Street Fighter V Tournament a Hit for ESPN
On Saturday, ESPN showed 18 straight hours of eSports coverage and events, leading up to the Street Fighter V tournament in the evening. The numbers are in and the results are a knock out for ESPN.
ESPN had 201,000 viewers on its TV broadcast, more than double it's view count in 2015. That number doesn't include unreported numbers from WatchESPN, the broadcaster's streaming service.
Meanwhile, Twitch saw a slight drop in viewers of the same tourney -- from 229,000 in 2015 to 183,000 this past weekend.
So can eSports make it in traditional broadcast channels? This weekend's results say so. Question is: Are you tapping into the eSports audience market?
eSports Scholarships are Now a Thing
I remember when my parents said playing video games wouldn't pay the bills. They certainly do now. Outside of being a pro-gamer which can lead into making some pretty sweet cash, competitive video game players can now score scholarships for college.
Derek "West Coast Carry" Micheau, of Robert Morris University, is the first American to graduate with an eSports scholarship. Robert Morris University (of Chicago) was the first US school to include gaming into it's varsity scholarships.
It pays to play.
Would a Donald Trump presidency be bad for eSports?
We tend not to think about how politics could affect eSports, but KillScreen.com is thinking about it. In a recent post "What would a Trump presidency mean for eSports", the author calls Trump a "natural enemy of eSports" because of his anti-immigration policies and the fact that eSports is "all about people from around the world coming together to compete." The author also notes that a lot of America's top eSports players are sons and daughters of immigrants.