An infographic from the Sports Management Degree Hub has an interesting breakdown of the stats comparing the electronic sports league with the major league sporting events, including the NBA, BCS, NCAA basketball and the MLB world series and e-sports actually comes out on top.
The infographic contains citations and data from from Statista, Superdata Research, Fortune and the Wall Street Journal. They note that the largest prize pool in e-sports history has been $11 million from The International’s 2014 finale for Dota 2. They compare the global games revenue, global box office revenue and the global music industry to gaming, showing that gaming leads – according to Juniper Research – with $46.5 billion, box office revenue comes second with $38 billion and the music industry is third with $27.4 billion.
The Juniper data is a little weird because it doesn’t say if they’re counting digital sales or if that’s just global retail sales. I would imagine that’s just global retail sales for PC and console. Data from other research firms that breakdown mobile, e-sports, MMOs, retail, console and free-to-play games with very different figures. For instance, Superdata Research recently estimated that the gaming industry would top $74.2 billion in 2015, while Newzoo’s research estimated that the gaming industry would hit $91.5 billion in 2015. Both figures are still wildly above the $46 billion mark from Juniper Research.
Even still, Sports Management did a breakdown of the 2013 sporting events and the viewership of those events and compared them as follows:
- MLB World Series: 14.9 million
- NCAA Basketball Final Four (average):15.7 million
- NBA Finals (game 7): 26.3 million
- BCS National Championship: 26.4 million
- League of Legends Season 3 World Championship: 32 million
They also did a breakdown of the most popular games in the e-sports community, and at the top was League of Legends, followed by Dota 2, StarCraft II, Counter-Strike and the very endearing Super Smash Bros.
They also show an inclined graph of the prize pool payout and the viewership growth from 2010 to 2013. There’s an interesting incline all the way around.
This seems to fit in line with Superdata’s recent report that the e-sports scene racks in an annual $612 million, globally.
They also did a breakdown of who watches what and who the majority is when it comes to demographic attendance. As per usual, out of the 71 million viewers 82% are male while only 18% are female. 75% of viewers are aged between 18 and 34 years old and 44% are college students.
This data fits in line with just about every other report when it comes to the hardcore gaming market. While yes, the casual market is constantly expanding and growing – reports attempting to skew the data that senior citizens, little kids and housewives are the majority of the core gaming market are misdirected. Yes, the senior citizens and soccer moms play mobile games a lot, but it doesn’t mean they’re willing to spend on average three or more hours a day playing on a dedicated gaming console.
What’s more is that 20% of the attendees of e-sports events are willing to spend up to $200 for tickets. If there’s always a fight about how much time little Jimmy can spend in front of the TV soaking up blood, guts and boobs, I tend to doubt that that same household would go and spend $200 to watch blood, guts and boobs at a giant stadium.
You can check out the full infographic over on the Sports Management Degree hub. It’s an interesting bit of data for those of you who like to keep track of the inner-workings of the gaming industry.
(Main image courtesy of Su-Ke)
