Overview

Generally, when we think of sports, we think of intense physical activities. But a sport is an activity which requires skill, and competitiveness. For example, chess is a sport. Also, video games are considered as sports, in fact it’s the newest form of sports. And like everything digital, we slapped an E next to it and called it Esports.
Esports is the professional competitive scene of video games, it has witnessed a huge development over the past few years, and so I would like to present some statistics to visualize this development.
The Dataset we are working with is mainly the prize pools of games along the years, gathered by the API of the website https://www.esportsearnings.com

Esports Earnings

Over the years, the amount of prize pools that professional players can earn increased exponentially, with no signs of slowing down. This is due to the fact that video games are now considered as a popular mean of entertainment. Also, accessability to platforms and services such as fast internet providers, all created a premium experience ecosystem for players, which in its turn augmented investments in the industry.

As we can see, professional players can earn nowadays millions of dollars. As a result, people were wondering if it is fair for others who play video games, to earn such high amounts of money. As we’ve seen in the previous video, Dota 2 has topped the chart in terms of total earnings by a large margin, also the top 20 professional Esports players earned their money from Dota2 as well, so how is that the case?

Dota 2

In this graph, we can see that Dota 2 has accumulated 32.3% of the total Esports prize pools, could this be because Dota 2 is an old game? Let’s plot Release Date vs Total Earnings.

Apparently, the game is not very old, in fact it is considered one of the newest ones. It is clear that Dota 2 has implemented a new system of prize pools which found success among the years

Explanation

As we can see Dota 2 seems like an outlier in the dataset, this is justified because Dota 2 has a unique system in compensating its professional players. The way it works is that a yearly battle pass gets announced on July. 25% of the sales go directly to the prize pool, which makes it the only crowd funded prize in Esports since 2014. The prize pools fund the most prestigious tournament of the year: The International
Of course, this is unique to Dota 2 as it defined the Strategy Genre in gaming during early 2000s in its first version, and so it holds the respect of its audience.

The big bubble englobing the smaller ones along the years is “The International” tournament prize pool, overshadowing its competitors. Note that during 2020 and 2021 the event did not occur due to COVID-19.

Players Demographics

It is clear that the count of gamers worldwide is increasing. Each year, video games become offer better experience for the players. In recent times, the internet has created the perfect platform for digital services, one of which is the video gaming industry. With more people having access to fast internet, they are now able to compete with their friends online seemlessly.

The age distribution of gamers in the US spikes between 18-34 years old. According to most economists, this portion of people tends to spend the most money in general, and we can see this reflect nowadays on the high numbers invested in buying products related to video games

Not many industries appeal to a large portion of population, generally these industries target their sales into a select group of customers that are more likely to consume their products. We can see that this is not the case here, as both males and females participate in video games, which makes the industry not gender dependent.

Conclusion

Historically, video games started with large expensive arcade machines, that provide simple games and poor quality experience. Nowadays, with fast internet being accessible for a larger portion of people, and with gaming platforms becoming cheaper and easier to get, video games have become the new way of entertainment. This has caused a boom in the Esports scene, where players get to witness the best compete in their favorite game.