My View

I believe that Esports will play a big role in the media in the future, it will influence the industry but now it is not giving the real perspective to the masses in the mainstream media and I have the knowledge to say so.

I want to start this post by talking about my own experience in the Esports because I'm a semi-professional player in CS:GO who attended more than 5 international LAN tournaments in Europe and I have big plans to stay and work in the industry in the future. If I will not find myself as a player then I will look for something in the Esports media since its a big part of my life already.

I was not playing video games that often before I got introduced to the Esports.
In November 2014, I saw that my local TV sports channel was broadcasting a live stream of an Esports CS:GO world championship called DreamHack Winter 2014 and that caught my attention.
For the 3 days, I was watching the best players competing in the gaming event for 250 000 $, for me it was something new, something different from the classic sports.
When the tournament ended, I surfed the web to find something related to Esports and I have found most of the information that I put into this blog.

I was inspired by the fact of how big is Esports, how much bigger it will become in the future and how cool it is to be a pro-player.
So I started playing by myself and later was invited to different teams (including international teams) where I really experience both sides of Esports.
I will start with the positive sides of my Esports experience.
First of all, I have met a lot of good people with who I became really good friends besides the game. Secondly, I grew up as a player from a rookie to a well-known player in my own country with the help of these more experienced players. I have won many online and offline tournaments where I made good money just playing the game I love. And one of the most important things for me that I traveled to a lot of countries and saw many places by playing tournaments there.

Now I will talk about the dark side of my Esports experience.
The main issue with that is time management because the game requires a lot of individual and team practice. Since at that time I was studying in high school I had to mix gaming with studies. The second will be family problems, my parents as most of the others didn't like the idea when I told them that I wanted to play a video game that I love and make profit of it, mainly, because of the things that mainstream media told them about the Esports such as addiction and everything that I covered in my early posts but then when I won my first tournament and showed my parents that I may make money on that, they allowed me to play. But money was always a problem, mostly because for professional gaming I need a very powerful PC and gaming "devices" such as a keyboard, mouse, and headset which were costly and I still have to upgrade them each year, my parents helped me with that by buying everything I needed for gaming. The last problem is the health problems that I faced is that I damaged my eyes and right now I'm using a computer only with glasses.

Also, I have to mention the mainstream media and criticize it for the negative influence that it gave. It is mostly happening on the main TV channels when people who don't know anything about the Esports and video games talk about how bad it is for society while they don't have any knowledge to say so. According to that most of the adults and elderly people have negative thoughts on it, which later may cause bigger problems with their close people who are interested in the topic, as I said before because of the mainstream media my parents didn't like the idea of Esports and myself being interested in that.

To sum up, when I started doing this blog I noticed that mainstream media mostly talks about the negative sides such as health problems, addiction to video games while Esports media on the internet gives examples of how profitable is Esports and how it is growing with the massive sponsoring. 

For Further Research

In this post, I will recommend 3 web pages that you can visit to find out more about the topic.

The first one: Esports — Bigger than Traditional Sports?

A good post from IntergalacticGaming where the author describes the future of Esports marketing and its economy.
The article also talks about the place of Esports media between traditional sports and how it will grow in the future.

Next one is from DreamTeam.gg 

Name of the article: Sponsorships Market in Competitive Esports: Up and Running

In this web post, authors do the overview of the sponsorship market in the Esport, biggest deals that created the Esports sponsorship market and the advertisements which plays a big role already.

Next one is by Adam Fitch a freelance Esports journalist, who wrote the post named: This year in esports: Investments, sponsorships, and deals in 2018

He discusses 2018 Esports media events such as deals, investments, famous people (Like Mike Jordan) who are partnered with the Esports organizations and teams. 

I personally believe that this post really shows how big Esports media is and how many famous people and corporations want to participate in that.

 

What the Experts Say II

Combining everything that I said earlier with the popularity of the Esports and its positive sides, I have to talk about the things I said in the Intruductionary post, such as the mainstream media hates Esports and Video games at all.

According to the experts, such as Psychologist Kathryn Smerling who said during the interview with Fox Business live talk on the TV, that Video games cause violence and addiction comparing it to drugs such as heroin, she also fears that promotion of Esports in the mainstream media may cause more young people getting addicted to it.

