How the world of Gaming is changing the sports world for good
By summer Abston
If you turned on the television to any sports channel in the summer of 2020, Camiseta Manchester United chances are you saw a virtual NBA 2K tournament, a Madden NFL tournament and a day full of athletes playing video games with each other.
This type of enjoyment known as E-Sports is taking the world by storm with nearly 500 million annual customers and players. E-Sports is said to be the fastest growing sport in the U.S., and one that is acclimating the younger Generation Z and older Generation Alpha to the world of competitive sports and gaming.
Currently, gamers in high school and college are starting to form their own ‘E-Teams’ that travel and compete in region and area tournaments all around the country.
Arlington sports commission vice president of sports and events Matt Wilson said, “E-Sports are special in a sense there is no demographic that is a lot more into it than the other.”
Arlington’s stadium is the nation’s first E-Sports arena.
Wilson adds, “E-Sports has a high viewership and a lot of people interested in the subject. There is really no issue in finding people to compete in the tournaments we put on. It’s no different than any other sporting event in that aspect.”
In 2019, the league of Legends world championship had a viewership of 100 million, just 700,000 less than the incredibly Bowl.
With a viewership so high, E-Sports is said to profits around $1 billion annually according to Newzoo analysts. considering that it is fast growing with solid profits numbers, it is no surprise that lots of destinations Camiseta Cerezo Osaka are swiftly adding E-Sports to their list of hostable events.
South Bend, Ind., for example, started plans to build a dedicated E-Sports facility in the Midwest in 2019 called Bendix Arena located inside the South bend Convention Center. “Due to COVID-19, we only got halfway done before the pandemic caused us to stop the build,” said Camiseta RB Leipzig Nick Kleva, sports market development manager for check out South Bend.
Bendix Arena, set to open later this year, will be the Midwest’s first E-Sports arena.
Bendix Arena, set to host its first event in the next few months, is getting ready to open its doors to the E-Sports community.
“South bend takes a really personal technique to planning events. We work as a two-prong technique with the Convention Century Center, so you can expect to have a team of two or three members with you helping to plan the event. considering that it is a smaller group rather than a large one, there is a lot more room for planner personalization,” Kleva adds.
Kleva says another perk of South bend is “we are centrally located between Columbus, Chicago, Indianapolis, and Detroit so we always pull in the collegiate and competitive/travel crowd. even though we are brand new and will not officially open for a few months, we knew we had to have an E-Sports facility for the growing number of fans and players in the Midwest.”
Further south, Arlington, Texas had the same idea of filling an E-Sports void. Wilson notes, “Arlington wanted a facility that would grow rapidly. After a study was done at NYU’s Tisch school of the Arts, we made a decision that E-Sports was predicted to grow at the pace we wanted it to, so it was a no brainer to make the facility dedicated to E-Sports.”
Investors planned for Arlington’s facility to be a designated E-Sports facility after a study done by NYU.
In addition to the arena hosting tournaments, E-Sports fanatics can come to the facility anytime from 12 p.m. to 2 a.m., seven days a week for a small fee and game in the “front room,” a room filled with gaming consoles and like-minded gamers intending to play on the big arena stage one day.
E-Sports has also grown rapidly due to the amount of money professional athletes and owners have donated to the sport itself.
Some donors include Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, Michael Jordan, Shaquille O’Neal, Stephen Curry, and Dallas Mavericks owner mark Cuban. With a growing number of donors comes the boosted need for tournaments.
Magnus Leppaniemi, former senior member of Dreamhack, says planning an E-Sports tournament differs from planning a regular tournament because “E-Sports has a lot more moving parts like Internet speed and servers that you need to make sure work in tandem. Otherwise, you can’t run the tournament.”
Furthermore, even though the outline of planning a regular tournament and an E-Sports tournament will be similar, they are also very different when it pertains to the pre-planning checklist.
Since video games are an external source of entertainment, copyright issues are present. a lot of games are protected under an substantial audiovisual sector, so it is crucial before the tournament is in the planning stages the designer or publisher has given authorization for the game to be used to the event planner themselves.
According to Wilson, “Arlington’s E-Sports Arena requires the planner to have proof of authorization from the dnull