Ready Player One Had it Right
Esports is going to fundamentally change society for the better
The first time I had the opportunity to see an esports tournament, the word esports didn’t even exist. Back in 2004, we just called them competitive video games. The tournament was held inside an internet cafe next to an AMC movie theater in a mall.
The internet cafe was small, only 1800 square feet, with 30 computers and a pair of couches for console gaming. It was dark, and a bit dingy with a unique smell that was part leather, part GPU exhaust, part sweat adorned by the usual medley of mall smells like Auntie Anne’s Pretzels and movie theater popcorn.
Walking up to the cafe named CyberZone, I could hear the sound of gamers yelling and cheering from a hundred yards away. The atmosphere inside felt familiar, just like any soccer or hockey tournament I’d been to as a kid. Players passionately strategized between matches, coaches praised or scolded players for their last game, and competitive ambition oozed from every player. As a gamer and an athlete, the atmosphere was magical to me.
As a kid, I was a decent athlete, and I got to travel to play sports which introduced me to people of all different backgrounds. Thanks to those experiences, I had a profound respect for how sports acted as a great equalizer of life opportunities in our society, even at a young age.
Thanks to sports, the kid who lives with his grandmother in an apartment from North Philly got to look at the same college as the rich kid from Haverford living in a ten-bedroom gated home. In the sports meritocracy, your background and financial status don’t dictate your outcome as they often do elsewhere in life.
Over 300,000 kids get some form of financial support for college every year in the NCAA (source)
However, only a few hours into the tournament, I was struck with the tragic feeling that this incredible experience was only available to affluent kids. The cost to buy a gaming computer, the cost of the games, the cost to get high-speed internet, and the opportunity cost of honing a skill without any immediate financial or educational upside all add up to create an incredibly costly barrier. A barrier not likely to be met by the average kid, let alone the kids who need it most in a city like Philadelphia.
Flash forward almost 20 years, and esports still has that same access issue holding it back from scale because it’s not affordable to most gamers. Despite gaming being virtually ubiquitous among kids in the US, very few have access to the equipment necessary to compete with integrity. There are thousands of high schools in America launching esports programs, while only a handful of kids in each school have the equipment and the means to participate.
“Some 4.4 million US Households with school-aged children did not have consistent access to a computer as of September 28 (2020) (source)
Even if the cost of gaming equipment comes down to 0, the speed of light will always limit the scale and competitive integrity, so physical in-person gaming facilities have to be built for esports to scale, just like gyms are needed for basketball to scale despite the weather.
However, we’re finally starting to see the problem get addressed with a flood of new dedicated esports venues building at an accelerated pace. Nerd Street’s building Localhosts, Vindex is building their own Belong Arenas, Simplicity has 30+ locations, and high schools, colleges, and municipalities are creating new venues by the month. Only five years ago, there were less than a half dozen dedicated esports venues in the country. Today there are over 500. That number will grow to 5,000 in the next ten years, and it won’t stop there.
Every time an esports venue opens near a school district that wants to launch an esports program, it unlocks the entire student base’s ability to compete. Each time a school launches an esports program, it sets in motion a 4-year cycle where that whole student population will graduate and become adult consumers that grew up with esports all around them. That creates lifelong fans, whether or not they were players. How many NFL fans played football?
That generational growth of the esports industry is precisely the type of scale needed to fulfill its promise to pass the size of traditional sports. But the impact is not simply a new larger market to be monetized. The impact is creating life, education, and career opportunities at scale in a society that desperately needs more productive pathways.
Ready Player One may have been a hyperbolic sci-fi look at what a society built around a competitive video game looks like. Still, it had one thing right: competitive gaming will be the largest equalizer of opportunity in our society.
Billions of people will one day thank esports for their life privileges and experience the same way that hundreds of millions currently do for sports.