Esports has been growing as a professional sport for the past couple of years, moving from $100,000 competitions to millions of dollars on the line for full professional teams. This mirrors the fact that video games have been expanding into today's world as time goes on. The latest talk in the Esports world has been about bringing Esports to the Olympics. While many people disagree with this choice, the Olympics are going to use Esports as a “demonstration sport” in the 2024 Olympics, and China is using it in the Asian Games in 2022 as a competitive sport -- which awards a medal.
As we all know, video games will bring in a large portion of viewers through teens. In the Rio Olympics, viewership dropped 15 % because of the millennial generation dropping off. The main problem with Esports joining the Olympics is the notion of violence that comes with video games. It is against Olympic rules for there to be violence-related activities, therefore any Esports in the Olympics would be games that are sport related or have been a previous event in the Olympics. The perfect example would be they could use world sailing as an Esports event because of the fact that it was a past event and has multiple maps that are designed exactly like the space that was used in real life.
Bringing Esports in would also cause more disabled and less active people to be able to join in on the Olympics and compete alongside the physical players. It also brings a lot of sponsorships and ad revenue to the Olympics, which would really help, because the Olympics -- other than the NFL -- is one of the biggest events for bringing in money, making 8.1 billion last year, the most money made last year out of any sport, with the lowest income sport being Major League Soccer only making $850 million in its last season. With the addition of Esports games, you can advertise with Sony, Microsoft and other gaming and electronic companies; this would help with advertising participation compared to what the Olympics did in previous years.
While there are many benefits if Esports joined the Olympics, there are also severe downside to them being part of the events. For example, the Olympics may lose viewers or get a bad reception because of the addition of Esports. Many middle age through elderly people which makes up the majority of the current viewers, will not want to watch someone play on a console when there could be people doing the sport in real life, and that option would be more entertaining for them to watch rather than someone sitting down not doing much. It’s unclear if the influence of young people would outweigh the loss of those older viewers, but in the end it may not even bring that many young people because of the fact that it won't be content that most teens and kids watch today. Most of the teens of the world watch NBA 2K and Fortnite, with Fortnite and 2k being the most viewed games on popular streaming platforms, getting hundreds of thousands of watchers daily. Not showing these sports as an event at the Olympics would be a massive mistake just purely based on the view-count rather than the money they make. Teens would rather watch these events instead of Boat Sailing.
It's a good choice to put Esports as a demonstration sport at first, to see how it is received. You never know how something is going to be viewed, especially when it's targeted towards a giant audience across a wide variety of age groups. This could bring a whole new age of viewers to the Olympics, or could end up completely destroying the integrity of the Olympics.
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