It is a paradox pitting popularity against relative pittances, electronic sports (e-sports) have exploded into the global consciousness but the big money has not yet appeared pitch-side or screen-side. Participation has soared as virtual games gain traction, with a worldwide fan audience now estimated at 280 million, approaching that for the NFL. Such a leap in growth has helped fuel talk that competitive e-sports or professional gaming, could even soon become an Olympic "discipline." But even if the League of Legends final drew a huge audience to the "Bird's Nest" National Stadium in Beijing earlier this month the sector has yet to mature economically and needs to secure more funding in order to secure a long-term foothold in the sporting world, analysts say. And the question of how to open the revenue stream sluice gate is complex.
"This year, e-sport should earn a little over 850 million euros and studies show that come 2021 we'll reach a turnover of some three billion euros," says Laurent Michaud, director of studies at Idate, a leading European think-tank on the digital economy.
"But that's set against a global video games market worth more than 65 billion euros."
How to ramp up low monetization is exercising minds given that an e-sport fan brings only three euros to the table annually on average, according to a recent study by Nielsen Sports. Soccer generates typically some ten times more. One reason for the disparity between the virtual and the non-virtual sporting universes is the difficulty of engaging with e-fans via traditional broadcasting outlets.
"We're still at the point we have to educate broadcasters and outside sponsors on how to interact with this complicated audience, because they don't watch TV and they all have ad blockers," Reichert told AFP at the Web Summit in Lisbon, a kind of "Davos for geeks" where virtual gaming featured high on the agenda. Many e-sport fans are used to receiving their visual fare for free via platforms such as YouTube, rather than switching on the TV set. Traditional media are still taking baby e-steps after coming late to the genre. An additional obstacle is the dubious image a substantial swathe of society has of video gaming and e-sport in particular.