Are We Playing Video Games Is Not A Sport?

Video games have been around for many years and so has competitive gaming. The first video game was created around 1970 and was Pong. Pong required one or two players to play. The players would play next to each other and the game required both players to move the courser to the ball and knock in to the other player’s side. Pong was the first competitive video game because you could play with another person. The video game industry now is a very big market and is suspected to be an 86 billion dollar industry in 2016 (A Classification Of Business Models In Video Game Industry). For the past couple of years video competitions have gotten really popular and now there is a franchise called eSports that hosts gaming competitions in big areas. “The past several year’s eSports have seen meteoric growth in dozens of markets, attracting tens of millions of viewers each year in the United States, alone” (Hollist). Esports is made up of many different games and each game has different teams that specialize in the game that they are competing in. E-Sports 89 million viewers in 2014 and is suspected to grow to 145 million in 2017. ("Red Bull Media Readies ESports Studio for Prime Time."). Competitive gaming should be recognized as a sport because each team has a sponsor. The sponsors pay for all associated costs of the player’s gaming including, but not limited to, plane tickets, hotel rooms, and food. In return the teams have to wear the

Imagine being scouted for your extraordinary talent. You join a team and train sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. The training is so intense you have little time to spend with family, or friends. Win, or lose you play to improve and, after every draining game, you reflect on your performance and study the game tape. No you do not play basketball, or football, you are a gamer.

Sports are played and viewed on the television by individuals from every social class, however, the general population is mostly accountable for the tremendous popularity of sports. People from all over the world watch popular social events, such as the

Many argue that wrestling should be excluded out of the olympics. Some say wrestling is a boring sport to watch, unhealthy, causes injuries and leads to children being violent. I find this to be very false. I think that wrestling is one of the most important sports, mentally physically and just all around. Wrestling is a sport that creates character and has children and young adults working hard for what they want to achieve.

Last year the League of Legends finals alone brought 40,000 people to Seoul, South Korea.(xx Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Paragraph 5) This isn’t counting the thousands at home who watched using streaming services. The teams also attract sponsors. The company DXRacer USA gave Robert Morris University a free chair which normally costs 349 dollars. Finally, eSports are one of the fastest growing sports ever. The quote, “The eSports scholarship program has been featured by ESPN, NPR, HBO’s ``Real Sports`` and a variety of other newsgroups.”, shows this. (xx Pittsburg Post and Gazette Paragraph 3) The only other sports to get this much attention to get this level of attention at the college level are men's basketball and men's football. Video games are fast on the rise in the world as the world moves toward a more technology dependent society. Estimates put video game spectators at 19.4 million by 2020.

The two biggest college sports that make money are football and men’s basketball. The time when they do make the most money is for all the Bowl Games in football and a big tournament called March Madness for basketball. In a recent article titled Pay to Play “College football and men's basketball generate revenues of more than $6 Billion every year.” Both of these sports make billions of dollars for others,

Continuing on, between the fact that out of country professional gamers get the same visa as out of country athletes and the fact that gaming can earn more money than being in the NFL, also that more people watch the video game championships than the MLB games, It's pretty safe to say that video games SHOULD be considered a sport.

As long as the sport stays entertaining people will always be out there rooting for their favorite teams and players spending their money in order to support their favorite sporting franchises.

The subject of money can be very controversial when it comes to sports in general. Whether it is the NFL, NBA, or MLB, they all exist because of large sums money. The NBA in particular produces billions of dollars of revenue each year in advertisements, ticket sales, apparel, and other forms. Through these different forms of revenue, a portion of this money goes to all 30 teams in the NBA. In the millions of dollars that each team receives, parts of it go to the owners, coaches, players, and other staff, but that is not the main source of income for players.

In a market currently dominated by free cellphone apps or $60 in-box games, League of Legends stands in a field of it's own. One of the key factors in Riot’s success

The amount of money a free to play game earns will shock most people. According to SuperData, a marketing intelligence firm, Riot Games in 2013 earned $624 million from League of Legends (Jarvey, 2014). League of Legends is a free to play game that has micro-transaction. The appeal of generating money through micro-transactions in gaming are stronger than ever with profits reported by the likes of Riot Games. The following chart shows the top ten online free to play game revenues for 2013.

Imagine it is 1990 and you just heard one of your friends got the new Super Mario World

Last October, Riot held the League of Legends Season 2 World Championships, a tournament that brought the world’s best teams together for a week of intense matches. $1 million went to the overall champion, while a total of $5 million was spread out over the course of Season 2. Apart from the unprecedented cash prizes, the League of Legends tournament was able to bring in over 8 million “unique viewers” online, viewership that is greater than the National Hockey League’s (Heaven and Robinson). In South Korea individual e-sports events for the popular real-time strategy game StarCraft 2 bring in over 100,000 live attendants to go alongside huge numbers of online spectators (Robinson). On top of this, competitive gaming’s popularity is continuing to grow through 2013. David Ting, founder of Imagine Game Network’s professional gaming league, states that online traffic for the company’s tournaments is “doubling every six months”(qtd. in Heaven). Who would’ve thought that playing video games would turn into such a loved spectator sport?

Do you know what eSports is? Many people in the world do not know what eSports is, but millions and millions of people each year are tuning in to watch professional video gamers compete for trophies and prizes. To put this into perspective, anyone can become a professional gamer and make a good living off of it. Although, you must have good skill at the game and be prepared to practice long hours on a regular basis. I will inform you of what eSports is, the growth, and lastly the present and future state of eSports. The term eSports stands for electronic sports and it is ultimately a platform for future competitive gamers.

Many other competitive games have been considered eSports in the past few years as well. CS:GO, or Counter Strike: Global Offensive, is the number one eSport to date. CS:GO is a first-person shooter developed by Valve which pits 10 players against each other on teams to fight for a common objective. CS:GO is so