If you are a gamer in India, the chances of you having awareness about eSports and gaming competitions held around the world are highly unlikely. However slowly esports is reaching out across the world and growing exponentially.
In the past few years, eSport has become widely popular that it could become a part of the Olympic Games in 2024.
A variety of competitive electronic games exist and some games are yet to come among them some of the best-known formats are Battlegrounds India(pubG), Apex Legends, Fortnite, Valorant, League of Legends, DOTA 2, Counter-Strike, StarCraft II, FIFA, Overwatch, Heroes of the Storm, NBA2KX, Rocket League, Call of Duty, etc. eSports is an organized competitive playing of video games or online games. The games are usually can be categorized into three broad games such as strategy games (RTS or MOBA), Ego-Shooters (FPS), and sport and race simulations. These eSports regulations differ considerably in their game mechanics on which they are based.
eSports is a swiftly growing field that attracts a large number of players and has a rising economic value. Games such as FIFA 18 were sold around 24 million times in the first 11 months after its launch. At the same time, FIFA 18 registered around 7 billion played matches and more than 20 million players from 60 countries participated in official online FIFA competitions.
Out of 1001 participants aged 14–35 was found that 80.6% of respondents play video games more or less regularly stated a survey conducted by the PricewaterhouseCoopers, 55% of male respondents play several times a week. Among those surveyed, 73.9% knew the term eSport, of which 3% were professional players and 29.2% non-professional.
In 2020, experts predict over 589 million spectators worldwide, which makes professional gaming extremely fascinating from a commercial point of view. In the year 2016, the total revenue collected from eSports is over 300 million worldwide.
The phenomenon of eSport is not just limited to the players themselves, but also attracts a large number of spectators. Almost 11 million people in Germany regularly watch eSports events through online streaming platforms such as YouTube, Twitch, or Smashcast. The League of Legends Worlds Finals 2014 in Seoul was witnessed by 45,000 spectators. Two years later, the final round of the League of Legends World Championships was viewed by a total of 43 million spectators worldwide. In that same year, the total number of spectators including online and those present in stadiums in international professional eSport was approximately around 323 million worldwide. In 2020, experts predict over 589 million spectators worldwide, which makes professional gaming extremely fascinating from a commercial point of view. In the year 2016,the total revenue collected from eSports is over 300 million worldwide.
eSport has established itself as a form of a sportive competition, even though the debate about whether eSport can be considered as a sport in the straitened sense or not, is still far from resolved. One of the first official competitive tournaments in video games was when Atari held a multi-city competition where 10,000 participants took part to become a world champion in Space Invaders in 1982. Ever since then, the way video games have been played has changed.
Concerning the future sociological research, the discussion on eSports is particularly exciting as the question of how 'real' virtual environments are perceived by people who act in these environments. The experiments presented using the latest technologies in games like where the first-person perspective of a male body was replaced by a virtual female body in a virtual reality simulation. Such experiments suggest that virtual environments can be experienced as real, even if the person acting in these environments is well-aware of their virtual nature.
In the forthcoming future, it can be predicted that competitive games will be developed for a refined augmented reality. It has not yet been investigated, however, to which extent individuals transfer their experiences within virtual sports worlds into the augmented reality. Therefore, sports sociology has to deal with the fact that the dispersal of the virtual world in modern society is an inevitable consequence of social development dynamics and cannot be stopped.
