Esports as it is called will eventually replace professional sports. They will get paid ridiculous amounts of money for the same reason athletes do now. With now two generations of people growing up playing video games, they can more identify and be impressed by those skills.

Esports will not replace pro sports. I think there is room enough for both. People will always be impressed and entertained by actual human athleticism.

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How does Danny Hart sit down with balls that big?

Yeah, I don't know why it wouldn't just be another form of entertainment. It's not a zero sum situation.

Not quite however it is on its way to being as big or possibly bigger than "real" pro sports. I was listening to a program on the radio where they were discussing this and the guest on the program was saying that the elite level gamers basically find a talent in a game and spend all of their time perfecting their play, some have coaches just a pro pitcher would, or a pro hockey player. He said that it basically equates to this at that level, and it was very rare that a "Bo Jackson", someone who was elite at more than one game would be competitive at more than one game.
Add to this, I've also heard of huge gaming tournaments with big prize money and stadiums or theaters of spectators watching.

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A false humanity is used to impose its opposite, by people whose cruelty is equalled only by their arrogance

Almost no owners, managers, facilities, staff, trainers, coaches, etc. Many professional athletes would be multi-billionaires if all those parties did not receive a huge amount of revenue.

There is a big scifi game universe called Eve Online. Buddy's son is one of the leading players in the world. 2x, I think, he put together and led "team" that won the world championships, or whatever they call it.

Much of the kid's (I tend to forget he's late 20's now) income stream is based on Eve Online, but as a player in the game, not someone behind the scenes coding.

Starting 10-15yrs ago the Iceland based software company that runs Eve reached out to him. He now does a bunch of player community liaison and PR gigs for the outfit. Also, there's objects in the game that get sold on ebay. Like an experienced player will put time and energy into building a spaceship, or something. Then they sell it on ebay. Finally, there's the training angle. For a fee one can participate in various kinds of training events with an experienced player.

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Books @ Amazon
"If only he had used his genius for niceness, instead of Evil." M. Smart

There is at least one study that showed that young men (18-25) already prefer watching eSports to traditional sports. And that's here in the U.S. If you go to places like S.Korea, eSports is practically already moving ahead of traditional sports.

To some extent, it becomes a virtual zero sum situation. People only have so much capacity to consume entertainment. If one segment becomes hugely popular, another has to dwindle, because people just won't have time for both. I don't think physical sports will disappear, but it would not surprise me to find them greatly diminished, and popular with niche crowds and "old people." Just think about other forms of entertainment that have been overtaken over the years.

http://www.businessinsider.com/...tional-sports-2017-9

https://www.nytimes.com/...icenter-esports.html

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Slowguy

(insert pithy phrase here...)

No they wouldn't. If owners weren't footing the cost for the league there wouldn't be a league.

Yes, revenue is shared but in team sports you can't have one without the other.

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How does Danny Hart sit down with balls that big?

As Slowguy says it is sort of zero sum in terms of the total amount of people's attention. There will be real professional athletes, but they won't be making as much as their form of entertainment is eclipsed by Esports.

So, what's your timeline for eSports to replace professional sports?

The grandson of Comcast's founder manages a professional Overwatch team owned by Comcast Spectacor.. big companies obviously see the potential.

Saw a piece last week about Zwift arena races starting to take off (I think there might be one this weekend with a $50k purse - small potatoes compared to some of the true videogame tournaments but I was surprised to see even that level of prize money)

Good question. It is most similar to golf in terms of the individual nature of most of the events. But most golfers get their money from endorsements and most Esports players get their money from people subscribing to their feeds. The highest paid golfers in the world make $20M-$50M per year (including some who retired a long time ago). The highest paid Esports person probably takes in about he same as the 50th ranked golfer. At the rate of growth of eSports, I would say 10 years or less before they are on par with golfers and their total revenue eclipses those of the major sports leagues of today. It will take a while longer before the total revenue of Esports eclipses that of all professional sports combined.

I think one of the major differences between esports and regular sports is that esports is appealing to both men and women equally. In fact I believe women have now eclipsed men in online gaming. So if advertisers can market/advertise to both segments of the population as opposed to one specific subset who happens to like baseball or football, I think you will see a huge shift in where the dollars go.

I play my share of online games (WoW for years, Overwatch, etc.), and I'm not sure if that's the case. Maybe I'm too "casual" as the online crowd would say, but I still think watching a dude run a 4.2 40 while catching a ball and evading tackles is more entertaining and impressive than someone getting a team kill in Overwatch.

I'm 32, so maybe I'm a few years ahead of the generation embracing online gaming more, but I don't see it eclipsing real sports in my life time.

Point taken, although I'd say it's not just sports per se but entertainment as a whole.

It all depends. If eSports gets greedy and forces people to pay, it will die quickly. If they let it grow organically and let people choose to pay, it will continue to grow. Unfortunately, it is normal for someone to think they know best and how to make the most money. This is usually the tipping point of success and failure. Hopefully they don't get greedy.

That and what everyone is talking about isn't the same...

Esports are thing A. The Fortnite streamer is thing B.

People who are good and play esports get a bit of cash from prizes, a bit from sponsorship, etc.

