional level, but it’s being this kind of celebrity player”. In another form of entertainment, these athletes interact with their fanbase through promotional events, their own social media, and their organization’s marketing. Through their interactions, these players have a “huge amount of influence… keeping sponsors happy and… fans engaged” (Davidson).
Even more than just influencing the viewers and sponsors, this off-stage performance also develops the stories and backgrounds of each player. A good example to look at would be Faker. As Travis Gafford, well-known North American journalist, describes, “if there is a Michael Jordan of League of Legends or esports, this is the guy… Faker has remained dominant for years now”. As the champion of three League of Legends World Finals, the mission to dethrone him as indisputable best player is a storyline that ignites the fanbase and other competitors. These storylines provide more entertainment value for the industry as a whole.
As a result, performance plays a role in an esports athlete’s career in two main ways. Most evidently, the athlete must train to entertain and bring new and interesting performances to each of their games. Accordingly, the game develops into different metas as these pro players continue to challenge the status quo. Just as importantly, athletes develop their personality off-stage by interacting with their fans. As a result, the games and the industry as a whole become more interesting as rivalries between players and personal stories are born. For an athlete, performance is important because it motivates them to improve and provides entertainment value, but on an even larger scale, their performance provides substance to the industry, which draws in a larger audience, and provides more legitimacy for sponsorships and other investments.
Marketing
Since its creation, LoL has not used traditional strategies to market their product. In fact, the founding team at Riot Games has said that nearly all their growth is attributable to word-of-mouth recommendations from the game’s founding players. In Gafford’s words, “because they have spent virtually zero dollars on traditional marketing. League of Legends has… flown [relatively] underneath the radar by the mainstream”. Therefore, League’s initial growth occurred in a very niche environment of young, dedicated gaming enthusiasts.
The esport’s big break into the mainstream occured in 2016 when the Staples Center sold out for that year’s Championship Finals. “Naturally, [League of Legends received] a lot of derision from traditional media” as ESPN, CNN, and other major news sites tried to report on the stigmatized topic to an ignorant mainstream audience (Gafford). In response, esports supporters came on to these traditional media desks to inform and defend the burgeoning industry. Through a performance lens, these advocates used this new media platform to spark curiosity for esports in an even larger audience.
Following these 2016 talks, these proponents were able to sway public opinion and inform potential investors about the immense opportunity in esports. As a result, large backers of traditional sports began to invest in esports. For example, Rick Fox — renowned ex-basketball player and businessman — bought into the North American League of Legends franchise and helped to usher the game into the mainstream.
Ever since League of Legends’ inception in 2009, Riot Games has utilized eccentric and essentially free methods of marketing to grow their product. Instead of spending their profits on advertising and marketing, they were able to reinvest their earnings back into developing their game. Their dedication to the game ignited the same passion within their niche audience, and through passionate performance, League was able to break into the mainstream and begin to dispel the stigma surrounding the esports industry.
Event Planning
When I think of performance, the first thing that comes to mind is something done on stages such as a concert or a play. It seems that Riot Games has the same idea as they invest heavily in their international events and performances. In an interview, Ariel Horn, Riot’s Global Head of Esports Content, stated that “[at Riot] we want to create memories with these big events and we know that those memories are what really carry on”.
As early as 2014, Riot Games were already seeking to introduce performance to hype up the competitions with their first LoL Worlds Championship song, “Warriors”, which was written and performed by Imagine Dragons for the 2014 finals. The year after that, they augmented the viewer experience “by bringing up the players on a lift and using technology to… elevate this new type of sport” (Horn). As the esports scene became more sophisticated however, Riot Games began to experiment with even newer technologies to provide the best possible performances to their growing audience. In subsequent years, the LoL Worlds final uses light shows, glass screens, and harnesses augmented reality to recreate colossal life-like depictions of dragons, phoenixes, and other League entities.
Ultimately, all these new technologies are used to make the performance more entertaining for the audience. Their use throughout the tournament season and its culmination in the World Finals opening ceremonies help build-up the anticipation of League fans, leading to increased viewership and revenue which have been projected to reach $1.5 billion by the year 2020, a year-on-year growth of nearly 40% according to Newzoo’s 2018 report; and as these numbers continue to grow in size, so will the growth of the entire industry.
Broadcasting and Streaming
Not only does performance seek to entertain and spark curiosity, but it can also be used to invoke meaningful thought. Another way esports performs is through the casters, analysts, interviewers and hosts that make up the broadcast team. This team casts over each game in real-time, breaks down and provides analysis for the games afterwards, interviews players as they leave the stage. As North American interviewer Ovilee May states, “everyone is driven by their love for the game, or community, and want to do what they can to contribute to the scene”. Collectively, they provide analysis through their performance, which allows the transition between each game to be as seamless as possible.
Moreover, just like all the other career opportunities, the broadcast team is paramount for the growth of esports. As esports manager Nick Allen suggests, “the growth around League of Legends… and esports has been tightly coupled with accessibility of the content. Livestreaming [on] twitch and youtube and facebook [are] all… sources where you can watch this content”. With the close link between esports and livestreaming, the broadcasting team becomes even more essential as they allow the esports experience to be accessible to the fans who are watching at home.
How Esports Performs
Every time I look back on my time in esports, I am amazed by how far it has come, even just comparing its recent year-on-year growth. Although debates about esports’ legitimacy are still brought up periodically, esports articles have begun to diversify to other aspects of the industry rather than just attacking or defending its legitimacy. These coming years also mark an interesting time in esports as its literature is still developing; I am fortunate enough to be able to provide my own articles on such literature.
Reviewing League of Legends’ growth, it is abundantly apparent that the game has come a long way. As interest began to build for League, the people behind the esport created its four main career paths; as these branches began to develop, they also began discovering how these careers could best be performed to promote the growth of the industry.
At its core, the athletes are the backbone of League of Legends as their competitive drive is what entertains esports viewers. As the game grew, proponents were able to find marketing opportunities to spark curiosity outside of the then-niche community of League of Legends, which assisted the game’s breakthrough into the mainstream. With a larger audience, Riot Games and its production team began to plan more daring events with the use of novel technologies such as moving platforms and augmented reality to further enhance the experience of the viewer. To facilitate this growing esports audience, the broadcast team packages each tournament to provide thoughtful analysis and streamline the transition between each game of the tournament.
Reviewing its history, it is clear that esports is an industry that is here to stay; and looking towards the future, I am positive that the industry will continue to exceed the expectations we set for its growth. Esports has not reached its highest potential, but if we continue to strive towards providing the best performance for our audience, there is nothing we cannot achieve.
Work Cited
Cheng, Ryan. “A Future in Esports”. Medium, The Startup, 30 May 2019.
Iwerks, Leslie. “League of Legends Origins”. Netflix, 16 October 2019. Netflix. People cited (chronological order): Bridget Davidson, Travis Gafford, Rick Fox, Ariel Horn, Nick Allen
Various Authors. “Games, Esports, and Mobile Market Research and Data.” Newzoo. 2019.
May, Ovilee. Personal Interview. 30 Dec. 2018.
Nguyen, Mai-Hanh. “Jobs and Careers in the eSports & Video Gaming Industry Continue to Grow”. Business Insider, Business Insider, 8 Dec. 2017.
Walther, Matthew. “Sorry, nerds: Video games are not a sport”. The Week, 4 May 2018.
