eSports yielded gains of over USD 1.5 B

eSports have fastly evolved into a multi-million dollar industry as this year they generated USD 1.5 B in earnings and at this pace, they could reach USD 2.3 B in 2022, in accordance with a report published by SuperData.com.

The industry has brought in more than the revenue estimated for this year by SuperData, who had calculated an amount of USD 1.1 B. As a matter of fact, the global eSports market was not supposed to reach USD 1.5 B in yearly revenue until 2019, according to the same report

The major corporations leading the market in eSports are Valve Corporation, Riot Games, and Blizzard Entertainment. The report uses some data generated by “investments” that account for 50 percent of the industry’s revenue last year.

The report also gathered data on the games’ players. Dota 2 and League of Legends were kings of the playerbase, each boasting 10 million and 84 million active monthly players respectively. All those players have done over 2.1 Billion Hours of content between April and October of this year.

Of all the unique viewers tuning in to watch their favorite esports stream, 67 percent of them watched through both YouTube and Twitch. Only 20 percent of them watched Twitch exclusively, and 11 percent watched only YouTube.

Finally, out of all the games watched on those platforms, League led the charge with 286 million unique viewers, and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds lagged slightly behind at 202 million. The eSports industry will continue to grow up at a very noticeable rate, new corporations like Square Enix will continue to see how viable eSports are for their future investments.