To most gaming is a hobby, but to others it is a full, or part-time job. With the earnings of video gamers tripling over the last five years, according to esportsearnings.com, competitive PC gaming is a big business and is now seen as a sport with some US players being offered athlete visas as well as college scholarships.
A few weekends ago Wembley Arena hosted the UK’s biggest ever e-sports show, the European round of the League of Legends LCS Championship. Attracting over 10,000 fans, spread over two days, the event showed that interest in e-sports across the UK has increased but there is still worry that there aren’t many British gamers around.
South Korea and the US are home to the most professional gamers, where the top performers can earn hundreds of thousands of pounds and get to travel the world professionally playing video games. However, a boss of one of the teams told BBC Newsbeat that us Brits are “lagging behind” when it comes to getting involved with e-sports.
Matthew Widdowson, aka MattTheMusketeer is a YouTube partner and has over 36,800 subscribers to his channel that provides high quality Battlefield 4 news and content. He says that actual professional gamers are still quite uncommon, even though there are many people who play video games and make an income from channels such as YouTube and Twitch Streaming.
“The term professional gamer is one that is thrown around all too often. The rising world of professional gaming more gravitates around other sources, it’s mainly a rise in content creators on YouTube and Twitch that have given rise to so called professional gamers, but they actually are playing the games for the content of their channel, so they technically aren’t being paid to play.” But what about the UK?The 24-year-old says that although the UK is home to some of the top professional gamers, it seems that we are more into console games, rather than competitive PC games.
“Some of the biggest YouTube gamers in the world are either from the UK or now working from it. PewDiePie is the biggest gamer on earth with over 27million subscribers, whilst he originates from Sweden, he now lives in the UK. AliA and Syndicate Project are also both UK gamers with over 7 million subscribers, so I would actually say that the UK is one of the biggest hot spots for the rise of professional gamers in that sense,” he said.
“For competitive players such as League of Legends (LOL) and World of Warcraft (WOW) this is something that just is not as popular in the UK. UK casual players prefer FPS games such as COD or sports games like FIFA, this can be down to a number of reasons, mainly that games such as LOL and WOW require PCs to play sometimes even high end PCs.“The UK sees a bigger average of casual gamers preferring console play like the Xbox and PS4 which don’t offer these MMO style games that naturally bring with it competitive play.”
As a nation we are very much involved in e-sports, especially when it comes to console games, but we are just not quite hitting the spot when it comes to competitive play. Needless to say though, if the result from the LOL LCS Championships at Wembley is anything to go by our interest is growing.
