How eSports compete with online casino games in Portugal
Bogdan LashchenkoOnline casino companies have grown rapidly in Portugal since the legalization of this activity in the country in 2016. However, this is not the only form of internet entertainment that is growing in the country. Electronic sports (eSports), for example, have also gained strength.
Despite the commonalities between these activities, their nature is quite different. In general, eSports focus on competition between players and reach a younger audience, while online casino games are much more based on luck and tend to attract the interest of a more mature audience.
However, even with the differences between eSports and online casino games, it is undeniable that there are points of convergence and competition between them. In this article, we explain how the relationship between the two is in Portugal today.
What is the audience for online casino games?
Gambling emerged well before the success of Las Vegas, Monte Carlo and Macau, among other casino fan paradises. When they arrived on the internet, they already had a loyal and eager audience for opportunities. However, it is undeniable that its audience has grown with the shift to digital.
Nowadays, the audience for online casino games in Portugal is much larger than the number of people who could attend physical casinos in the past. There is no longer the financial barrier, for example. After all, currently, with €5 or €10 you can start playing on any site.
This made the audience more diverse, too. In fact, there are more and more young people among the registered users of gambling and betting sites. According to a report recently released by the Portuguese Gaming Regulation and Inspection Service (SRIJ), 59.3% of registered gamblers in the country are between 18 and 34 years old.
This distribution by age groups considers not only casino players, but also users who place sports bets. After all, both activities are regulated by the SRIJ, and many of the websites available in Portugal offer both options to their customers.
And who are the eSports fans?
Those who think about e-sports usually imagine extremely young players and fans, many of them children and teenagers. In a way, this corresponds to reality. After all, eSports are an evolution of video games, with a much higher degree of competitiveness, interaction and professionalism. Access to these games from an early age facilitates the formation of a relatively young audience.
However, as with online casino games, the eSports audience has grown. In 2020, it was estimated that eSports would soon have more than 1 million practitioners in the country. A minority, around 10,000 people, would be amateur athletes with the inspiration to turn pro. The rest would be a potential consumer audience for various products related to eSports.
As this audience gets older, starts working and earning their own money, without forgetting eSports, the market becomes even more promising. There are currently no specific data for Portugal available. However, in the UK, 63% of eSports consumers are men aged between 21 and 35. In the same 2019 survey, women already represented 31% of the total audience.
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The struggle for generations Y and Z
The truth is that, currently, both casino and eSports sites have the largest share of their audiences in Generations Y and Z. More specifically, among people up to 35 years of age. This is an audience that had access to the internet from an early age and that, for the most part, is already able to pay for its own consumption.
As much as, in the case of casinos, it is still important to rely on revenue from a more mature audience, with money to spend and an old passion for games like blackjack and slot machines, the future lies with the younger generations. Therefore, the trend of the iGaming market is precisely to bet on strategies that reach this audience. And the approximation of the online casino industry with eSports has shown to be a promising path.
In the opposite direction, but still modestly, the electronic games industry has seen the mechanics of gambling as a way to increase its revenues. We talk about that next.
Approaches between casino sites and eSports
In recent years, video game developers have started to invest in new sources of revenue. The promotion of major events between players and professional teams emerged precisely as a way to further promote the games — and that's what motivated the emergence of eSports.
A fledgling revenue stream in this industry is the inclusion of casino minigames in some games. This occurred, for example, with the opening of a virtual casino within GTA Online. Another example is the poker games in Red Dead Redemption. There are also cases where specific games of chance were created to monetize the games, such as the packages with surprises in Pokemon GO and the card game Gwent in The Witcher 3.
Movements in this direction are not exclusive to game makers. In some cases, they were born thanks to business opportunities based on them. The growing online commerce of CS:GO skins, for example, has given rise to exclusive roulette sites for this “digital currency”.
Traditional online casinos, of course, are also aware of the opportunities generated by e-sports. The most obvious example is the growing number of betting markets available in eSports and in virtual games on many of these sites. Currently, games like CS:GO, Dota 2 and League of Legends (LoL) are among the most popular for betting on casino sites. However, the options can vary greatly from site to site.
New possibilities for casino sites
On the other hand, to attract the interest of eSports fans, online casinos should do more than offer bets on LoL or Dota 2 events. Of course, this helps to attract new players to their slot machines or poker tables, a time new users sign up to bet on eSports. However, these users need to like these other games.
That's why some small developers like Green Jade Games and Spribe have started betting on casino games that require a little more skill. The idea is precisely to preserve the luck factor in the results of the games, but to reward the quality of the players, stimulating competitiveness.
Bogdan Lashchenko – content manager at EgamersWorld.Bogdan has been working at EGamersWorld since 2023. Joining the company, he began fillin the site with information, news and events.