Esports Industry

Esports is a form of competition using video games, typically organized as multiplayer competitions between professional players competing individually or in teams. The industry runs on two main league structures, promotion-and-relegation systems that move teams between tiers based on performance, and franchised leagues in which financially backed teams compete in a regular season without the risk of relegation, following the model of traditional North American professional sports; organizations such as FaZe Clan, Cloud9 and T1 sponsor players, and figures from traditional sports, including Rick Fox with Echo Fox and Shaquille O Neal with NRG Esports, along with football clubs such as FC Schalke 04 and Paris Saint-Germain, have invested in teams. Tournament prize pools can be large, with Dota 2 2021 International offering more than 40 million dollars, and the global esports audience grew from about 662.6 million viewers in 2020 to 921 million by 2022, with China accounting for roughly 35 percent of global esports revenue even though only about one in five professional players sustains a career longer than two years.