EPTThe Esports industry is undoubtedly a growing force in the industry of sustainable jobs. Accompanied by faster bandwidth availability to more areas in the world, the increasing availability of access to the internet, and the best damn fans in the world to support Esports, us nerds.
As a broodwar player, I was around when TeamLiquid only existed as a forum for the single game, broodwar. The interface wasn't as shiny, there was no streams page, but the website has always been up in a reliable manner, and has always been a great experience to be able to browse through the super crisp speed of being able to open up threads (I personally always considered TL to be "faster" than GG.net in terms of just opening threads and stuff)
My point is, back before 2013, there wasn't a dota2 section, and there wasn't a starcraft2 section. The importation of multiple games such as the popularity that teamliquid brings to twitch.tv through it's live streams section, tournaments with commentary and prize money, and user streams of professional gaming players, is the strongest piece of evidence that indicates an even larger than anticipated future for Esports. There is nowhere to go but up right?
That's what the forward trend seems to be. With Heart of the Swarm right around the corner and the Kespa broodwar players transition to Wings of Liberty, it looks like we are in for a hell of a year. That is, of course, from the perspective of a avid starcraft 2 gamer. In the broader picture of things, this is only a tiny piece that is in movement.
Looking on the other side of the pond as they say from Starcraft 2, there is also games such as dota, league of legends, heroes of newerth, and warcraft 3. This is where most of the major tournaments occur in the RTS department.
But wait...this pond has more than one side. Don't forget the halo, call of duty, and counterstrike players that also compete at tournaments like MLG and support professional teams. Lastly, there is also the console gamers, although I don't know how big they are compared to computer games. The world of esports has never looked so large. You have opportunities across a variety of different genres of games that have pro scenes you can passionately follow, advertisements that you can watch to support the pros, and merchandising for the die-hard fans, although just look at the TL store and how many people attend events worldwide (from MLG in in North America, to Dreamhack in Stockholm, to Gom in Korea.
So many nerds in this word...yet being a nerd is still considered being an "outsider" compared to other, more mainstream activities such as soccer and American football, hockey, tennis, and more. Why is that? It is because Esports, in proportion to regular sports, is a fraction of the amount of people. It is because these other sports have been around for hundreds of years. They have had a lot of time a fan base that spawns across generations of people. With the recent explosion of the internet, things such as Esports, that were previously nonexistent sprung up, taking advantage of the internet as a new resource.
Remember, this didn't exist in 2000, the turn of the century. Every other sport has. Now, 13 years later, we have an arsenal of weapons to popularize Esports with. Think twitter, facebook, instagram, snapchat, skype, aim, xfire, msn messenger, etc. If you think about it, we really are the first generation that has been exposed to this. Your parents most likely didn't have Verizon Fios or Comcast Digital Cable when they were growing up. Think of when someone like Flash has kids, tells them about his old days kickin it as a top progamer in starcraft 2. These kids of the future generation will not only have whatever we have now to look at, but also the years upon years of history that has been accumulated with time. They read about Tastosis in archived threads in the internet, about Day9 and Incontrol, 2 more popular figures of esports. By then, they will have become historical living figures. Not only will these kids be able to read about them, if they really really wanted to, they could talk to these people. I'm sure tracking down what day9 is up to won't be hard (he was in forbes magazine...ya that one). If all else fails, I'm sure google or the google equivalent would have a people tracking feature, probably next to google images haha
Ill give ya guys a break here and put the rest of this in a 2nd part
