Call to arms in quest to develop UK e-sports market

Jack Lindsay is an articulate, clean-cut 18-year-old who any parent would be proud to show off to their friends. Because he likes to spend hours blowing people's heads off with high-powered rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, he is also highly sought after by a rapidly growing global industry: e-sports, or competitive computer gaming.

Mr Lindsay and his friends are Team Ascend, four killers from Eastbourne who have come for the Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare open championships, held at the Gfinity Arena in Fulham, southwest London.

The arena is the UK's first dedicated venue for e-sports and this is Ascend's first attempt at live competition - as opposed to challenging other gamers over the internet.

In the early stages they will play their fellow amateurs, but in the latter rounds they get to play against professional teams, who train for several hours a day. "I watch or play games about three or four hours a day, but the difference in skill level between us and the pros is this big," gestures Mr Lindsay.

Gamers have attended big e-sports events for years, but Neville Upton, the chief executive of Gfinity, an e-sports media and tournament company, believes that there is enough appetite for weekly contests.

"If you want to create a long-lasting impression you need to provide fans with weekly competition," says Mr Upton. "And if you want true e-sports competition it has to be face-to-face. Online is never a level playing field because you have different computers and broadband speeds."

Until recently. the world of e-sports has been dominated by Asia. South Korea is especially well-known as a nation of fanatics, with entire stadiums packed out for live championships, while China and Vietnam now have as many if not more enthusiasts.

But the west, including the UK, is catching up. About 36m people in Britain play computer games of some sort, according to the analysts Newzoo. Of those, 4.4m watch or play e-sports at least occasionally, while a core of 1.9m are classed as e-sports enthusiasts - defined as "frequent viewers or active participants", online or offline.

Worldwide, Newzoo estimates there are 89m e-sports enthusiasts and predicts this will hit 145m in 2017. The top players of games such as Call of Duty, League of Legends, StarCraft, Fifa and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive have millions of online followers and can earn hundreds of thousands of dollars at the biggest tournaments.

As far as Mr Upton is concerned, e-sports operates like any other sport - and is more popular than almost all of them except football. Such is the crush for autographs and "selfies", he added, that when the elite teams compete they are often smuggled in via side entrances.

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While he calls his 30-hour-a-week CoD habit a mere "hobby", the aim is to go full-time, he says, "and the ambition [for Aware] is to crack America".

Inside the auditorium, which Gfinity runs in partnership with the Vue cinema group, fans watch two teams in glass-fronted cubicles battle each other, with the players' individual actions projected on the big screen above. Two commentators provide in-game analysis over the speakers and in a studio next door, experts dissects the action.

The big question for the industry is how to make more money from e-sports fans. According to Newzoo, revenue per e-sports fan in 2014 was $2, compared with $20 per fan of "real" individual sports and $56 per fan across all sports.

There is little doubt computer games fans have money to spend. The gaming sector as a whole, including consoles, computers, games and accessories, is expected to be worth more than $100bn in 2017, suggests Newzoo, and e-sports enthusiasts are considered lucrative targets for sponsors, advertisers, and PC and console makers.

The main e-sports companies, such as Germany's ESL and Major League Gaming in the US, are still focused on online e-sports and big occasional live events, so Gfinity's experiment with weekly competitions is unproven.

"We hope to [make money] through advertising, sponsorship and selling broadcasting rights," said Mr Upton, "and giving them regular exposure is much more appealing than a few big one-offs."

According to Peter Warman, Newzoo's chief executive, regular contests are "one of the things missing from e-sports". The frequency of competitions will have to increase on a national and international level, he adds.

"Only then will the money become comparable to traditional sports."

But e-sports are just the visible part of the huge success of competitive gaming, he added, and advertisers are still trying to work out how to get at the billions who play online on the Twitch livestreaming service every day.

"Imagine every amateur football game being broadcast live on a PC," he said. "That is so much content. The advertising potential cannot be missed."

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