Video Games on ESPN - The International 4

By Johnny Ngo on July 18, 2014

It’s great that there are websites like the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network (ESPN) that have news and updates for most of America’s favorite sports, including football, baseball, basketball and hockey. You can find news about the latest and greatest, scores from recent games, schedules to see when your favorite teams will be on and more about your favorite players as well.

This weekend’s feature? On the weekend of July 18-21, ESPN’s feature was Defense of the Ancients 2 (DotA 2) and their largest annual event, The International 4, on ESPN2 and ESPN3.

http://a.espncdn.com/i/espn/espn_facebook.png

Yep, you got it. One of the biggest events in eSports was being aired on live television for the world to see. If you couldn’t watch it on television, you were able to watch on WatchESPN (their streaming site).

Here are some numbers that I thought were interesting:

If you ever visit Twitch.Tv, a website dedicated to video game streams, you can scroll down and see all the featured games that are being streamed. Usually, League of Legends holds the #1 spot with the most viewers. Occasionally, other games like DotA 2 and Hearthstone will have more viewers than League of Legends, but it’s usually LoL that consistently has the most viewers on Twitch.

Every week during the regular season, the League of Legends Championship Series (LCS) gets about 200,000 viewers during the live matches that take place Thursday through Sunday (Thursday/Friday is EU LCS, Saturday/Sunday is NA LCS), give or take about 30,000 or 40,000 viewers.

During the preliminary matches in the tournament, The International 4 (TI4) live streams would have more viewers on Twitch than League of Legends streams, exceeding their viewership and peaking at numbers near 250,000 viewers.

On the main page of www.twitch.tv at 11:30AM on 7/18/2014

ESPN gets 115 million monthly viewers on average. Thats about 3.5-4 million viewers daily. TI4 is a four day event that goes from July 18 to the 21. In four days, TI4 could see as many as 16 million viewers, and these are just the averages. We won’t know the real numbers until the time comes, but what can be said for sure is how amazing this is for eSports as a whole.

Speaking of amazing things, the prize pool system for DotA 2 was interesting this year; the money did not come from sponsors or the company itself. Players and fans were given the opportunity to participate in a “Compendium,” which is “a virtual booklet that contains dozens of ways to interact with the year’s biggest Dota 2 tournament. This year, you’ll earn even more rewards as you level up your Compendium by watching games, collecting player cards, making tournament predictions and more”(http://www.dota2.com/international/overview/).

A Compendium costs $9.99, and for each compendium purchased, $2.50 will be added to the current prize pool.

As I write this now, the prize pool sits at $10,848,057.

This is the largest prize pool for any eSports event in the history of eSports.

http://www.dota2.com/international/overview/

No matter how many viewers the event gets or how big the prize pools are, eSports is certainly growing into something big. Something that gamers and non-gamers alike can enjoy. If you want to watch the event live, head over to Twitch.Tv and check it out for yourself. Never played the game before or new to DotA 2? There’s a newcomer’s stream that’s friendly for people who are new to the game. Here’s a direct link; look for anything that has “The International” on it.

In the past few weeks, universities are now giving scholarships to competitive eSports players as well as the initiation of eSports programs in their athletic departments. There are almost as many players in the world playing League of Legends as there were World Cup viewers. Pornographic websites have shown interest in sponsoring big eSports titles.

And here we are a few weeks later, one of the largest DotA 2 events in the history of the game’s existence with a record breaking prize pool of almost $11 million USD (at the moment that I write this) will be on ESPN2 and ESPN3. That’s incredible.

In Korea, gaming and eSports has been relevant and a popular part of their society for a long time now. Hearing about an upcoming StarCraft 2 tournament being featured on OnGameNet (a Korean TV channel dedicated to eSports) was nothing new. But it’s not common to flip between channels and see tons of little animations, explosions and the health bars of champions quickly dropping during a major fight.

Although the US government will authorize athletic visas to international gamers to compete in the states, a lot of people still have a harder time agreeing with the idea of a gamer being considered an athlete. The term “real athletes” has been used to compare people who play sports and people who play eSports.

But that hasn’t at all slowed down the growth of what we see as the eSports scene today. It’s indeed a different culture and experience as a whole and there are a lot of people who love these games. A little competition wouldn’t hurt anyone and eSports creates opportunities for those who want to take that one step further.

The fact is, eSports is growing and as time goes on, even more incredible things will happen for eSports.

http://www.dota2.com/international/overview

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