Esports mean big bucks: inside the rich, new world of video games

Looking down from the second floor of the International Centre in Mississauga, the noise is overwhelming. People are cheering, laughing, and it’s drowning out the subtler sounds of games beeping and keyboards clattering. Suddenly, it crescendos and the power goes out. As the organizers of Enthusiast Gaming Live (EGL) whip out their phones and begin calling around to find the source of the problem, the crowd gathered below is illuminated by the televisions being run by back-up generators and they begin chanting “MVG! MVG! MVG!”

The same thing happened this past April in Arizona at MVG Sandstorm and since the esports world is so closely knit, the people here at EGL know all about it. There’s more laughter and chanting, but everyone stays put. After all, they’re here to support the first esports tournament of this scale in Canada, and they plan to be here to the end.

Meet the new face of gaming. Historically, gaming has been seen as the domain of teenage boys, playing at home in their basements by themselves or with a couple of buddies. However, huge events like this demonstrate the tremendous sense of community and sociability that gaming now has, as well as the potential dollars at stake in esports events.

Esports, short for electronic sports, is the broad name given to a range of competitive games played in a tournament setting. Games include fighting-style video games like Super Smash Bros. and Street Fighter, first-person shooters like Call of Duty and, probably the most popular and lucrative category, multiplayer battle arena games like League of Legends and Dota 2. To give a rough idea of just how popular, the last League of Legends tournament at Riot World Championships, the most watched esport event of 2014, was viewed by 27 million people worldwide. By comparison, the average number of viewers of each World Series game over the last three years was 13.2 million.

Enthusiast Gaming Live, in mid-May, saw over 1,700 people came out in Mississauga to watch the industry’s top competitors duke it out in tournaments, test new games from independent developers and, perhaps most importantly, socialize with people just as passionate about the gaming scene as they are.

Bernard 'RaynEX' Mafei, Super Smash Bros. player

“It’s really grassroots and it’s really beautiful,” says Bernard Mafei, a competitive Super Smash Bros. player from the Kitchener-Waterloo area. Mafei, who goes by the handle RaynEX online and in tournaments, is backed by Let’s Play, an esports organization that runs tournaments in the Kitchener-Waterloo area. While some sponsorships are extremely lucrative and enough for players to turn gaming into their full-time career, Mafei’s partnership is enough to cover his tournament fees, travel and accommodations for the tournament.

“When I started playing, I was 15, 16 years old,” said Mafei. “Like many teenagers I was unsure of myself, I didn’t want to voice my opinion, I had a lot of maturing to do. Without realizing it, just by coming to these events and meeting other likeminded people, I was really able to come out of my shell. And I’ve seen a lot of other people like that, too, people who are afraid of other aspects of their life, but they feel at home here.

“[I also found] all these skills I didn’t know I had. Like, in a tournament setting, I’d be in a very high-pressure situation, and I’m 16, 17 years old, how do you deal with that? I had to learn over time how to control my emotions. That gave me emotional maturity when I went outside of the scene, when things would happen to me, I would deal with it better in a more mature way.”

Super Smash Bros. is a fighting game from Nintendo, where two-to-four players battle each other as characters from various Nintendo games including Mario, Kirby and Link. There are four console editions of Smash, including the two you’ll most commonly see at tournaments, Super Smash Bros. Wii U and Super Smash Bros. Melee for the GameCube. The mechanics of the game are simple, but with 49 playable characters available in the latest version of Smash, it’s not a game that can be easily mastered, which explains at least in part why it’s had such a huge, dedicated following since the series’ debut in 1999.