With all the recent postponements and cancellations across traditional live sporting events, fans are having to look elsewhere for their dose of competitive entertainment. One place they could turn to is esports. Edward Dowdall, sales manager here at Gravity Media recently spoke to Broadcast TECH about the opportunities for gaming to flourish at a time when traditional events are not currently available.
Edward says that platforms such as Twitch, Mixer, Facebook Gaming and YouTube Gaming open vast opportunities for streaming creators. These channels give a sense of a collaborative community, while putting the grass roots mentality on a pedestal. Effectively, sports fans can instead spend many hours engaging with esports, particularly at the time they can’t watch traditional games on TV. Although Newzoo predicted that by 2021 there’ll be 307 million casual viewers and 250 million esports enthusiasts, these numbers might now become even higher.
More time to explore opportunities offered by esports will undoubtedly lead to an increasing appetite for in-arena and studio content creation. Edward predicts a rise in people seeing esports as a source of entertainment and engagement for all backgrounds, sporting interests, cultures and ages. Already in 2019, there was an estimated 1.57 billion people keen to learn more about esports.
As we’re looking into the future of esports, it’s clear that this trend is currently growing in power and will continue to do so long after traditional sport productions return to our screens. At the end of last year, Newzoo predicted that esports could generate over $1.6 billion in revenue, however this year is looking to enlarge the streaming landscape even more.
You can read more of Edward’s thoughts in Broadcast Sport here.