Overwatch eSports (Activision Blizzard)

Do you know how big eSports actually are?….. Games like Overwatch, Hearthstone, CoD and LoL are currently driving Activsion, Blizzard Entertainment and Riot Games into an up and coming multi-billion dollar gaming industry.

Rough Transcript:
Curious about why companies like Activision Blizzard are doubling down on eSports? It doesn’t seem like a massively profitable endeavour, It’s even said that Blizzard takes a substantial loss from events like Blizzcon.

So what’s the big deal…. where’s the money? I think most people are in two understandings with eSports…

Respectfully most older people are in the “it’s a group of nerds and they are not real athletes….” we’ve heard this before… most often they didn’t know eSports even exist (OR) most gamers “Ya eSports is a thing and I like it” BUT, most don’t truly understand how insanely big eSports is and how it will scale over the next 10 years.

Before I tell you how Blizzard is planning to make a killing in eSports I will show you some clips of the media reminding us how out of touch most of the general public is regarding eSports, well, at least in the media.

Activision’s players have put in 42 billion hours playing and watching its games – which is four times the viewership of national sports leagues watched on ESPN. Try to understand Collectively eSports is bigger than the
NHL, Major league Baseball and even the NBA, its secretly enormous. Also, remember at one point $1.2m of Kobe Bryant merch was sold in 1 day. Also, note that former pro basketball player Rick Fox purchase Gravity a League Of Legends team for a reported $1m… last year

Do most kids look up to their favorite Basketball player these days or Gamers…. YouTubers and Twitch streamers. I can tell you now the 3rd highest job kids in Japan want to have when they grow up is to be a YouTuber.

Activision has 3 titles in eSports right now: CoD, Hearthstone and Overwatch. In the recent Activision Q1 conference call they talk about how a friend Robert Kraft purchased the new England patriots for $172 million in 1995 which was the best investment he ever made (they are now worth $3 billion). They (Activision) go on to say 15 years from now pro team owners will now be the same, but, how is Activision going to cash in?

Well if you don’t know they have a Media networks division and profits will come from the following: ticketing, merch, broadcasts, broadcast rights, advertising, sponsorship. Two of these are huge (advertising and broadcast rights). But how big will this actually scale…. Remember Heroes Of The Storm airing on ESPN for the first time last year? eSports with ESPN went up 15% this year compared to 2015. The INSANE thing about eSport games like Hearthstone is they keep getting bigger not smaller….like most games.

Hearthstone’s received a 20% revenue growth and surpassed the 50m player base with its six major releases. Overwatch has the biggest launch since Diablo in 2012. Think about it like this: eSports represent all sports electronically and games like CoD, Hearthstone, League Of Legends and Overwatch are the different sports played. Now imagine one company owning and running every major event like Football Baseball, Basketball and so on. The potential for profit is amazing.

if you know a little about angel investors you know that their investments are most successful with companies who built or build products around what they think the world will need in 10 years. Blizzard is doing the same with eSports. So I hope that helps you understand why companies like Activision, Blizzard and Riot games are setting up now. eSports’s annual revenue expected to triple to $1B by only 2018 and that’s not even taking into account branch off business’s such as sports betting and the private education sector.

The audience for eSport is here and the money previously locked in Traditional sports is moving into eSports. For allot of these companies eSports is not a game. It’s a race to set up first.

Alvis On Twitter: http://bit.ly/1l9VRIO

Official Overwatch Website: https://playoverwatch.com
Blizzard Official: http://us.battle.net/
League Of Legends: oce.leagueoflegends.com/

source