Electronic Sports: the Final Frontier
Image source: Damian Estrada.
The question isn't "will e-sports become an Olympic sport?", but rather "when will e-sports become an Olympic sport?".
Electronic sports, or e-sports for short, is still in its relative infancy. While competitive video games have been around since the time of classic games like Pac-Man and Frogger, e-sports in its current form has only really been around for 20 years. During those days, players would gather in arcades and fight to set and beat high scores. While that certainly was, and still is, competitive, it lacked the sort of interaction between players that most sports and e-sports have today.
Where did e-sports come from?
It was not until the mid-1990s that we began to see development of multiplayer games on a large scale. The ever-increasing popularity of the Internet now meant that you could use your computer to connect with - and play video games versus - other humans. Playing against people other than those who were in the room with you gave PC gaming an incredible boost. Competitive video games exploded in Asia towards the end of the 1990s, and in South Korea in particular.
The region had just been rocked by the 1997 Asian financial crisis. National debts ballooned, their currencies depreciated, and unemployment rose quickly. According to The New York Times, the South Korean government looked to the future as a response to the financial crisis,. They invested heavily in the emerging technologies of telecommunications and Internet infrastructure. With high unemployment and a world-class Internet architecture, South Koreans flocked to "PC bangs": local Internet cafés. There, they could distract themselves by playing games with friends for hours. The result was the start of a competitive video game culture that would establish the Asian nation as a global superpower in e-sports. A position they have maintained to this day.
Rock Concert? No. 100 000 spectators turned up to watch the "Starcraft: Brood War" Proleague Final in person. In 2005. The final was between KTF MagicNs and SK Telecom T1 on Haeundae Beach in Busan, South Korea.
KeSPA, the Korean e-Sports Association, was founded in 2000 and is a part of South Korea's Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism. Established in response to the growing popularity of electronic sports in the country, its purpose is to manage the commercial interest and broadcasting of e-sports in Korea. They have been a very influential force in making e-sports a legitimate profession. Litigating match-fixing and banning cheaters, KeSPA has also been instrumental in securing minimum wages for e-sports players; wages that are "competitive with popular traditional sports". KeSPA has also guaranteed players better job security through deciding that contracts between players and teams must last for a minimum of one year. You are reading this correctly. "Video game player" is a fully professional career with minimum wages and mandatory contract lengths in Korea.
What is e-sports now?
Jonathan Pan put it well in his article "Esports, the Next Olympic Sport" for Medium.com:
“The Olympians of tomorrow will include esports players [...] not because esports is the sport of the future, but because esports is here and esports is big, today.”
It is hard to explain just how big e-sports already is to someone who perhaps has never even heard of it. Though e-sport is relatively new it is already putting up big numbers. The top e-sports players are already multi-millionaires from tournament winnings alone, excluding salaries and sponsorships. The March 2017 Intel Extreme Masters event in Katowice, Poland, set new records for viewership and attendance. An incredible 46 million unique viewers tuned in online and over 170 000 people visited the stadium event over the course of two weekends. Keep in mind that this event took place over six days and hosted tournaments for three different video games, but 2018's Superbowl "only" had twice the viewership of an e-sports event held in Poland.
Starcraft legend Lee "Flash" Young Ho signing autographs in 2012. Image source: David Schmidt.
South Korea, as mentioned before, has long been on the cutting edge of e-sports. Ongamenet is a South Korean TV channel that specialises in showing e-sports content on TV, and it has been doing so since 2000. Western Europe and America have only started to catch up in recent years, with e-sports now being aired on major U.S. TV channels on a regular basis. Professional "real" sports clubs now employ e-sports players or buy e-sports teams outright. That list includes European soccer powerhouses like Ajax, Paris Saint-Germain, Manchester City, and many, many more. Australian Football clubs are also getting in on the action, and have been acquiring e-sports divisions this year.
Trying to become an e-sports professional has always been a bit of a gamble, similar to people who drop out of school to become professional athletes. The chances you will make it to the very top are slim. So how about going the other direction entirely? Dozens of American universities now offer e-sports programs similar to playing university basketball or football. Several universities have also started to add scholarships for e-sports, with Forbes reporting that there are now over 85 e-sports scholarships available in the United States alone.
