BY RICH LUKER
Let me start with something really positive about esports before considering some thornier issues. A larger proportion of fans and AVID fans of esports participate in sports and/or exercise on a weekly basis than those who are not esports fans. Esports fans are NOT game-chair-potatoes. I will come back to this after taking on some fundamental questions about esports.
Our panel at the Project Play Summit is titled "From Pokemon Go! to Esports – Lessons and Opportunities." Actual sports video games like Electronic Arts Sports' Madden and FIFA fit somewhere between the two. Playing sports video games actually precedes becoming a fan for many people.
An important distinction is what follows from playing online or a video game. Conventional sports video games are potentially three-stage engagements. Stage one: You play the online/video game. State two: You become a fan of that sport. Stage three: You play the game in real life. With esports (of the sort found on Twitch), there are really only two stages – playing the computer games and being a fan of the pros who play those games. It is not clear which comes first.
Going forward, on the present course, esports will have to find an entirely new player and fan base roughly every 15 years because kids stop paying attention and playing long before they become parents. They are not going to pass it on to their kids. That would be like you passing along Pac-Man to your kids.
The difference between esports and generationally-linked sports can be found by Googling “St. Louis Cardinals tattoos” and looking at the images. Sports didn’t put those tattoos there. MLB didn’t do it. Nor did the Cardinals. A generations-long, family-based love of the game and the team became so strong that it became part of a life-long identity.
Fans build sports. Sports don’t build fans. Fans make businesses money. Businesses don’t keep fans.
Rich Luker operates Luker on Trends, which focuses on building fan relationships and engagement. He conducts research to understand how American free time is changing and impacting the sports fan experience. Luker on Trends' flagship product, the ESPN Sports Poll, has been the industry standard for understanding American sports fans since it launched in 1994. Luker will be a panelist at the 2017 Project Play Summit on Sept. 6 for a discussion titled, "From Pokemon Go! to esports – Lessons and Opportunities."