FEATURE: ESPORTS
NOT FOR KIDS ANYMORE Esports is driving significant activity in the gaming and hospitality sectors by David McKee
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sports can no longer be ignored. The sector is blowing up. Covid-19 played a role. Sequestered at home, fans streamed video of esports in record numbers. SafeBettingSites.com clocked 1.6 billion hours of viewing of YouTube Gaming between July and October, a 131% increase. (Facebook Gaming gained 30 million viewers.) For the year to date, YouTube gaming has logged 4.3 billion hours of viewing. No fewer than 107 million people subscribe to the online gaming channel of Norwegian player Felix sportsbettingoperator.com
Arvid Ulf Kjællberg, aka PewDiePie. El Salvador’s 27-year-old Luis Fernando Flores Alvarado comes in a distant second with 38 million subscribers. That’s still a lot of eyeballs. Esports fans are watching 500 million hours of play a week, according to SafeBettingSites. That’s up from 291 million a year ago. During the third quarter, League of Legends was the most watched game with 543 million hours. It was followed by Fortnite (426 million hours) and PUBG Mobile (416.5 million hours), with 60 percent of viewership going to the Battle Royale genre of games. High schools and 15
