In less than a decade, the amounts distributed by international video game tournaments have literally exploded to the point of reaching those in leading, worldwide-coverage sports events.

The most striking example is that of The International. This tournament, based on the game Dota 2, which took place from 20 to 25 August, 2019 at the Mercedes-Benz Arena in Shanghai, beat all records with $34.330.068 in play of which $15.620.181 for the first place. This is unheard of!

Right in second place was the Fortnite World Cup which put the video game in the spotlight by proposing an overall cash prize of 30 million dollars! With 40 million players registered, it was 100 players who qualified with the guarantee of winning at least $50.000. The former met together in the Arthur Ashe stadium in New York to play in front of 23,000 spectators (it was sold out) and 2.5 million viewers. And it was “Bugha”, his real name being Kyle Giersdorf, a 16-year old American teenager from Pennsylvania (USA) who brought home the jackpot of 3 million dollars after a gaming marathon of 3-days.

Not too far off was the 2018 edition of « Worlds » for the game League of Legends which had the 4 best teams share the impressive sum of $3.741.000 with $2.418.750 just for the winners! The finals were watched by 99.6 million viewers, and the simultaneous audience reached a peak of 44 million viewers, thus beating the audience record from the previous year. For Counter- Strike: Global Offensive, the ESL just announced the schedule for its Pro Tour 2020 with endowments of $1.000.000.

In 2018, the Washington Post had fun with making comparisons :

This craze which results in monstrous media investments is heaven for pure players of online video streaming who were eagerly awaiting this to take advantage of selling advertising space.

A champion in this category, Twitch again reported a record increase with 9.36 billion hours of videos viewed in 2018 (up 25 % compared to 2017). Relying on over 3 million streamers and 15 million visitors on average daily, this site is more than ever a major player in the gaming world. Although it has never disclosed its financial results, on top of the advertising income (Twitch Brands) which we can only imagine are pretty significant, Twitch has also developed several paying products with Prime, Turbo and Bits which should reinforce even more its business success.

Microsoft was dumbstruck at the success of Twitch, and rapidly jumped into the fight to get a piece of the cake with its platform Mixer which aims to compete with, or better yet, surpass this beast Twitch, and it’s with this in mind that they invested a substantial sum of money to “snitch” Ninja from them, their major streamer on Fortnite.

In the video game universe, just like in sports or show business, the best people are the stars. And who says stars, says rich. Tyler “Ninja” Blevins, a 27-year old American streamer, maintained to CNN at the end of December 2018, that he had earned nearly 10 million dollars over the year, of which 70% thanks to YouTube and Twitch.

Despite the latest controversies, PewDiePie, the pioneer of video game streamers, earned nearly 12 million dollars in 2017.

On a world scale, Goldman Sachs, in the 2018 version of its investment report dedicated to the subject, estimated the turnover generated by esports at 570 million euros in 2017. A figure which could reach 1.7 billion before 2022.

A country smaller than the others but an initiative which is just as big, accompanies players and event organisers in the Grand Duchy. Its future is certainly promising given the small associations, along with an SME like 11F which covers all the news and which is in contact with a good number of the big gamers abroad.

The key indicator is the number of visitors constantly growing from year to year during the 2 main events:

The numbers have greatly increased, notably thanks to the change of location, from the 1500 m² at the Casino2000 in Mondorf-les-bains to Luxexpo and its available surface area of 6.400m2. This allowed for a giant capacity of welcoming more than 10 esport tournaments and nearly 1000 participating players (prize pool of around 15,000 Euros) along with 150 exhibitors to assist this human wave, including twenty or so merchants. The local media was very present (RTL, L’Essen-tiel, Wort, Tageblatt, Paperjam, Lëtzebuerger Journal...) to cover what they considered to be the largest gaming event ever seen in Luxembourg.

As for the SprinGames, it’s part of another event called Spring Fair. The number of visitors corresponds to the total turnout of the Fair which remains stable (around 35,000 people a year). Even so, Luxexpo doubled the surface area dedicated to video games each edition:

According to 11F, the year 2020 looks very promising and offers a good deal of hope for new surprises in a community which has certainly not finished growing!