How Do Esports Based on Traditional Sports Compare to the Real Thing?
Yuriy SheremetEsports have begun to follow in the footsteps of traditional sports, professionalizing and commercializing. This is attracting more viewers and sponsors, generating millions of dollars in revenue. Some people consider esports to be just a fad, while others believe they are a sport equivalent to many popular games like football and basketball. So, who is right?
Humans Will Always Compete
Whether it’s with a game controller or a bat, humans have always been competitive and used sport as a way to settle their need to prove their superiority and athleticism over others. The Ancient Greeks invented the Olympics while the Romans had sports like chariot racing and gladiator battles.
Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, many of the traditional sports we know today began to take shape. In England, sports like lawn tennis, cricket and football were codified and then exported around the world.
Then, during the 20th century, these sports began to professionalize and commercialize. In the 1950s and 1960s, games began being shown on TV, giving more people access to these sports than ever before. Then in the 1970s, sponsorship deals became commonplace, bringing significant revenues that drove player wages up.
This all helped to evolve traditional sports into the well-polished products that we know today.
The Rise of Esports
Esports are a modern form of competition, where players battle it out inside video games instead of on a pitch or court. They’ve grown in popularity over the last decade, reaching around 400 million viewers in 2019.
Their popularity has helped competition organizers to command large sums from sponsors and organizers who pay to have their brands associated with these events. This includes companies like Red Bull, Intel, Dell, and Acer as well as the developers and publishers of video games like Activision and Electronic Arts.
Given that these esports are now commanding large audiences that are on par with some more established spectator events, how do they compare to traditional sports?
Basketball
Although it's a league based only in North America, the NBA is the leading brand in global basketball. The NBA Finals are watched by around 15 million people, making it the third most-watched sport in the country. Many of these fans enjoy placing bets on basketball to add another layer of excitement.
The official esport competition of the NBA is the NBA 2K League. It is a joint venture between the league and 2K, the game publishing company. In contrast, the sport had a peak viewership of just 28,850 people in July 2018. Things were reportedly worse in 2019 when its viewing figures fell by around 40%.
American Football
The NFL Madden game has been a popular title for around two decades and is also one of the oldest esports. This competition has large shoes to fill as the NFL’s Super Bowl is the most-watched sporting event in North America.
Like the NBA 2K League, the Madden Championship has significantly smaller viewing figures. In 2019, its final game reached peak viewership at 97,000 on Twitch, although it did get 2.5 million views overall.
This figure doesn’t include the people who watched the game on ESPN2, community channels and fan sites.
The winner of the competition received $100,000 in prize money. This is actually not too dissimilar to the $124,000 each winning player of the Super Bowl receives. However, that means the NFL pays out around $6.5 million just to the winning team’s players.
Additionally, several NFL teams earned almost as much as the entire esports industry in 2019, showing there is a long way to go.
Soccer
Soccer is a popular sport around the world and competitions like the World Cup and the UEFA Champions League can attract as many as 500 million viewers to watch a single game. That’s more than all the esports viewers in 2019 combined.
EA Sport’s FIFA franchise is the most popular soccer video game but doesn’t attract anywhere near as many viewers as the real thing. In 2019, the ePremier League final reached 83,421 peak viewers while the Premier League regularly achieves more than 2 million peak viewers per game.
Non-Sports
The big difference comes when you look at esports that aren’t based on traditional sports. Games like Dota 2 and League of Legends attract many more people.
For example, the 2018 League of Legends World Championship saw 1.9 million peak viewers, while Dota 2 and CS:GO both had more than 1 million peak viewers in several 2018 competitions.
Yuriy Sheremet – Expert in mobile gaming and esports among shooters and MOBA games.
At EGamersWorld, Yuriy, as in 2020 when he joined the portal, works with content, albeit with adjustments to his area of responsibility.