At the beginning of the 2010s if someone told you that Will Smith, Jennifer Lopez and Michael Jordan would invest in competitive gaming by 2020, you’d probably have called the hospital on them. Professional gaming was a concept which sounded much too surreal to the casual listener. “You can play games and earn money?” “Why would anyone watch others play games?” are a few of the common questions that were floated across any individual that prioritized gaming to become a source of income. Now cut back to the present and Esports is booming like never before and is a massive multi-million dollar industry employing business representative, HR personnel, nutritionists and psychologists aside from others. Whether you wish to accept it or not, this is now a full-fledged industry.
But what brought about this boom? What was the catalyst for it all? If you look back to the mid 2000s, the gaming industry was in a bit of a purple patch with Call of Duty, Counter Strike, World of Warcraft being some of the most common names among gamers. But what stirred this frenzy of competitive gaming was this tiny little modified map on the Real-time Strategy game called Warcraft 3. Warcraft 3 in itself was a hugely popular game since its release in 2003 for its Local and server based multiplayer. Due to this massive popularity, the creators of Warcraft, Blizzard Entertainment, decided to allow users to create custom maps for the game that they could play with their friends. This got the creative juices flowing in many gamers who formed various kinds of PvP and Tower defense maps. Then came along this group called IceFrog that designed a mod called Defense of The Ancients.
This map involved players controlling one player each(a hero) instead of controlling an army which was the usual in Warcraft. This was a blazing success with the map growing popular in the community. This concept had slowly morphed into one of the most popular genres for its individualistic flair, team strategy and competitive nature. Soon enough, another developer called Riot Games swooped in to take advantage of the growing popularity of the genre and released an independent game called League of Legends. On 27th October 2009, League of Legends(or more popularly known as LoL) was released to the public as a free-to-play game. Thus began the era of dominance of MOBAs.
Soon enough Dota 2 was released by Valve and all the Dota-loyalists from its initial days quickly jumped on board. This was a shrewd decision by Valve because they basically improved the graphics and released a game that had loyal players even before it was released. This lead to a flurry of other developers releasing their own versions of MOBAs like SMITE and Heroes of Newerth. None of them however could come close to the dominance of Dota 2 and LoL.
The exponential rise in popularity of these 2 games was music to the ears of game developers and the first dota 2 international championships were held at Gamescon in 2011. The prize money of this event – a staggering $1.6 million. This massive sum and the growing number of gamers and spectators meant that the snowball effect was well and truly in motion. The Internation(Dota 2) has since become an annual event and has been graced by the greatest professional players without fail.
Another example of this genres popularity was at display when the creators of Warcraft 3, Blizzard Entertainment, decided to release their own stand-alone MOBA called Heroes of The Storm. Dota started as a part of one of their own games, so this was a no-brainer. Heroes of the Storm changed the style up a bit with multiple maps with objectives instead of one static battleground. The game was made more fast-paced than others and required more teamwork over individual brilliance. Though the game did not manage to reach the heights of Dota 2 or Lol, Blizzard announced an esports tournament called Heroes of the Dorm where teams would represent different universities and the winning team would be awarded with their tuition being paid in full by Blizzard Entertainment. The fan-fare, viewership and participating was greater than expected with the team from Arizona State winning the first edition. This game and tournament turned out to be the catalyst for collegiate level esports much like Dota 2 and LoL on the world stage.
These gigantic fan-bases, massive online playing community and high-value competitions resulted in developers using the same blueprint of tournaments and ranked play in other games like Overwatch(a first-person shooter) and Hearthstone(turn-based card game). Today, there are multiple professional leagues like Overwatch League with franchises, just like the NFL and NBA, that are backed by A-list celebrities.
To this day, Dota 2 is the game that brings in the most prize money to gamers with 1400 tournaments and $225,366,331 in prize money. If not for the emergence of this genre, the industry might not have existed today and would not have created so many jobs for people around the world. This is still the beginning, at this rate we will see professional gamers in the same light as professional football players in terms of earning and status quo.
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