Performance enhancing drug use by players is also an issue in eSports and is recognised as a form of cheating, but only one promoter (ESL) actually does anything about this, with an industry leading anti-doping programme that is beyond the scope of this review. Alternatively, cheaters use remote cyber-attacks to slow down their opponents’ computers. For example, a cheat may enable one player access the ability to see through walls or smoke, or to never have to reload a weapon, or to enable an auto-aim feature on it.
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Match-fixing and Edoping in ESport EdopingĬheating (in order to win) in eSport is more akin to doping or the infamous “ bloodgate” 8 affair in rugby union in 2009 than, say, diving in football with a view to conning the referee into awarding a penalty.Įdoping principally involves using “ hacks” and “ cheat” software to gain an advantage over an opponent. The scene is huge, but disjointed with little reason to organise itself…until now.
It is not, however, in any way a coherent industry. Blizzard, Valve and Riot monopolise the top end in the publishing world, and Electronic Sports League (ESL), 7 Major League Gaming (MLG), and Dreamhack dominate the promoter market. The key stakeholders in this industry are the games publishers and the tournament promoters. 5 The top players are consistently earning more than a $1million a year in prize money alone, and that takes no account of sponsorship and streaming/broadcast earnings (online tutorials and demo games) and other media work that net many hundreds of thousands of dollars more in earnings every year.
4 The cumulative time spent by the audience watching the online broadcasts of the top tier game (League of Legends) on the Internet platform,, exceeded 1 billion hours in 2015, and four other top tier games exceeded 100 million hours. Top tier games regularly have over ten million active users a month. These games are diverse in nature, but what perhaps needs emphasising is the sheer scale of participation. 2 It’s the right time to be looking at this in the context of law in sport for the first time, bearing in mind that, according to Bloomberg, more people watched the 2014 finals of the League of Legends World Championships (27 million) than watched game 6 of the 2015 NBA Finals between the Cavaliers and the Warriors (23.25 million). 1ĮSports has really begun to enter the mainstream during 2015/6 as a result of a confluence of scandal (match-fixing and doping hitting the headlines in Korea and America – see below) and a seemingly sudden realisation of the numbers, money and demographics involved (which are quite staggering).
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For readers wanting to know more about the eSports eco-system (as a full description is beyond the scope of this article) it has been brilliantly laid out by Jonathan Pan in his article, “ ESports Market Ecosystem Map - January 2016”. There are, of course, many hundreds of video games titles, but remarkably few of these have the necessary characteristics or traction for competitive match play.Ĭonsequently, a few specific computer games dominate the eSport scene because they lend themselves to competitive play and have built up huge followings/participation bases that create a natural audience/fan base for the top competitive level. For the uninitiated, eSport is the collective noun for video or computer games played competitively between individuals or teams of players. This is not with a view to being contentious, but rather because it is hard to determine what else it should be called, and it shares many of the characteristics of traditional sport. Throughout this piece, eSport will be referred to as a sport. These issues will be examined within the context of the governance and integrity of eSports each significant growing pains that the fledgling industry is currently grappling with.
It will begin with a general overview of eSports for uninitiated, before focusing in on two specific issues relevant to this Chapter – eDoping and betting/match fixing. This extract examines the phenomenal growth of the eSports market.