By Bill Burke
It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that there is a serious amount of money in the competitive E-Sports scene today. What might however be much less known to people is what the cash-pumping channels that are filling the scene with money actually are. Therefore we have written an article taking a closer look at this!
The base that glues the industry together
Like any other sport, the fundamental basis of the E-Sports industry is first of all its competitive nature, which is rooted in an ancient old psychology of humanity. Since the dawn of the time, people have been sold on the idea of knowing who’s the strongest, smartest and fastest. We have a natural need to understand this hierarchy and it has been a part of the human history as long as the record goes. By setting up rules in a competitive environment, certain traits can be highlighted which is proven by history to be the most efficient way to find out who the top dog in a certain category is.
There is no difference when it comes to today’s E-Sports scene. People are obsessed to know who the best player is and what team that is the most successful. The rules are of course much different than they were hundreds of years ago, but the psychology of it all is still the same. Today we use advanced technology to duke it out in games such as CS:GO, Dota 2 and League of Legends. We create tournaments and leagues with head-to-head matches or team vs team battles to settle the hierarchy.
Where the money comes in
These action packed encounters have a high spectator value and drive a huge amount of curious fans and gamers from all around the world to watch the events unfold. Some video game tournaments taking place today are selling out super stadiums such as the Madison Square Garden. The number of people attending to these events are however nothing compared to the vast majority that are following the tournaments online, either live or playback on services like Twitch and Youtube. We’re talking about millions of E-Sports interested fans.
This activity is a gold mine for advertisers who are willing to buy prime estate for ads in order to get the right exposure to their brands. It’s for instance common that wealthy and respected hardware suppliers such as Kingston HyperX, Intel and Geforce spend some of their huge marketing budget on this type of advertisement. This is incredibly good for the E-Sports scene since well needed funds are channeled into it. It’s even better when these major companies choose to sponsor a specific E-Sports team directly, since that benefits the team at first hand and helps to sustain its players in a financial way.
E-Sports betting is the new kid on the block
The past years we have seen more and more betting sites finding its way into the competitive E-Sports scene. Marketing wise, a lot of these companies’ main focus have been in sponsoring various teams. The well established betting operator, Betway is for instance currently the sponsors of the world renowned CS:GO team Ninjas in Pyjamas (NiP). More and more resources are however being moved into the industry and a perfect example of this is the logo of the operator GGBET that is often seen on streams when big tournaments are going down.
Betting on E-Sport matches is not only fueling the fire of the betting companies’ marketing approach, but it’s also a fun activity to get more engaged when spectating the professional matches. The most popular game to bet on is currently Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and that is for good reasons. It simply has the most developed betting scene with lots of matches and fun and interesting markets to bet on.
Should you be interested in taking part of this activity, which could actually also make some money if you end up being good at it, the first thing you should consider is doing some research and reading a csgo betting guide to get a better understanding of what it is and how it works. It’s also important to know that, if you do take part in this activity and sign up with a csgo betting site, it’s crucial that you choose a good and trusted one.
Tournament winners getting a share of million dollar prize pools
We have already been exploring a few interesting cash-flowing funnels, but we haven’t looked into where the money actually goes. A substantial amount of it goes to prize pools in various tournaments. This is a good way to increase the buzz around the event, which goes hand in hand with attracting the best players and teams competing for the money. This leads to a huge amount of fans following the matches, placing real money bets on them and watching the advertisements that wealthy companies have paid good money for. It’s all a healthy circle that is growing bigger the more popular E-Sport gets.
The biggest prize pool up to date has been The International 2017, which was the last years world championship in Dota 2 and had a whooping prize pool of $24,687,919.00. This isn’t the first time the money has reached more than $10 million in the event as this also happened for the championship in 2016, 2015 and 2014. This isn’t the only game with huge prize pools, but plenty of others have had prize pools exceeding a million dollars.
These life changing amounts of money are surely attracting the best players in the world – in every stretch of the imagination – to compete for not only the riches, but also for the fame and recognition of playing in front of million of cheering fans all around the world. Hence the full circle is complete.