This is what playing video games look like in 1958.
60 years ago video games were a novelty.
And even 20 years ago being good at video games would only win
you bragging rights or concerned looks from your parents.
Today it can earn you a scholarship,
a sponsorship, and even a career in one of the world's
fastest growing sports leagues.
eSports are exploding in popularity growing by
30% every year and are on track to have more online viewers than the NBA, the NHL,
or the MLB in only two years.
With $750 million invested in 2017 alone,
the eSports industry is now worth $1.5 billion and it's expected to
reach $2 billion by 2020, but who's all that money going to?
And do you have what it takes to be one of them?
On October 19, 1972, Stanford University hosted
the first gaming tournament at their artificial intelligence lab.
The tournament was called the Intergalactic Space Wars Olympics.
And it saw two dozen players duking it out to win a year's
subscription to Rolling Stone magazine.
Nearly 50 years later, the Dota 2 International
sees 90 players from the 16 best teams in the world faced off for
$25.5 million grand prize.
And this time it's in a stadium full of fans
with 66 million more watching at home.
But unlike some other sports,
the big leagues aren't always where the players making the big money are.
They're on platforms like Twitch, the live streaming platform that
lets fans watch and interact with their favorite gamers.
The easiest way that I think it is to get your head around
how big eSports is right now is to kind of
look at the numbers that Twitch streamers get.
They stream you know five to seven days a week.
You can have one streamer getting 60 - 100,000 viewers at a time
which is larger than a lot of regional TV stations get now.
One former pro Imaqtpie, now reportedly makes $2 million streaming himself online,
where companies allegedly pay him up to $7000/hour to play their games.
That's because for both streamers and pro teams, most of their income
comes from sponsorships which involves promoting and selling
everything from eSports drinks and keyboards to very expensive gaming chairs.
And in eSports those sponsorships work in one of two ways.
The first is being a title sponsor who starts, pays for, and owns a team.
The other is what's called an agency team.
These teams don't have a title sponsor but allow sponsors
to pay for any sort of promotion they want, from putting logos on their jerseys
to creating content to promote their product.
The smaller percentage of a team's revenue
comes from winning tournaments and in some cases from selling merch.
And eSports athletes make anywhere from $80,000 to $300,000
a season to help their team do both of those things and just like any other sport,
these leagues have teams with captains and coaches.
Some teams even live together with personal trainers,
personal chefs, and practice rooms
where they spend 10 or more hours a day perfecting their game.
But becoming popular or good enough to make money in eSports isn't exactly easy.
To use League of Legends as an example their season starts third week of January and the
competitive season runs up until the end of November so that's longer than any
other traditional sports league and they're expected to be on that entire time.
It's pretty grueling.
Of course not everyone's born to be a pro and
sometimes even practicing for 12 hours a day like the pros do isn't enough to win.
That's why there's an emerging industry where you can pay to get personal
coaching from some of the best in the game there's always an option to become
a sportscaster or analyst who earn thousands of dollars a day to work at
major tournaments but one of the best bets is to become a game developer.
The makers of pro level games make an incredible amount of money.
Blizzard, the developers of overwatch and StarCraft make over $7 billion a year.
While the developers of the free game League of Legends bring in $1.6 billion
a year on in-game purchases that let players unlock new and custom characters.
But whatever your path into eSports, getting from the basement to the
big stage takes an incredible amount of hard work.
And becoming a champion is much much harder than it was back in 72.
I mean I think the gaming space as a
whole is growing and I think competitive gaming is only going to continue to grow
just because it's so accessible to everybody.
Anybody that wants to play can really do it.
The most popular games in the world right now have very low technology requirements.
It's not an easy scene to get into but if you really like it,
a lot of the time that's really what it takes.
And while we may have predicted
that video games would become this popular, who would have thought there'd
be a billion dollars to be made in mashing buttons?