What is the driving factor in trying to get what we do recognised as a sport. Why do we need it? What has changed recently that means it's important for eSports to be recognised as a sport? A more complex question is, why do we need any kind of public recognition. Ballroom dancing for example has been recognised in the UK as a sport. It has competition and also has a reasonable physical aspect, so by all accounts it is a sport, yet it hasn't caused the mainstream to get involved in it. the only driving factor which i can think of, which encompasses both of these situations is money. Money has become the driving factor, mainly due to the massive cost of eSports compared with any other kind of pastime. Consider football as a general hobby in England, probably one of the most played games / sports in the country and the cost / effort to do it is next to nothing. There is a large social aspect for it, and everyone knows that after excersise you feel better due to chemical changes while excerting yourself. If you compare this with gaming. Well you need a PC. So already we're talking more money than everyone playing a quick football game in the park combined. Then to gain the same experience you need a group of people also with PC's a location to setup in, some network experience and generally come vehicles to carry stuff to and from the location.

Difficult? Most definatly in the eyes of this gamer.

So what does that mean with regard to the increasing popularity of eSports. Is there an increasing trend? It has recently come to my attention that there isn't a metric of popularity of eSports we're being told by those who have a real interest in it that eSports is growing, yet i haven't seen any evidence of the fact. How is it growing?

1. In regular viewers of games?
2. Is it games sales?
3. Profit of games companies?
4. Number of competitions (is this gaming 'growing' or just companies having a bigger interest)
5. Increase in media interest?

I think these are some of the metrics we need to try to address if we're going to actually get a good approximation of exactly whats happening in our industry.
So let's start with viewing figures, normally television stations would release figures to show how they're programs are doing in respect to other stations in their timeslot. To my knowledge this hasn't happened with people like iTG/GGL and TSN so we have no solid numbers of viewers in a comparable environment. All we get is "this is ever increaseing" and "getting more than we imagined". For example the CPL finals had a large following on MTV overdrive, well ok so lets theorise the normal viewers were watching and couple that with the increase of gamers. An understandable increase really, yet it was thrown around as a massive increase and really increasing the popularity of gaming. The real question is, did other stations such as iTG / TSN get increased viewing figures, i.e. did people take an active interest in gaming, in the months since that one broadcast on MTV? Again we need their figures to look at the trend.

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The recent buzz around games and gaming is mainly focuessed on the market value of gamers. Games sales, there are a variety of metrics to use here. Moconews (http://www.moconews.net/) claims a huge increase in mobile games sales. So this is an increase in people playing games, but then again on my Nokia i don't have any pre-installed games.

Annual 2004 Top 10 Video Game Titles Ranked By Units Sold
Source: The NPD Group / NPD Funworld / Point-of-Sale

RANK - TITLE - PLATFORM - PUBLISHER
1 - Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas - PS2 - Take II Interactive
2 - Halo 2* - XBX - Microsoft
3 - Madden NFL 2005* - PS2 - Electronic Arts
4 - ESPN NFL 2K5 - PS2 - Take II Interactive
5 - Need For Speed: Underground 2 - PS2 - Electronic Arts
6 - Pokemon Fire Red W/ Adapter - GBA - Nintendo of America
7 - NBA Live 2005 - PS2 - Electronic Arts
8 - Spider-Man: The Movie 2 - PS2 - Activision
9 - Halo - XBX - Microsoft
10 - ESPN NFL 2K5 - XBX - Take II Interactive
*Includes Limited & Collector’s Editions

Source: The NPD Group, January 2005

As we can see in 2004 the entire top 10 of games purchased are console games. This is certainly in parrallel with my own experiences on the day of the Quake4 release. I went down to my local games retailer (GAME for you uk dudes) and stood waiting in a huge queue, maybe 30 people long. None of whom had a sparkling copy of Quake4 in their hand
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The most interesting point here is the 4th one i made specifically because
Is Is that due to the increase in number of people with high bandwidth connections or more actual interest. The perception of an increase of interest in games and hence in gamers is without a doubt an easy one to convey as there are very few usable metrics which can show a trend. Though an increase in game does not nessesarily mean that there is an interest in 'professional gaming' or gamers. It was mentioned recently in a reply to one of my posts that a lot of children these days would rather sit in and play wow than go out and play football, by Zeicon i believe. This maybe true, but wow is again another type of game. There needs to be a parrallel on some level to be able to relate one to the other.
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Along with all of this the media is gaining interest in gaming. Or is it? Again there are several occasions where gaming and games related pieces have appeared on major news sites such as the BBC giving the impression that the mainstream is getting more involved and more interested in gaming. But it is this writers belief that it is just an impression, the niche is coming closer together and hence increasing in size, but is still a niche in the grand scheme of things. The easier it is to get a community of people together be it through an article on the BBC or a podcast on iTunes, the more smaller communities will be brought together into the large whole. Contributing to this is the evolution of the media and particularly journalism. It's reasonably easy to bring examples of this, the second Gulf War being a good one. Here in England there was almost 24 hour coverage of it, with all kinds of stats and real time pictures from the front line. In approximatly 10 years we've gone from a news bulliten every so often, to 24 hour news stations and massive news websites covering everything from everywhere. Not only is this happening within the large news corporations like BBC or CNN but also the so called 'blogosphere'. The advent of tools and services to give the average joe access to publish their thoughts means that there is an ever increasing stream of new journalistic material filtering through the web, couple this with RSS and you get a saturated journalist network with mainly poor content, but also a rich vein of high quality material. Just the other day i was listening to a tech podcast which mentioned e3 and the g0d girls got a mention. Podcasts didn't exist until around 2004 and is another form of media where a niche journalist can easily reach his target audience in a relativly simply way and with a host of services available to them enabling them to share their content.


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A wow / secondlife / SIMS example; "I would prefere to live in a virtual world where x y and z are possible than stay in the real world"

This could be classed as a form of escapism, and there are a lot of people who enjoy this kind of thing on a regular basis. But i don't think that an increase in participation in WOW can be used to show an increase in gamers using the context implied by many as 'pro gamers' or even competative gamers. The person who is dedicated to WOW is totally different than those who play FPS.

An FPS example; "I would rather play CTF with my on-line friends than go to the park and play soccer with my real life friends"

i would say a fair choice, both are team games and both have competative eliments. Playing on-line removes all difficulty of getting people together for a lan, it's all setup and ready to go.
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The point which i'm trying to articulate here is that although there may be a booming industry behind games. The stai prefere my wow life to my real one so i'm going to focus on that. With team sports it's again different i prefere All the numbers about games and gamers are released Having been thinking about this recently i'm not particularly convinced that more people are getting involved. What we see is a general trend of increased publicity and increased corporate involvement. Though i don't believe that the corporations are particularly interested in gaming. They're more interested in the demographic of the gamer, which are two totally different things.