hello all, first post here…though i have been trying to read through the firehouse for the past month or so…it seems like there was a post here on China that went into esports a bit not long ago.
i’m involved with scouting, and on a recent camp out (where gaming devices are banned) i’d say 90% of the boy’s conversations involved gaming. (the other 10% was about food)
this seems like an area this board might find interesting…high growth in an inevitable industry. no specific investment ideas were mentioned at either link. though Tencent (TCEHY) and Activision (ATVI) were discussed. AMZN owns Twitch, but that’s likely a tiny piece of the whole. Nvidia makes graphics cards aimed at gamers, but is also only part of the whole.
the second link is the more interesting of the two. for the subject matter, and also the way this professional investment manager went about educating himself.
a snip from the first link highlighting key findings of the second link:
*More people in the 18-25 years old age group regularly watch and play esports than any other traditional sport. *A small town in Poland hosted an event this year that was watched live by people from 180 different countries. The audience was 3x as large as it was for the most recent MLB World Series. More people attended this event in person than the last 3 Super Bowls combined. *The esports audience in Asia is 4x larger than it is in the U.S., so this is truly a global phenomenon. *One event in a tournament called the League of Legends was viewed by 80 million fans. *Twitch is one of the streaming services that allows people to view these events. The service already has a bigger audience than CNN or MSNBC. They get more than 15 million daily unique viewers. They’re owned by Amazon (because of course, Bezos was on top of this trend before anyone else). *The video gaming audience is 5x the size of Netflix subscribers. *There’s a league called Overwatch which has teams owned by people who already own a professional sports team. This list includes Robert Kraft (New England Patriots), Jeff Wilpon (New York Mets), Stan Kroenke (LA Rams and Denver Nuggets) and Dave Scott (Philadelphia Flyers). The teams cost them $20 million a piece.
investing in inevitable companies in inevitable industries seems like a good place to hunt! any ideas for public companies that specialize in this space?
May be a contrarian opinion but I think youtube will be #1 in esports. Probably already is if you count people viewing other people watching videogames. Every tween I know watches other people play fortnite on youtube.
Disney’s ESPN has signed a deal with Activision Blizzard for live TV coverage of the Overwatch League, an esports league. The deal is the biggest yet for video game developer Blizzard Entertainment, and deepens ESPN’s commitment to esports, where spectators watch professional video gamers compete.
The Grand Finals will mark the first broadcast of an esports championship on Disney’s flagship TV network, ABC, and the first time live competitive gaming will air on ESPN in primetime.
Overwatch coverage will begin with the playoffs on July 11, across both Disney XD and ESPN networks and will finish with the Grand Finals live from Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York, July 27–28. A recap of highlights will air on ABC on July 29. All coverage also will be available for ESPN and Disney network subscribers to stream live on the ESPN App and DisneyNOW. :
I have to admit, I have yet to even read this thread, bit have been intending to and probably will in the not-too-distant future.
That said, my town (Chattanooga) is having an e-sports tournament and may soon be getting an e-sports arena. The reason for this is mostly because of our internet connectivity, with up to 10 gigabit service available. The tournament/festival is called the 10 Gig Festival in honor of EPB’s internet capabilities.
I was actually sitting just to the right of where the video embedded in this article was shot, on the front row, and had intended to bring this slight e-sports tidbit to this thread after hearing the announcements Thursday night.
volfan84
Not really a gamer, but planning to learn some more, for investment purposes if nothing else
As one of the younger members of the board, and having grown up spending a lot of time gaming (including competitively), there is absolutely no doubt Esports are going to be huge. I could easily oversee Esports overtaking all other “physical” sports in terms of revenue in the future (this could still be decades away, but I do believe it will happen). Professional gaming has been big for quite a while now, but things have gone much more mainstream as youtube streaming and Twitch continue to grow. I really for the life of me cannot understand it, but there’s already literally millions of people willing to spend real money to watch other people play video games. A game I used to play in college had something like a $1 million cash prize pool. I just checked it out and in 2017 the cash prize pool was $24 million. For one gaming tournament…
I’ve been thinking about this for a while and it’s interesting this thread popped up on here. I think Esports/gaming are still very much in their infancy, and the question is going to be where is the real money to be made. Not sure if I’d bet as much on the actual gaming studies as I would the media platforms or larger conglomerates that encompass more than strictly developing games (I could see Tencent being like the Amazon for Esports).