This Saturday will see 15,000 spectators descend on the Staples Centre in LA to watch the League of Legends World Championship Final Event. Gaming as a professional sport has been around for a long time and has enjoyed mass popularity in Asia for years. Now the phenomenon is breaking out of niche status in the West as well, attracting millions of game enthusiast followers. Sudden mass uptake over the past year has made game videostreams the fastest growing content on the web, including YouTube and specialized destinations like Twitch, who raised $20 million this week to support its explosive growth and global expansion.
While Western press focus their attention on the nextgen console battle between Xbox One and PlayStation 4, PC Gaming is leading the industry in eSports and video content as well as in number of gamers on a global scale with around 900 million players. From a screen perspective, games played on the computer screen also gross more revenues than games played on TV: $27.6bn or 39% versus $25.4bn or 36%. Worldwide that is. The PC platform continuous to shape trends and lead innovation in the industry in terms of game genres, free-to-play business models and now… eSports and video content. The new consoles Xbox One and PS4 will provide integrated functionalities allowing console gamers to follow the path originally carved out by PC gaming. Console-based eSports leagues do exist but not on the same scale as the PC franchises such as Starcraft, Dota2, World of Tanks and League of Legends.
Games played on a PC will generate $27.6bn this year, 39% of the total games market. This includes money spent on casual websites and social networks. Without these “casual” segments, the global PC/MMO market is worth $21.0bn. Approximately 40% of the 900 million PC/MMO gamers worldwide spends money on, or rather within, these games.
Thank you Newzoo for providing us with this information.
Image courtesy of eTeknix.
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