Another thing that related to that are politicians such as Donald Trump's statement, he said that first-person shooters may also cause real-life violence alike mass shootings which are the big topic to take a look at especially in the U.S.A. and in some ways it is connected to the video games and its promotion.

Next, the article from a.LIST shows why and how world-leading brands, athletes and investors say that Esports matters from the media side.

(https://www.alistdaily.com/strategy/experts-express-their-intel-on-why-esports-matters/)

This article is a compilation of interviews with the industry experts from 3-time NBA Champion Rick Fox (who is now having his own Esports organization "Echo Fox") to Alban Dechelotte, Coca-Cola's marketing manager.

I personally like the interview with "Bud Light" digital manager Jesse Wofford who shows how Esports is important for their company because they are been sponsoring Esports events for 25 years by now.

What the Experts Say I

Another related topic to the growing popularity of Esports is how it affects the player's health.

As esports becomes more popular, the industry is beginning to take a closer look at how the sport affects player health. Over the past few months, there have been several initiatives announced in the industry to assure players stay as healthy as possible.

According to experts, professional and semi-professional players damage their health during their gaming process.

Professional gaming not giving you a concussion, but players have some challenges during fitness. Needless to say that some players are having wrist problems which usually leads to wrist surgery.

This video from Eleague shows how players damage their health.

Visit this page to know more about the topic: https://www.gameskinny.com/wk96t/experts-to-speak-about-esports-fitness-health-at-upcoming-championship-event

Current Events II

One of the main issues related to the Esports and its media or market is Lack of Standardization.

eSports is still a relatively new industry which means that it’s going to have its own growing pains. For instance, a lot of participants and players complain that some of the tournaments lack authenticity and thus it can be challenging to find which tournaments are real and which one are full of scams. This places issues for the marketers as well, especially ones with a role in active sports marketing but have no experience in the eSports market.

The lack of standardization in this industry also means that there are constant issues that arise with players, teams, tournaments and their advertising, sponsorships or contracts. For instance, salaries for players remain remarkably low for novice and immediate levels despite their necessary involvement within the tournaments. There are also continuous issues with poorly crafted contracts between brands and teams or players that usually result in a nasty lawsuit or poor player performance, which naturally negatively affects brands and their marketing teams. These growing pains currently plague the entire eSports industry but will likely (hopefully) be ironed out as this industry continues to expand. 



Underage Spending
With the industry of eSports’ worth reaching over $1 Billion, it’s a wonder how much of that money is being spent by underage participants. This is a growing issue with younger players abusing their parents’ credit cards and spending thousands of dollars on tournaments, whether it’s on merchandise, gambling, etc. This can be an issue for marketers as well, by being associated with tournaments that have a lack of security and monitoring capability. It can also be tied with an issue of the brand selling their products and their overall business moral.

If a consumer, especially if that consumer is underage, is using someone else’s money to buy products due to the marketing campaign associated with an eSports tournament it can provide that brand with an ethical issue as well as a business issue. They might have to return the sold products, resulting in a loss of profit and the loss of the potential return of that consumer.

Current Events I

 From media laughingstock to media craze

Esports phenomenon reached a tipping point in how it is viewed worldwide. The once niche past -time has finally secured its place in the mainstream media, with more and more brands realising the endless opportunities it presents, both for those inside and outside the games industry.

The "League of Legends" world championships event, which occurred last year at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, triggered the interest of the American mainstream press. Following this, the rise of the Esports phenomenon, and the press attention that it receives has accelerated rapidly.

2 years ago, an Esport even in Madison Square Garden would have been unthinkable. But in the June 2018 New York main entertainment ground hosted an ESL One Dota 2 event and later that week the same organizer announced that they will soldout 18,000 seat SAP center in San Jose and they did.

The rise of Esport continues...

Most of the viewers prefer to watch Esports on the classic TV channels such as CNN.

But at the beginning, mainstream media took Esports as a joke.

This video from "eSports eScore" shows how media had a diffrent opinion but soon changed it and helped to promote Esports.