Is It True Esport: The Biggest Show On Earth?
Esport is a term to describe organized video game competitions and has been around since the early days of video games. The earliest example of esports was during 1972 where Stanford University held an Atari Pong tournament and offered a $50,000 prize to the winner. This turned out to be the very first-ever esport tournament and paved the way for esports to become what it is today.
Esport which has paved a long way in the past few decades and has grown tremendously during this time, with plenty of tournaments being held worldwide every year. The biggest esports tournament that features many professional teams worldwide is known as The International, which was first introduced back in 2011. This tournament lasts for about six days and offers the biggest prize pool in esport history, with a total of $18 million being held back in 2015. This game has grown to become one of the most popular in the world since its release in 2003, with millions of players around the world playing this game on a daily basis.
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Talking about Esport being one of the most popular show?
Esports is currently considered as one of the most popular contents on the internet, with hundreds of millions of viewers around the world. Many esports players have managed to amass huge followings on social media and YouTube due to their popularity in this area. For example, a professional player known as Faker managed to earn more than $5 million dollars during his competitive career and has over 18 million followers on Instagram and Twitter combined.
Esport has been around for a long time, and it only continues to grow more and more each year, especially with more money being made. It has not been so unlikely that we will see many forms of esport tournaments in the future, whether this is including different games or having larger prize pools.
One thing is for sure, and esport will continue to grow and become one of the biggest forms of entertainment in the world. During the early days of esport, competitions were largely local and had very little spectator experience for viewers. Nowadays, esport has become one of the most viewed electronic sports out there, with prize pools that overshadow even regular sports tournaments such as NFL, NBA, etc. Not only are the prize pools large, but so is the viewership of these games on streaming platforms such as Twitch. Tv and youtube. In January 2016, during the grand finals of League of Legends (LoL), a record was set were 29,000,000 people watched the final match live from all over the world. That is more viewership than regular sports such as NBA finals or World Cup Finals see.
Few Facts Regarding Esport:-
- Esport athletes don’t get paid millions yearly to play video games, unlike sports such as football, basketball, rugby, etc… which can offer up to 200 million dollar contracts for the best players in the world.
- Esports athletes don’t need to train their bodies like sports athletes have to. They just have to train their skills for each video game they are playing since every single video game is different from one another, which makes it unique.
- You can watch esports live even if you are not at the event. Esport uses the internet to stream live matches either on a website or on a live television channel which you can watch with your family and friends in the comfort of your house.
- You can bet on esport teams/players to win competitions just like traditional sports such as football, rugby etc… This makes it even more interesting since if you have a bet on team A and team A wins, you get money. This is just like the concept of traditional sports but esport uses virtual items such as custom skins or knives instead of real money.
- You can watch esports teams play against each other with your family and friends in the same room unlike watching a sport where you would probably need to be in a crowded area to watch the match with your family and friends.
- Esport is becoming more popular day by day just like traditional sports are. This means that soon enough, you will see esports on television or even on cinemas where you can buy tickets to go watch an esport championship live just like purchasing tickets for football matches etc…