By Rachel Bradshaw
On Tuesday September 27th, Professor Andy Clark invited Kurt Melcher, Executive Director of Esports & Gaming of Intersport to The Business of Esports class. Kurt showed a video from Robert Morris University, which talked about esports growth. Some still have stereotypes of esports as being played in your basement and assuming that you’re just playing all day and night. Even though esports has grown to have similarities with traditional sports because of tournaments; teams practice, have a coach to discuss strategies with during a game, etc. He then showed a graph that shows Formal University Esports Program Growth, which showed that back in 2016 there were only 38 programs and now in 2022 there are 654 programs. Due to the pandemic in 2020, the desire to play esports grew exponentially, helping with the expansion of programs in universities.
Kurt then presented 2 other charts that stood out. The first showed the growth of Twitch from a viewer and channel standpoint. From 2019 to 2021 people viewing Twitch went from about 1 million to around 3 million viewers, since traditional sports were suspended at this time most people turned to esports to watch. Not everyone is good at playing, so watching can be interesting to do. The second chart showed the Global Sales of gaming compared to other media and in 2020 gaming hit 159 billion dollars while other media including professional leagues, music, and cinema only hit 66 billion dollars. It’s fascinating to see how much more sales esports were gaining during the pandemic while everything else was shut down.
To end his presentation, Kurt showed a video about what Intersport does and its five main categories. The categories include: Consulting, Tournament Ops, Experiences, Content Marketing, and Property Creation. Intersport helps with sponsorship for games and creators. One example that Kurt discussed was Nathan’s Famous partnering with JoshOG. They found Josh because he would wear a hot dog costume just for fun during his live streams, so they decided to make a partnership out of it. He would wear a Nathan’s Famous hat and eat hot dogs during his livestream, which got people more involved and created an interest in wanting to buy Nathan’s Famous. Overall, it was interesting to learn about everything that goes behind the scenes of sponsorships with esports.
Photo Credit: Rachel Bradshaw