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Ninja is the first gamer on the cover of ESPN Magazine
Ninja is the first professional gamer to feature on the cover of ESPN Magazine. The 27-year-old streamer, real name Tyler Blevins, is most famous for playing Fortnite and has more than 11 million followers on Twitch.
He reached the mainstream earlier this year when he broke Fortnite streaming records after playing with Drake.
But some people are questioning if a gamer should be in the same category as athletes.
Ninja started off as an e-sports competitor, mostly playing Halo. He switched to streaming, becoming known for battle royale - or last player standing - game Player Unknown's Battlegrounds. But when Fortnite introduced its battle royale mode, Ninja jumped ship and then started getting really big.
Back in March, Forbes reported that he had 3 million followers and 4 million YouTube subscribers. He now has 11 million Twitch followers and 18 million YouTube subscribers.
Related: Ninja explains his choice not to stream with female gamers
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Pino P on Thursday September 20 2018, @03:44PM
I don't consider most esports to be legitimate sports. It's not because they're not athletic. It's because they are proprietary.
Because nobody owns tennis, nobody can sue a city for putting up a tennis court, and nobody can sue a sporting goods manufacturer for selling regulation-spec tennis rackets and balls. Because nobody owns basketball, nobody can sue a basketball league to block it from forming, selling tickets to matches, and selling broadcast rights to regional radio and TV stations. Because nobody owns chess, nobody can sue the producers of a movie about chess, such as Paramount's 1993 film Searching for Bobby Fischer (also titled Innocent Moves), solely because it depicts chess. Nor can anybody sue for making mods to chess, such as replacing pieces [wikipedia.org] or randomizing the back row [wikipedia.org], and running a tournament around those mods.
An esport, on the other hand, has an owner. You can't make your own software for playing Fortnite because Epic Games owns the exclusive right to distribute copies of Fortnite. And because Nintendo owns the exclusive right to perform Super Smash Bros. publicly, Nintendo can and has shut down Super Smash Bros. tournaments. (See "Why Nintendo can legally shut down any Smash Bros. tournament it wants" by Kyle Orland [arstechnica.com].) True, some video game publishers allow esports leagues to make matches available for live or VoD streaming, but under current law, publishers can withdraw this permission for any reason or no reason, leaving a league without a sport to play. And publishers routinely withdraw this permission a few years after a game's release when they online matchmaking servers and sue those who develop or run third-party matchmaking servers.
Over the long term, guarding esports from publisher tyranny would require the development of a video game distributed as free software and free cultural works, so that leagues can use it as they see fit.