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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: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 19 2017, @09:48AM (2 children)
I could think of million reasons why esports is crazy, has nothing to do with healthy lifestyle, shouldn't be supported with public money etc.
Then again, pretty much all of those reasons apply to regular sports at professional or olympic level as well.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday April 19 2017, @10:02AM (1 child)
Sitting with a beer in front of a television looking at other people moving is perhaps not much better ;)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 19 2017, @10:24AM
Well, you could say that's the other half of my point. So instead of naively idealistic one-size-fits-all distribution we have one which starts at 0 where lots of people just sit around with a beer and ends with a spike of few overdoing it to the point of hurting themselves.
It's okay. People are just people and they do silly things. I'd just want rip off the aura that it's necessarily something inherently good instead of just another form of entertainment.