E-sport is a very hot growing industry with the future format of living embedded in. It is the intersection between gaming, technology, social, media and entertainment.
There are some related concepts, e.g. streaming gaming, and they share some similar fundamental building blocks.
Future of gaming will be mostly based on cloud. Just like Office Suite and Adobe Suite is moving to the subscription model, the computer gaming industry is making that transition as well and this might be the next growth opportunity for Microsoft (with its cloud computing services, Hololens and Xbox, etc.) and other companies. In fact, most of the mobile games today have already relied on continuous connections, instead of a publisher model like movie/music (buy, download and play).
As certain games (now and in the future) would be considered as “sports”, they inherently include related business opportunities – worldwide competitions, leagues, sale of tickets, game watching and ads, etc. It is very similar to today’s sports and is able to provide a more authentic experience as games are born to be digital (unlike traditional sports that are recorded and digitalized for TV/videos). The concerns here include: 1. the watchableness of players playing games is hard to improve. Players are just sitting in front of the PC or even holding phones. (It is the characters they are playing are watchable) 2. Compared to traditional sports, games usually need a certain level of understanding to enjoy, while sports are commonly understandable and may have some natural beauty to watch.
The leading games that are run like “sports” include LOL (League of Legends), Dota2, Overwatch, etc. The Dota2 international competition in 2018 (TI8) has $25.5 million prize pool. Another major company to “sportify” gaming it Amazon, with its Twitch platform, on which there are 140 million monthly active users. [Netflix has 139 million subscribers globally]
From the technology perspective, the increasing power of cloud is definitely the driver here. Additionally, the coming 5G (low latency, faster transmission of larger data) and AR/VR (actually bringing sports alive; and to solve the watchableness issue maybe) will revolutionize our view on gaming and e-sports. That will even redefine what is “living” and “socializing” in the future (say 25-50 years).
The concept of “playing video games with friends” will be barely used. The line may be so blur that the following concepts are true “life is a real game” and “living on the net”.
And then virtual goods will be huge market. It’s not only buying on the internet (which is e-commerce) but also using on the internet. The virtue clothing on a virtual character we control would have value. Many people are buying or will buy virtual luxury goods. It doesn’t matter if a product’s actually cost is $100 or $0 – they can be sold at $3000. Clothings have already gone far beyond keeping us warm anyway.
E-sports is part of the test field or connection between our current world and the future living.
