An Introduction on "Play Time"

This article comes from The Economist,talking about the e-sport(电子竞技）.It begins with a picture that a salaried player called MinD_ContRoL wins the international , a tournament held inSeattle’s Key Arena on August 7th-12th.MinD_ContRoL will receive $10m prize money which provided by the producer of “Dota2”,ValveCorporation.E-sport is on the rise.

E-sports is gradually assembling all the trappings of mainstream sports: corporate sponsorships, professional managers, salaried players and even announcers whowear suits and make bad jokes. Their goal is for e-sports teams tocompete with conventional ones forviewers and bigger corporate sponsorships.

It still has a long way to go. Last year e-sports earned $900m, mainly from advertising, ticket sales and merchandise, according to SuperData, compared with $83bn from sales for mobile, computer and console games. Viewers watch for free. For now, the main value ofe-sports is as a marketing tool to sell games.

That may change. Media companies are hungry for content that can win viewers’ attention; e-sports has a young, passionate audience.Giant firms have taken an interest. Amazon, an e-commerce juggernaut, bought Twitch in 2014 fornearly $1bn. Disney will soon have a controlling stake in BAMTech, a video-streaming firm that last year agreed to pay $300m for the rights to stream tournaments for a game called “League ofLegends” until 2023. (The game’s 100m monthly active players outnumber the population of Germany.) The owner of“League of Legends” is Tencent, aChinese internet giant.

Nevertheless, gamers face several obstacles before they can compete with established sports. Although big brands are beginning to sponsor event sand teams, they are still tentative and invest only small amounts.