E-Sports: A New Entrepreneurial Avenue
We recently faced a long lockdown because of Covid-19. Amidst all these the sporting and entertainment events halted due to safely issues. However, one platform which made its way out on the top was E-Sports. E-Sport took a long time to evolve from passion to profession and making it a career- option, ranging from a player, director, coach and a famous owner. But the gaming industry is still in its adopting days, which makes it open to alternation and changes to make a perfect fit for a potential market. So, we are gonna address the importance to what it takes to be an Entrepreneur in the E-sports industry.
Like the IT sector, we can see a lot of your entrepreneur waking in the E-sports industries. Especially college students who flood the industry start pretty early in the competition. The Start-ups in E-Sports range from Organizations to production or even content creation.
We will divide this structure into three parts.
1. E-sport entrepreneur characteristics
2. Market trends.
3. How to build or Enter E-sport Industry.
You need to have the following qualities to survive in E-sports Industries.
Perseverance: Most Business doesn’t have to deal with Haters. Well, E-sports is plagued with more such people than any other Industry. Here to overcome those haters who will try their best to let you down, you have to persevere through them. You need to ignore hate and at the same time you should be able to differentiate between constructive criticism and hate. Constructive criticism will help you grow and responding to hate is gonna let you down. Focus upon your product is necessary, whatever you are into be it content creation, providing a service or an origination. The competition you are gonna face will be brutal, but maintaining a sturdy business model will help you keep afloat.
Passion: Here, this field gives an extra edge to an E-sport professional as when passion turns into profession. Almost every business owner in E-sports Industry will tell you that they love their job and it is the best thing that happened to them. It’s a career path that defined them for the rest of their lives.
Network building: In E-sport it is rather easy to build up a network, it is one of the most important task for being in any entrepreneur portfolio. Your content creation will be a great way to reach to new aspiring individuals who might be potential investors, managers or some players. Always use your platforms wisely as they will be your front page as a creator and reflect back your experience and work.
Vision: This skill binds all the three previous skills to together. If you master them you will see deep vision which will pave your path to success. It will keep you on track; will help you to see the bigger picture. This vision will also provide a practical situation when you confront any problem and this will help you adopt to the required situation.
How Market Trends in E-Sport?
Market in the E-sport area presents in interesting prospectus as it is a brand new industry. It has the luxury to save itself from any existing business models. Often this adds to the way consumer’s purchases or use this product as it is not prone to disruptions, which leads a way to change. The E-sports ecosystem is a new ground for experimentations with new formats and a sense of acceptance with the change. It will also trickle to the existing physical sport industry. Now, the E-sport industry is adapting consumer monetization strategies from physical sport to E-sport. This also registers the paradigm shift of the broadcasting services that have newly invested in the digital space.
Opportunities: As an emerging Industry, E-sports has an immense potential to outperform many large pre-existing sectors of finance. Gaming doesn’t only monetize from Price Money or salaries. It also generates revenue from media sources, broadcasts, sponsorships, Merchandise. Biggest Revenues earners for designers is in game investments to purchase characters, skins, tokens, boosters and many more. For Organizations it will be media rights and viewership. For individual creators and teams it will be sponsorships. So it is pretty much well organized in terms of monetization in spite of an emerging industry. The main edge over traditional sporting events is it is mainly online unlike television. Viewers from pan-global level can access it easily.
Growth Potential and Market size: FIFA E-world cup has been started and had viewership of 278 million people. The FIFA body official has declared its E-sport wing which reflects the views on growth of E-Sports. Accordingly to reports in 2019, the League of Legends World Series was estimated to have a 14.3 million average viewers. In 2019, Minecraft had 1.3 billion viewers on twitch.
E-sports audience unlike others is relatively younger and under the age of 35 years. Online streaming platforms have earned millions through live streams and content creation on their platforms such as Mixer and YouTube gaming.
How to Build a Business in E-Sports
Choose a format: The thing that you need to decide is the domain you need to work in, like Content Creation, if you are goof in creating and making good content in way of video, skills, and written content. Other might be Live streaming, if you can invest several hours in a day to enjoy the live performances and stream live on the platforms such as Twitch and Mixer are made for you. You can also edit the gameplays and clips and earn significant revenue from Instagram and YouTube. If you make written content go for Reddit, Discord and Facebook. This will efficiently help in making a community that will gain you Audience and Sponsors.
Focus on Genre : The Success will come if you focus on one particular Genre around where you feel most Comfortable for example Battle Royale, Horror, RPG’s( Role playing Games). The reason to that is simple because the audience you earn is not going to appeal to everyone. This is also gonna help you as creator and manger to switch between the games with similar Tactics. When you focus on a Niche, you are gonna attract audience under the same umbrella.
Use your Social media Platforms: You can grow only if your content is bringing back people to you again and again. You should try giving glimpses of your work on social media this will keep audience updated and propagate your work. Keep a tight schedule for this purpose, advertise it and boom you have more viewers. Also hosts some Giveaways and contests for people, wherein you can a chance to interact with your Audience, this will excite them and help you reach people who are unaware about you.
Executing these strategies will put any entrepreneur gamer on the right track when it comes to building and scaling the community. The methods listed in this article will help you get your channel up and running and will cause others to gravitate towards your content and make them want to join your gaming community. But you should remember, building and growing a community takes time. Always conduct yourself professionally and remember to interact with your audience, answering any of their questions and replying to their comments and messages. And remember, these rules apply to any entrepreneur looking to build out their community.
Go out and explore this new venture, see you again soon.
Adios Amigos!
