You can say "it’s not a sport" all you want, but competitive video gaming — also known as eSports — is a thing, and, as this chart from Statista shows, it’s only expected to get bigger.
Competitive video gaming will be a $1.5 billion industry by 2020, researchers say
And it'll have a global audience of close to 600 million.
In its latest eSports market report, market researcher Newzoo thinks eSports at large will make $696 million in revenue in 2017, with its total audience — be it hardcore fans or those who just watch the bigger game championships — reaching 385 million. By 2020, Newzoo projects, those will reach $1.48 billion and 589 million, respectively. (That revenue figure doesn’t include money made from eSports-related gambling, either.)
That’d still fall well behind major sports leagues like the NFL and NBA, and the relative inscrutability of, say, “League of Legends” — the most popular competitive video game in the world — still makes it harder for newcomers to get into. Plus, while sports media titans like ESPN has stopped ignoring the trend, some of their forays into gaming haven’t been popular.
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