The answer may be simple for some and generate many questions for others. What we do know is that this scenario is growing more and more.
Back in 2018, people around the world watched eSports videos for over 6.6 billion hours.
There are those who say that eSports is not considered a sport because players do not “get to sweat” or because they are simply “sitting in front of the computer”.
If we are going to consider what a sport is due to physical exertion or being in command of a machine, are chess or racing considered sports?
Because of these and many other questions, we are going to make a complete content about what eSports is from its history, growth, modalities, main games and much more.
What is eSports?
eSports is the abbreviation for Electronic Sports or electronic sports, which in practice are professional competitions of computer games or video games transmitted to thousands of people.
The term eSports is written in the plural because it encompasses several modalities and electronic games.
eSports has come to show that the time when video games and computers are “children’s stuff” has passed.
Today we see a scenario that moves more than 905 million dollars (2018 data) in which game companies, teams, players, broadcasting and companies that support this market to grow are involved.
For a visualisation of what eSports is, we separate a video of the opening of the League of Legends world final in a crowded stadium in Beijing, China.
History of eSports
As much as many people wonder what eSports is, it is not such a new concept.
Who never had a passion for a video game or computer that they spent hours and hours playing.
This passion was growing and we wanted to get better at the game to beat our friends, soon there were competitions in lan house in which a group of people competed and won a prize.
There are those who say that the first eSports event was in 1972 at Stanford University, in the United States where students competed in the game Spacewar.
Another well-known milestone in eSsports was in 1997, also in the United States, where there was a championship of the famous Quake game in which the game’s prize was simply a Ferrari owned by John Cormack’s, one of the game’s creators.