This archive report was first published on 6 July 2021.
Published on July 6, 2021, Bizna Digital Services pondered over the question of Esports and why it has not caught up like a bushfire in Kenya and indeed, in Africa.
Esports, short for electronic sports, is a world of competitive, organized video gaming where competitors from different leagues or teams face off in popular games.
With Esports, teams of people play against each other at a professional level and win huge sums of money as prizes. In developed markets, Esports players are contracted by different organizations, forming teams.
Some of the most popular Esports video games include Fortnite, League of Legends, Counter-Strike, Call of Duty, Overwatch, and Madden NFL.
Today, the Esports industry is worth over a billion dollars and growing fast. For instance, prize pools for both the 2019 Dota 2 International and the 2019 Fortnite World Cup surpassed $30 million.
Take the case of Kyle 'Bugha' Giersdorf, a 16-year-old professional Fortnite gamer, who won $3 million at the most recent tournament, making it the largest cash grab by a single player in the history of Esports.
Make no mistake, the meteoric rise of Esports is not by chance. In 2019, when the Esports market size notched $1 billion, almost half of that revenue came from sponsors.
The other big contributors after sponsorship are media rights and advertising. Since they are not hooked to traditional media, the Esports audience prefers livestreaming, where gamers between 18 – 30 years old spend 77 per cent of their time watching other people play online.
From the foregoing, there is no doubt that Esports is a fast-growing phenomenon in the world. However, Kenya seems not to register anywhere in the realms of Esports. The question remains, why is this the case?
