TSM celebrates winning the NA LCS summer split.
eSports took a huge step toward mainstream coverage in July when ESPN broadcast The International 4, the world championship of the popular computer game Dota 2. TI4, which sold out the KeyArena in Seattle, even made the front page of ESPN.com. It may come as a bit of a surprise, then, that ESPN president John Skipper dismissed eSports as a whole during a media conference in New York. Skipper was asked about Amazon’s nearly $1 billion purchase of the video game streaming platform Twitch, which as of now is the site most viewers use to watch professionals play games like League of Legends and Dota 2.
“It’s not a sport — it’s a competition. Chess is a competition. Checkers is a competition. Mostly, I’m interested in doing real sports.”
Skipper’s rationale that the professional play of video games is a mere competitions may have held up 15 years ago, but there are eSports that mirror “real sports” in nearly every single way in 2014.
Take League of Legends, for example. In the United States, Riot Games runs an 8-team league that plays 28-game seasons before moving onto an NBA-style playoff. The worst teams in the league can be relegated, much like teams in the English Premier League. Players swap teams (and can be traded) in the offseason just like in any other sport. At the end of the year, the best teams from each region in the world will meet for a championship final that’s not unlike the World Cup. eSports teams have fanbases and rivalries just like any “real sports” teams, and hundreds of thousands of people watch Riot’s League Championship Series every week. The same cannot be said for, say, the Jacksonville Jaguars. You probably wouldn’t call a professional League of Legends player an “athlete” (though the U.S. government recognizes them as pro athletes), but their competition is a unquestionably a sport.
Even if Skipper isn’t willing to call eSports “sports,” it’d be silly for ESPN to dismiss them from a business perspective. More people watched the League of Legends Season 3 final than the NBA Finals or the World Series. The Season 4 world finals will be held in Seoul’s enormous Sangam Stadium, which hosted three games during the 2002 World Cup and seats more than 60,000 people. eSports is exploding in popularity, and it only makes sense for ESPN to latch on.