It is no doubt that with free access to multiple streaming platforms watching professional players play video games online has become easier, and the success of the growth of E-sports is kind of owed to that. E-sports has already become one of the most popular viewership categories in media consumption regarding sports with numbers already beating the NFL (National Football League) in the US. This paper aims to conclude whether this momentum will continue or it will proceed towards stagnation as the case with the viewership of other sporting events. The success and explosion of E-sports lies upon the benefits of the foundation of online gaming: on demand competition and interaction, as technology is catching up it is also attracting on demand spectators. Popular streaming platforms like twitch already have cultivated audiences approaching numbers of up to 5 million who spend approximately 106 minutes a day watching live streams which is more than prime time TV networks like CNN manage to pull in. Overall the global E-sports audience is estimated to be 300 million and shows no signs of slowing down as this number is expected to double to 600 million in the next three years (Bountie Gaming, 2018, Medium.com). Overall after looking over the data already collected worldwide and an online survey conducted through the help of a google form concluded that this massive global phenomenon known as E-sports shows no signs of slowing down. As more and more people over the world gain cheaper access to internet, it is very hard to think that the viewership numbers will ever decrease. Even though the audience for E-sports is predominantly found online, TBS and ESPN have already started investing in E-sports and began broadcasting major events in order to gain a slice of the viewership, this shows that others will soon follow suit.
Impact Factor
2022: 6.012
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