ESPORTS

 Electronic sports, or esports for short, are competitions played through video games.[1] Esports are mostly organized competitive video game play, either alone or in teams, with a focus on professional players.[2]

Video game culture has always included multiplayer tournaments, but these were mostly amateur affairs until the late 2000s, when the emergence of online streaming media platforms—most notably YouTube and Twitch—allowed a rise in the involvement of professional players and viewers.[3][4] A significant portion of the video game business by the 2010s was esports, with several game companies creating content for and providing financing for competitions and other events.
 

Esports gained popularity in East Asia early, especially in China and South Korea (which legalized professional players in 2000). Professional gaming competitions are prohibited in Japan because to the country's strict anti-gambling legislation.[5][6] In Europe and the Americas, where regional and 

international competitions are held, esports are also quite popular.

Video game genres most commonly linked to esports are first-person shooter (FPS), fighting, card, battle royale, multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA), and real-time strategy (RTS) games. Esports titles that are well-liked include StarCraft, League of Legends, Dota, Overwatch, Overwatch, Street Fighter, and Super Smash Bros. The League of Legends World Championship, Dota 2's International, the fighting game-focused Evolution Championship Series (EVO), and Intel Extreme Masters are a few of the most well-liked competitions. Like the Overwatch League, several other events feature a league play format with sponsored teams. Esports have appeared alongside conventional sports in several international competitions in Asia, despite the fact that their validity as real competitive competitions is still up for debate. Their inclusion in next Olympic games has been explored by the International Olympic Committee.

About 85% of viewers were men and 15% were women in the early 2010s, with the majority of viewers being between the ages of 18 and 34.[7][8][9] By the late 2010s, projections showed that by 2020, there would be 454 million esports viewers worldwide, bringing in over $1 billion in income. Of this total, 35% came from China.