Bright future for eSports

Staying with G2E Asia, a presentation on eSports that predicted seriously large business potential attracted interest and comment on the burgeoning vertical.

Borislav Borisov, who is chief operating officer at eSports operator UltraPlay, predicted without quoting research sources that eSports cash betting could reach turnover of more than $10 billion by 2018 and considerably more than double that by 2020.

The eSports executive pointed out that competitive events and prize pools in the vertical have been almost doubling on an annual basis since 2012, with over $65 million paid out in prize money this year alone. His own company recorded 310,000 bets in the first quarter of this year, he revealed.

Borisov categorised eSports action into cash-betting, skin betting and fantasy league, and said that, unlike sports betting, eSports punters tend to use desktop hardware rather than mobile apps. 60 percent of wagers are single rather than combination bets, and just over 67 percent are placed before the competition, with barely half that going on in-play wagers once a contest has begun.

He said that in his experience 44 percent of competitions on which wagers are placed are in the FPS (first person shooter) game Counter Strike: GO, with 34 percent going on the multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) action strategy game Dota2 (Defense of the Ancients) and the rest going to League of Legends and other team games.

The typical eSports punter demographic is male and between the ages of 18 and 24, he claimed…the much sought after “millennial generation” which has grown up with modern communication devices, video gaming and now eSports, making it receptive to new technology and concepts.

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