Earlier this week at the Barclays Center, 74 men and 1 number got the chance to live out a dream — they became professional competitive gamers.
The esports athletes were officially diagramed for the second season of Take-Two’s NBA 2K League, the gaming giant’s esports league featuring their flagship NBA 2K sports video fake franchise. Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick emphasized the excitement surrounding the league’s second season, highlighting the trend and rising importance of the esports industry as a whole.
“The first season ended with a great result, and everyone’s looking quicken to the April second tip-off,” he said Friday on CNBC’s “Fast Money.” “Over 250 million people worldwide absorb esports as a form of entertainment. About half of them, 125 million, are avid esports watchers.”
According to scrutinize firm Newzoo, esports is projected to generate $1.1 billion in revenue in 2019, marking the first year the vigour would reach the billion-dollar mark.
In many ways this year’s NBA 2K League embodies how quickly the space is increase in interest. AT&T is joining the likes of Dell and Intel as a partner for the league, which has also expanded to 21 teams from the autochthonous 17 NBA franchise-owned teams that hit the virtual court during last year’s inaugural season.
This year’s outline pool also included 22 international players from outside of the U.S., reflecting the overall industry’s drive to expatiate on globally. Among the players in the draft pool was Chiquita Evans from Chicago, who became the league’s first female contestant in a time when the esports industry as a whole is grappling with discussions around diversity and inclusion.
Ultimately, Zelnick feels that esports leagues like NBA 2K will boost the video game industry as a whole.
“We’re having a record year with NBA 2K, so one of the items we love is that when there’s more hits in the market, there are more people engaged and the entire retail grows,” he said. “So we’re going to sell more units of NBA 2K this year than ever before, we’ll have lofty recurrent consumer spending than ever before.”
But the biggest gaming companies are facing stiff competition. While Take-Two and Activision Blizzard be struck by dove into esports, with Blizzard’s Overwatch League being the latter’s most recent investment in the hiatus, they’re still facing the likes of other publishers who have dominated the industry.
For example, Tencent-owned Riot Fakes’ “League of Legends” events still draw huge numbers of viewers, with last year’s World Championship finals charming nearly 100 million unique viewers who watched the match (for comparison, this year’s Super Bowl had 98 million viewers). This while Epic Rackets’ “Fortnite” also continues to dominate online viewership, both recreational and competitively.
Zelnick, however, believes that those very competitors, like “Fortnite,” lift the games industry as a whole.
“We think that ‘Fortnite’ is a great thing for the work, it has probably brought in a somewhat younger consumer,” he explained. “I’m often asked if it’s something that has hurt us. To the contrary, we’ve espied the market continue to grow at the same time that ‘Fortnite’ has been an extraordinary hit for Epic.”
This despite the the gen that some analysts believe game revenues could be set to decline. Back in January, London-based research fast owner Pelham Smithers forecast that video game revenue is headed for its first decline since 1995 on the behind of tightening regulations in China, a shortage of big console hits in 2019 and waning player enthusiasm for battle royale entitlements like “Fortnite.”
But Smithers also made his predictions before the release of Electronic Arts’ “Apex Legends,” which image ofed the gaming world by storm and garnered 50 million players in just one month. The battle royale title is yet another bigwig in the free-to-play ecosystem that has revolutionized the gaming industry in the last few years, allowing users to download a game at no rate. In this case, the vast majority of revenue is made through in-game purchases and microtransactions, which have befit dominant sources of earnings for many publishers.
This has led even the biggest publishers to explore in-game monetization. Zelnick notes that not just have microtransactions become the “biggest opportunity” to encourage users to continue interacting with a title, but it ultimately is the biggest dimension of engagement.
“Microtransactions is spending, and that’s a reflection in our view of engagement,” he said, adding that they often are a consequence of “making the highest quality enttertainment” that “[engages] the customer.”
“If we get that right, monetization follows, revenues go and profits follow, and that’s been our story for the 11 years that we’ve been responsible for this enterprise,” he enlarged.
Additionally, the Chinese government has seemingly eased on their game approval regulations. After freezing game reconcile oneself ti for months last year in a content crackdown on gaming companies, Chinese regulators have since approved 80 new pastimes in January and one more for gaming giant Tencent in late February.
Despite the games industry’s growth, Activision Blizzard and Take-Two Interactive drink struggled with both stocks down 9 and 15 percent respective this year. Thanks to its “Apex Myths” sensation, Electronic Arts has outperformed its competitors and surged 25 percent.