People in thing B are who OP is talking about. A dude that goes by Ninja makes $500k monthly streaming games. No esports involved. People subscribe to his twitch channel. Twitch gets a cut, he gets a cut. Twitch shows ads before, during, after his streams. He gets a cut of that revenue based on viewers.

A and B are definitely part of the same broad thing, but you're right, there's a difference between live streaming personal play and a competitive league. That's one of the things that will make it easier for gaming to develop. It's much cheaper and easier to monetize. It's difficult for someone to privately monetize their physical sports in the same way. You have to be good enough to compete in the pro leagues, make it onto a team, work within a union, etc. Gaming can be monetized even if you're not top caliber. There are pretty girls making money off of gaming streams mostly because they draw in nerdy guys who want to watch a cute girl.

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Slowguy

(insert pithy phrase here...)

Yes, that's him.

I haven't gamed in a longtime.. used to play online shooter but everyone 'bunny-hopped' (repeatedly hit jump key), which made it ridiculously lame and childish, so I quit.
Heard 'Overwatch' is now big.. watched 3minutes of it on Twitch but from what I could see.. everyone was bunny-hopping. My impression was I sure ain't missing much.

I know a young kid (23?) who works for a League of Legends team. I know nothing about it, so googled.. From what I can see, his 'team' is a bunch of pimply, spindly-armed, early-teen Korean nerds. His job is to 'coach' these kids about how to play the game better and analyze their playing styles and the tendencies of their upcoming opponents. IMHO, it's weird sh*t.
So I googled his team and surfed his Facebook. He is white as rice, but has taken to posting on fbook like he's a teeny-bopper Asian. His posts are clearly written to emulate someone who's poor at Engrish. Err,English. And he changed his hairstyle, eyeglasses, dress style,etc to mimic or emulate what appears to be a Japanese anime character or similar. Very weird sh*t.
Pictures of the 'team house' where he lives is like Real World MTV populated by 14-15yo super nerdy Korean boys.
Further reading shows that a big part of what these team employees do is babysit and make sure the 'players' get enough sleep and don't eat only Sugar Pops and drink only Mt.Dew. Since these are very immature kids living away from home, the team is there to play camp counselor and assure the parents that all is well with Jr.
Anyhow, the more I googled, the weirder it seemed to get. This kid was recently promoted to 'assistant coach', and makes more than his father who is a public projects engineer. His dad thinks it's all extremely pathetic; can't say I disagree. I don't see the future career path unless his son's goal is to morph into a Japanese teen girl or anime character. The day this stuff replaces real sport featuring real athletes someone pls shoot me.

Got a friend of a friend making a living doing this now. I was flabbergasted at first, but I guess she's both good and hot enough to attract a variety of viewers to watch her play, which enabled her to gain a subscription following for an initial income, and then once that grew to a point she started getting sponsors paying for ad space on her YouTube channel. It's still insane to me, but then I think of how utterly befuddled my dad is by smartphones; time and culture march on with or without us...

Ninja (The Streamer) has around around 170,000 subscribers to his Twitch Channel. A monthly subscription is $5 which is paid to Twitch and the streamer typically get $3. He very likely gets a higher percentage than this. There are also two additional tiers of subscriptions at $9 and $24 per month so figure a small portion of the subs do this. During the stream, there are also donations from viewers so conservatively I would put that at $10K per stream. Of course he has a youtube channel as well. He is making way more than $500K per month.

I have a friend who will occasionally live stream himself playing a video game. I, for the life of me, can't understand the interest of watching someone else play a video game, let alone paying to play it. Then again, I could say the same thing about golf, bowling, race cars, poker...

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Take a short break from ST and read my blog:
http://tri-banter.blogspot.com/

Hey. I am Hazben's 17 year old son. I actually play a good bit of League and am rather knowledgeable on the subject. I would like to clear up a few misconceptions you and some others may have.

For one, these are not kids. One must legally be seventeen to join the LCS (the competition the teams are in). One of the oldest players is 28. The teams have some very powerful friendships. It is not like the garbage on MTV. Yes, there are some disputes, but they are living together. It is just like every other team: some great friendships and some rivalries.

The coaches do far more than babysit.The coaches are in the top 0.1% of players and do legitimately pass down insight to the players. There is much more to the coaches job than watching the diet and sleep patterns of the players. There are others to help as well. For example, many of these houses have chefs that prepare food for the players.

I do not know which staff member you speak of, but it is not uncommon to import players, mostly from Korea, to other teams just like in other sports. The same thing is done with coaches. Some of the imported players barely know English. It would not be impossible for the coach to legitimately struggle with English. It could also explain why his culture is so different. Even if he is not, that is quite possibly the culture surrounding a team with quite a few Korean players. If he is around it long enough, he might slowly begin to adopt it. Heck, he might consciously do it so that the players can relate to the him better.

I not going to debate whether these people get paid too much; one opinion is as good as the next. You also probably know the guy better than I do. I just wanted to clear up some surprisingly common misconceptions many people have.

Thanks for posting and providing more info. You have to understand some of us grew up on Pong, Colecovision, and Atari 'Tanks'. This is a different world you are describing. I still say gaming can't ever replace athleticism...