Gaming
E-sport is big but gaming is mammoth already.
I could have ended this article with this sentence. Before we will talk about why eSport is so important for our theory of being in Meta let’s talk about gaming from a higher perspective.
There are more than 2.5 Billion players globally in 2022 and it’s predicted that the number will increase to 3 bln in 2023. (according to Statista). When you consider the fact, that a significant part of our population lives in a poorer part of the globe (Afrika) doesn’t have easy access to computers it’s more or less half of all the people on the globe are players. Yes. it’s that big. The value of the market in the US is almost 90 billion USD and almost 200 billion globally. And the predictions are of course increasing year to year.
Additionally, 83% of sales come from online purchases (which makes sense since it’s the most convenient way to purchase and own digital products. The gaming exceeded any other entertaining platform – movies included. When you compare hi-budget games to films you can see the gap already in favour of games and it’s growing year to year. The budgets for the production of games can be huge. For example, the budget of the hit – Red Dead Redemption 2 game (released on PC and consoles) was estimated between 350-550M U.S. dollars. And we are talking here only about the production. Including marketing, it could easily reach… 1 billion U.S. dollars. And after only one weekend after the release of the game, they almost got break even. The income from the game was $725 million USD (first 24 hours).
Compared to this the biggest production movie budget: Avengers: Endgame – approx 400 M U.S. dollars for the production. And it was the most expensive production of all time.
If you consider mobile gaming on the other hand report shows that in 2021, 52% of the revenue (whooping 93 billion U.S. dollars comes from mobile games). $32 billion was generated in China, the US $15 billion, and Japan reached $13.7 billion. Mobile devices are faster y2y and they replacing PCs in many areas – gaming included. The modern smartphones are PCs in fact, but available for us 24/7 everywhere we go.
I could write a lot of examples, but I think we all have the idea of how big the gaming is and about what scale we are talking about. So let’s heads up to eSport.
eSport
The idea of eSport is not new. The first competitive gaming can be traced back to October 19, 1972, at Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory when groups of students competed playing Spacewar (which is often consider as a first video game). The first recognized competitive tournament in video games took place 10 years later in 1982 when Atari held a competition that offered ten thousand participants a chance to become a world champion in Space Invaders. If you are interested more in the history of gaming there is a documentary on Youtube (hosted by Tony Hawk – legendary skateboarder). It’s of course outdated but explains well the history of video games.
Getting back to eSport – why is it so important to our agenda? Because the very nature of games is being competitive. You can either compete with the game to beat it or compete with another human being. How is that different from traditional sport? There are of course tons of materials proving that eSport is a sport or the other way around – absolutely not. But for the sake of this article let’s put this aside. It’s competitive and this what makes it so popular.
For future research, the discussion on eSports is particularly interesting regarding the question of how ‘real’ virtual environments are perceived by people who play in these environments. The experiments presented above suggest that virtual environments can actually be experienced as real, even if the persons acting in these environments are well-aware of their virtual nature. In other words: the players playing the game are starting to lose their attachment to reality.
eSport stands on 3 pillars: competition, teamwork, and improvement.
– Competition fuels us toward being the best (ergo need to improve)
– teamwork – make us persistent in this direction and gives us a sense of belonging
– constant improvement is needed to be in the competition, and the circle is closed.
Why is this so important to the topic of being in the Metaverse. I believe gaming and eSport will be a strong drive, especially for the younger generation to use metaverse as a place to shine and compete with other players. Of course, we are not ready yet (which I will cover in my article on technology maturity), but conceptually I believe without gaming metaverse won’t be existing and strong gamification will be at its core concept.
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