E-sport offers a terrifying glimpse of the future – Telegraph.co.uk

Now, if that draws a blank for you, as it did for me, then don’t worry. But my guess is you may be older than 35 and not into your gaming. COD stands for Call of Duty, the big daddy of shoot-’em-up video games. And this year’s world championships took place in Inglewood, California. Turns out Dave was leaving a party full of real live people on a sunny afternoon to watch, from his darkened bedroom in Maidenhead, the action he had missed the previous evening followed by a live stream of people, 5,000 miles away, playing a video game.

Maybe Dave was just bored of my chat and needed an excuse to do a runner, but since then I have noticed more and more signs of the growing phenomenon that is e-sports.

This week the BBC reported that Crystal Palace’s part-owners, Americans Josh Harris and David Blitzer, had acquired Team Dignitas and Apex. Team Dignitas might sound like a place to put Damien Delaney out of his misery should things go south at Selhurst Park, but it is in fact one of the world’s leading e-sports teams and Harris and Blitzer, who also own the Philadelphia 76ers NBA franchise, are planning on merging their acquisitions into a new global powerhouse.

And don’t think it is not coming to your club soon. Earlier this year West Ham signed a player you probably did not hear about: e-sports star Sean Allen, who recently made the final of the Fifa Interactive World Cup. “We are looking at options to engage and interact with our fanbase,” explained West Ham’s head of digital marketing, Karim Virani. “E-sports is growing crazily – over 250 million people follow it globally.”

The numbers involved in e-sports are indeed staggering. And – given today’s rising obesity levels and vanishing municipal facilities – genuinely scary. 

Peter Warman, of market research firm Newzoo, believes e-sports could be the largest participation ‘sport’ in the world within a decade, surpassing even football.

Is it a sport? No more than chess or poker, certainly, but the reaction speeds, concentration, and mental acuity do benefit from training. The top teams now have sports psychologists and nutritionists.

And driving it all? Money. What else? Live gaming can sell out mega-stadiums, but it is online where the real wonga is being made.

Twitch, the live streaming video platform, was bought by Amazon for $1 billion in 2014. It attracts more than 100 million monthly unique users.

Nearly half of them spend more than 20 hours a week on it. Just 28 per cent of them are over 35.

This has been a depressing, grubby week for ‘traditional’ sport, with Big Sam exposed as a greedy so and so, and Team Sky’s ethics taking a battering. But just think of a virtual world 10 years down the line where millions of people are playing and betting on e-sports.

Terrifying.