What is the difference between esports and gaming?

Welcome to our first installment of Gaming Street 101, a series meant to teach the average investor or gamer some fundamental knowledge about the industry!

First up, we are tackling the question: What is the difference between gaming and esports?

These days, the word gaming and esports have been used interchangeably. Here is a difference and an analogy to help you get the hang of things:

Gaming is simply the act of playing a game, which makes the word “gaming” an all-encompassing word that includes anyone who is in the act of playing a game. Keep in mind that gaming does NOT include the gambling industry. An analogy that might help is the word “gaming” is equivalent to the word “sports”, where similarly how sports encompasses soccer, football, hockey, baseball, gaming includes specific types of game being played. Particularly large games include: League of Legends (LoL), Counter Strike: Go (CSGO), Hearthstone and many many more.

Esports is the part of the gaming world where professional gamers compete to win tournaments and be the top of their regular season standings. Think of this as the NHL, NBA, where instead of segmenting professionals by their sport, they’re segmented by the game they play. For example: Team Liquid and Team Fnatic (the names of two famous professional teams) will be competing in League of Legends game. In this analogy, both teams have competitive esports players playing their specific game of League of Legends.

Now that you know the difference, let’s dive a little bit deeper into how big the Gaming and esports industry really is. According to various reports, the revenue earned by the gaming market at 43B in 2018, putting that into perspective, that is even larger than the revenues generated by Fifa in 2018 standing in at 6B. The esports industry on the other hand is expected to break the 1B size in 2019, doubling the size of the North American Major League Soccer in 2019. In addition, according to Daily Esport’s report, the 2019 League of Legends Mid-season invitational had 1.7M unique viewers — which is more viewers than the 2018 MLS finals.

There it is, now you know the difference and size of both markets. Keep an eye out for our next post about the difference between a game developer and a publisher!