An elephant called Esports (and nobody wants to see it)

Spolier: esports are no longer interesting, for most people.

Sacrilege! Traitor! Liar! And other similar adjectives will come out of someone's mouth. I love esports, I owe them a lot and I wish they would keep going up, but reality is very stubborn and if someone doesn't want to see the elephant in the room, don't look at it.

Esports have been sold as the new football, that they have dethroned the NBA, that in Spain there are almost 3M esports enthusiasts and the like. I myself believed it myself, looking at the growth data since 2016, but in recent times we have seen many indicators that tell us that esports seem to have reached a ceiling. Esports are very interesting, but now they are going to be confined to very specific cases.

We can give many arguments to reinforce this argument. Peak audiences for the finals of the king of esports rarely exceed 200,000 viewers, and not exactly on an upward trend. And as in politics, facts and figures are interpretable; it is true that the volume of hours watched is growing, but what it tells us is that those enthusiasts, the 200,000, are consuming more and more content. There are other metrics that reinforce my view, interaction, core users registered on esports channels, among others.

Other inputs tell us that something is happening in esports. Some brands are reducing their investment in esports (e.g. BMW), the benchmark B2B esports event (Bar Esports Cannes) is no longer being held, the regular reach of esports in Spain has dropped from 27% to 13% between 2020 and 2022 (Deloitte. Lets Play: t.ly/s292L). And we could go on.

What's going on, is esports not interesting?

No, not at all. Esports have very positive aspects, but as the figures show, they are a niche and, here is the big problem, a niche that is not growing too much and that will not be mainstream. It is not a problem to work in a niche, it can be very rewarding for some brands, but not for all of them.

In addition, the data has been played with. To generate headlines or sales pitches, audiences that are not esports have been "borrowed". Very quickly and without going into detail, we can say that there are 3 possibilities when playing a video game: non-competitive gaming (I play Last of Us for example), competitive gaming (League of Legends for example) and finally esports (a professional who also plays League of Legends). As an audience I can watch a non-sports broadcast (for example a streamer playing Minecraft or even playing his competitive, but not esports, League of Legends game) or an esports broadcast, watching the League of Legends finals. A bit of a mess. Analogy with football: I take a few penalties for fun (non-competitive), a game with friends (competitive, not esports) and a league match (esports).
What is the difference with football? While in this sport the league match is the one that attracts the biggest audiences, in video games it is not like that. It's as if the biggest audience was not in the Champions League final but in the singles vs. married match of some hilarious guys or in watching a football influencer put the ball between the posts in her neighbourhood's dirt field.

And it's not a perception. In 2022, the audience for esports as a percentage of the total Twitch audience in Spanish was 10% and for League of Legends, the esports video game par excellence, it was 25%. In the rest of the world, something very similar is happening.

The Kings League is not an esport, and when The Grefg or AuronPlay play Fortnite or Minecraft it is not an esport. The millions of Roblox players don't play esports, nor do the millions of League of Legends players, they play a video game.

Esports is not the same as broadcast and playing video games is not watching video games either. There is a salad of concepts that have been mixed up and what is worse, figures and expectations that are not realistic.

And those who don't have real knowledge of the territory pay for it. And we are not talking about poor unwary people, but about very intelligent people with great knowledge, but without expertise in the territory. And that is why we see brands that come and go (or pivot their investments towards gaming or broadcasting, leaving esports aside), start-ups that are created and don't work or investors who, once inside, realise that they are not going to get their euros back if they don't sell their project discreetly.

In short, gaming as a territory continues to grow in all its verticals, and is becoming increasingly attractive to brands. But what is growing and is mainstream or trendy is not exactly esports; esports have done incredible things for video games, but let's not fool ourselves, now the focus is on other video game verticals. I'm sorry if this statement bothers anyone, but the reality is what it is.