eSports to be worth $463 million this year and involves a racially diverse group of people: Report

eSports has regularly been brushed off, left on the sidelines in the face of other sporting events, particularly so in India. A Pricewaterhouse Coopers (PwC) report however, indicates otherwise. They predict that eSports will bloom into a $463 million industry this year, a growth of over 40 percent from 2015. PwC defined eSports as organized video game competitions involving fighting, first-person shooter (FPS), multiplayer online battle arena tournaments (MOBA), or massively multiplayer online (MMO) games. A growth of 43 percent is a huge one by any standards and PwC’s survey indicates that there are two primary reasons for this. The first they attribute to a lessening of the social stigma surrounding gaming in general. They claim that the introduction of free-to-play titles brought gaming to a wider audience, vastly increasing the userbase and piquing the interest of publishers. Coupled with the rise of reliable streaming services, enabling spectatorship, PwC claims that eSports has reached a tipping point. The second driver for growth was social media, says PwC. Awareness of the platform and the unification of fan communities under Twitter and Facebook contributed greatly. Other interesting insights from the report include the following:

• 22 percent of women and 18 percent of men surveyed claim to be, or have been, involved in eSports
• For 57 percent of the participants, the laptop or desktop was the device of choice for viewing as well as participating in eSports.
• The average eSports consumer can be either male or female, is 28 years of age and is as likely to be of one race as the other.

A gender neutral, racially diverse group of gamers is among the last things we expected from a survey involving gaming and is indicative of the significant shift in mentality with regards to gaming today. The report quotes Cinnamon Booth, COO of GameCo, Inc. as saying, “For success in eSports, it’s critical to recognize that today’s ‘average’ gamer is not the stereotype of a male teen in their parents’ basement.”