HITMARKER

Hit mar ker The Golden State has advertised more esports opportunities than the other 49 states combined in 2019

AUTHOR Hitmarker  @HitmarkerJobs

t’s no secret that esports has a significant presence in California. It houses multiple top-level competitions like the LCS and Overwatch League, as well as countless companies within the industry, from giant publishers like Blizzard to elite organisations like Cloud9 and TSM. I

However, the extent of California’s dominance of our industry is only truly revealed when examining the esports job market.

At HitmarkerJobs.com, we post opportunities in esports and gaming from companies all over the world every single day. We’ve used the data collected from this activity between January 1 and April 30, 2019, to tell the story of California’s hiring activity.

What our numbers reveal is that there were more jobs located in California than there were in the rest of the United States combined in the first four months of the year. Indeed, from the beginning of the year to April 30, we’ve posted a total of 1,584 jobs in the United States, and an enormous 956 (60.35%) of these have been in California.

This really shocked us at first. After all, Texas is more commonly seen as the emerging hotbed of esports, as it hosts the impressive trio of Team Envy, Complexity Gaming and OpTic Gaming. Add to this the jobs that exist all along the east coast and in the rest of the US, and it is a pretty surprising statistic.

The tipping point in California’s favour is the presence of major companies such as Twitch, Riot Games and Blizzard, who combine together to overpower the hiring in these other locations.

On the adjacent page, we’ve used our data to visualise The Golden State’s hiring activity. From which of its cities are home to the most jobs to which of the companies based within it are the most active, our map of California gives you the highlights of its esports job scene. San Francisco stands tall, possessing over 33% of California’s jobs due to its hive of tech companies. Following it is Los Angeles with 26.99%, which benefits from a whole host of elite teams being based there. Irvine comes in third with 9.52%, primarily due to Blizzard being found in the city.

With the Overwatch League and its teams hitting the road soon, more companies moving into the industry, and more esports startups appearing all of the time, we expect that California’s dominance of the esports job market will slowly begin to lessen. However, for the time being, it seems California remains the Golden State of opportunities!