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from the it-worked-for-judo-and-beach-volleyball dept.
Alibaba is venturing out of e-commerce and further into esports.
Esports will appear at next year's Games in Indonesia as a "demonstration," Alibaba said, but will be an official medal sport in China's 2022 Games. The Asian Games are recognised by the International Olympic Committee, meaning in 2022 esports will be an official Olympic sport.
Esports is a growing market that is expected to garner 191 million global enthusiasts by the year's end, according to research firm Newzoo. As of last April, the industry was worth over $450 million -- a number expected to grow to $1 billion by 2019.
That growth is manifesting in many ways. Not only is esports now technically an Olympic sport, the NBA will soon be creating its own esports league, and there are gaming schools to groom the next generation of pros.
Can't decide--is this exciting, or sad?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Pino P on Wednesday April 19 2017, @03:00PM
No one owns swimming, or fencing, but someone will own whatever specific game is chosen.
if you want to go the whole hog, the events could be held exclusively using FLOSS games.
I agree that free software ought to be a requirement for a legitimate e-sport.
At one time, Henk Rogers and Alexey Pajitnov of The Tetris Company wanted to turn Tetris into an e-sport. But with its having successfully sued the publisher of a workalike product in U.S. federal court in June 2012 (Tetris v. Xio), as well as Pajitnov's claim that free software destroys the market [slashdot.org] and DMCA threats toward developers of free software workalikes, I can't see how that would be practical. One analogy I like to use is that of a company suing a company for making tennis balls or suing a city for putting a regulation-size tennis court in a city park.
And without tolerance of fan games, there's no way for the community to experiment with evolving the game's rules to quash game-breaking exploits that eventually arise or to improve the spectators' experiment. Such changes to basketball that arose from experimentation have included the gradual widening of the free throw lane, the American Basketball League's 3-point field goals, and the NBA's (ultimately unsuccessful) ban on zone defense. Nor is there a way to work around experiments added by the game's publisher but poorly received by competitive players, such as the infinite spin and T-Spin triple rules in Tetris or random tripping in Super Smash Bros. Brawl.