Do You Know E-Sports?

With the impact of lockdown on consumer habits and the release of the new PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series consoles, 2020 is definitely a landmark year for the video game industry. In a recently published report, YouGov looks back on the adaptation of this market to the pandemic and the major trends in video games. Among the latter, e-sports is a growing field. E-sports is the term for video games being played competitively or even professionally – as the emergence of an international scene of tournaments handing out substantial prize money in recent years shows.

Not everybody knows this though, as the survey by YouGov shows. Participants were given one right and three incorrect answers to choose the correct definition of e-sports from. Most people succeeded in picking the right answer in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, but Scandinavian countries also ranked high in familiarity with the concept. A substantial difference was the engagement in e-sports, however. While many Scandinavians knew e-sports, fewer were taking part either as players or spectators. In contrast Chinese and other Asians were much more involved.

The makers of the survey concluded that markets like India had the highest growth potential for e-sports. While only a minority of Indians could place the concept right, those who could engaged in high numbers, leading the researchers to hypothesize that those yet to gain familiarity would follow suit in engagement. The same patterns emerged in markets like Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and the Philippines.