eSports has only been around for less than 15 years, in 2000 there were about 10 tournaments held worldwide for competitive gaming, in 2010 over 260 tournaments were played. One of the actual first formation of competitive gaming was Counter:Strike in 2007 which was slowly grew over the past 8 years into one of the top games involved in eSports. In 2010, League of Legends introduced it's first World Championship and the winning team got $20,000. 5 years later in 2015, the winner of the World Championship wins a million dollars. Dota 2 held it's first championships known as TI# (The International 20##). In TI1 and TI2 the prizepool for each was close to $1.5m each. TI3 awarded 4m, following year TI4 awarded 11m and TI5 had a prizepoll of over 18m. In 5 years, Dota went from a prizepool of 1million dollars to 18 million dollars and the team that won 1st place, got 6.6m dollars. Starcraft is much different game because it is a 1v1 game compared to the other 3 listed which are 5v5 but still had it's prize pool consist of 1.6 million dollars. Now where do people watch competitive gaming? Well, the main source of watching competitive gaming is Twitch, which is a live streaming service for free. Last year Amazon bought Twitch for 970m dollars. Yes, almost a billion dollars was invested by Amazon on a gaming service. Twitch has attracted over 15 million people to watch not only competitive gaming but just normal other people streaming themselves playing video games, and some of those streamers make a living off of streaming a game. eSports is not this little imaginary game that gamers hope to exist, it is now real. Google, HTC, and Nissan which are non-gaming companies are getting involved with eSports today aswell.
Image credits:
League of Legends(leagueoflegends.com)
DOTA2 (steampowered.com)
Starcraft (blizzard.com)
CS:GO (steampowered.com)
