Blog 4: eSports in Digital Culture

I, myself, am a fan of eSports; specifically League Of Legends and DOTA 2. I started playing it even before it became popular here in the Philippines or even before it was considered an eSport back in 2011. There were just a few players and I only had a couple of friends who I can count on one had who played with me. Finding in a match in the queue took a minimum of 5 minutes then, compared to the fast almost instant matchmaking queue today due to the growing number of players.

In an article titled Report: More than 70 million people watch eSports worldwide written by Rod Breslau in the site OnGamers, it is stated that the numbers of eSports fans and participants around the world are growing exponentially. The article is full of statistics about eSports and the numbers are awe-inspiring. 

"The report estimates that League of Legends will see 42 million new players by 2015, topping out at 94 million monthly active users, with Wargaming's World of Tanks predicted to reach $590 Million in revenue by 2015.

Twitch released their own impressive report in January, which includes 12,000,000,000 minutes watched per month, over 45 million unique viewers per month, 1 million broadcasters per month and 6,000,000 total videos broadcast per month. 5,100 of those broadcasters are partners, and minutes watched and videos broadcasts have doubled since 2012, with unique viewers up from 20 million in 2012. Twitch users watch on average 106 minutes of content per day." said Breslau.

The numbers are astounding. This just proves that the digital culture which we live in is just starting to flourish. Maybe it's because people love to play games. This MOBA games just started for the sake of friends to have fun, but now it enters competition level. They now hold tournaments which provide professional players income and fame.

I found another article titled DOTA 2 INTERNATIONAL PRIZE POOL HITS $10 MILLION written by Mike Mahardy in the site IGN. The article reports the recent addition to the already humongous prize pool of the DOTA 2 International Tournament. The prize pool already hit the $10 Million mark just recently. The prize pool comes from part of the sales of Compendium in Steam stores.

"The prize pool is fed almost entirely through purchases around the Compendium, the interactive program that accompanies the upcoming tournament. For every $10 Compendium purchased, $2.50 goes directly to the International 2014 purse.

Team Matchmaking, 1v1 mid-lane practice, and a Favorite Hero tracker were recently added to Dota 2 during the steady flow of Compendium purchases. As of this writing, the victory prediction taunt is the highest listed reward, with no further milestones exceeding $10 million." said Mahardy.

This shows the enthusiasm and excitement of the growing number of eSports fans, as well as players. This is also a first in history, a tournament with a prize pool of 10 million dollars generated from the players itself. This is just the beginning. Who knows what else could be in store for the eSports community? Even a college in the U.S. is starting to sponsor scholars for their eSports program. 

This could be the start of a new era for digital culture. If at first it was just the social media dominating worldwide, this could be next big thing. Competitions around the globe will start popping up more often, even here in the Philippines, tournaments are starting to gather numbers. Let's just hope that this will bring in more positive effects rather than negative effects.