Another thing that the growing e-sports industry has in common with traditional sports is serious ethical issues. Issues of match-fixing in Korean e-sports were uncovered in 2010, and another large scale scandal came to light in 2015 and 2016. It involved over a dozen people: players, coaches, brokers and financial backers who were charged, tried, sentenced, and banned from participating in e-sports again. Among them was Lee "Life" Seung Hyun: a former world champion in Starcraft 2, and widely considered to be one of its greatest ever players. Similar cases of match-fixing can be seen in other games as well.
Performance-enhancing drugs, which we've written about before, are not exclusive to the more physically demanding sports, as cyber athletes have previously admitted using various drugs during competitions.
Image source: artubr.
Where is e-sports going?
Earlier this year, members of South Korean e-sports team KT Rolster became the first cyber athletes to ever carry the Olympic torch, as they participated in the torch relay ahead of the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang. There is a growing acknowledgement of e-sport by the International Olympic Committee. Thomas Bach, president of the IOC, recently spoke about e-sports potentially joining the Olympics and raised valid concerns that there is no international governing body for e-sports.
This is true, there is no one organisation that coordinates every competitive video game. But there are large and powerful organisations in place already, organisations that could grow into governing bodies for e-sports. Remember the Korean e-Sports Association, KeSPA? They are already a "reserved member" of the Korean Olympic Committee, which is pretty crazy. Crazier still is the fact that they used to be a full-fledged member, but were downgraded in 2017 due to not expanding their regional operations. Another organisation based in South Korea, the International e-Sports Federation, could become the governing body that Thomas Bach and the IOC is looking for. Founded in 2008 with the goal of having electronic sports recognised as a legitimate sport, the IeSF already has 46 member countries.
This year's Asian Games will begin in Jakarta on August 18. While e-sports is not part of its official line-up of sports, there will be held demonstrations of six different video games. We already know that the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo won't contain e-sports, but they will hold e-sports tournaments in the run-up to the Olympic games. The 2020 Tokyo Olympics will already be a very adventurous event, as they have added sports like BMX cycling and surfing to its list of sports.
“I am delighted that the Olympic Games in Tokyo will be more youthful, more urban and will include more women.”
In four years, e-sports will be an official sport at the 2022 Asian Games in Hangzhou, China. A monumental occasion for e-sports. If the International Olympic Committee want to keep pushing towards innovation and youthfulness, like they did with Tokyo 2020, we may see electronic sports at the Olympics as early as 2024. The Paris 2024 Olympic bid committee already seem interested in finding out whether it is possible to crown Olympic champions in computer games. Speaking to the Associated Press, co-president of Paris' committee, Tony Estanguet, said the following:
“The youth, yes, they are interested in e-sport and this kind of thing. Let’s look at it. Let’s meet them. Let’s try if we can find some bridges. I don’t want to say ‘no’ from the beginning. I think it’s interesting to interact with the IOC [and] with them, the e-sports family, to better understand what the process is and why it is such a success.”
Image source: Damian Estrada.
If e-sport fails to make it to Paris in 2024, Los Angeles is next up. The City of Angels already has a strong connection with e-sports, as developers of some of the most popular e-sports titles, Riot Games and Blizzard Entertainment, are based in California. It seems like a natural place to introduce e-sports to the Olympic games.
Will e-sports become an Olympic sport? Certainly. It is only a question of when. You have to consider that it would be an incredibly smart business decision by the International Olympic Committee to include e-sports in their program. E-sports, as of the time of writing, has an audience of just under 400 million people across the globe, and that number is estimated to reach 600 million by 2020. A 50% growth of audience in two years is simply unheard of in traditional sport, and that audience is likely to continue growing.
Research conducted by Newzoo also indicates that the e-sports audience is very young: 59% are between the ages of 21 and 35, with stable lives and dispensable income. A sizable percentage is also younger than this age bracket, a group of the audience that is expected to grow in the coming years. As a business decision, it makes little sense to not include e-sports in the Olympics. The audience is young, forward-thinking professionals, and e-sports is projected to reach the same revenue numbers in 2020 as France's premier soccer league, Ligue 1, does today.
There is no doubt in my mind that the International Olympic Committee will include electronic sports as part of the summer Olympics at some point. The question is when. My bet would be Los Angeles 2028.
Now we wait.
In the interest of full disclosure: I was a writer for an e-sports organisation for almost two years, and served as editor for that website for around 18 months. I was the manager for two e-sports teams during the same time frame for that organisation.
That website has since disappeared from the Internet and I am currently not affiliated with any e-sports organisations.
Special thanks to Damian Estrada for permission to use his images.
