experimented with having their players play video games for an audience instead.
Video-game technology has also been used to fill empty stands with fake crowds for
some sports broadcasts.
As the line between video games and traditional sports blurs, companies will strive to
capitalise on the popularity of e-sports in 2021. Guild Esports, a team owned by David
Beckham, an English former footballer, which competes in four different e-sports, is
among those hiring professional players this year. In October the firm raised £20m
($26m) on the London Stock Exchange. Events which had to be scaled back in 2020
because of the pandemic should restart, too. The “Fortnite” World Cup, which debuted
in 2019 but was cancelled in 2020, seems likely to kick off again. In 2019 Epic Games,
the maker of “Fortnite”, provided $30m in prize money for the event. Blizzard, which
runs leagues for “Overwatch” (another cartoonish shooting game) in half a dozen
countries, may even be able to restart events in stadiums.
Will the money pouring into e-sports get a payoff? That is less clear. For all their growth,
e-sports are chiefly a form of marketing for video games. Teenagers are keen, but their
attention spans are short—and new games come out all the time. Traditional sports
have much deeper roots. It is far from clear whether e-sports teams can build brands of
even a fraction of the scale of a minor Premier League football team. But if you do not
play, you cannot win.
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