As coronavirus cancels sporting events, esports plays offense

Just hours before the tournament’s start in Katowice, Poland, organizers received some bad news. Concerns about the novel coronavirus were growing by the hour. Now, the governor had ordered organizers to close the competition to the public.

Some 11,000 fans who had come to watch the tournament live in Spodek Arena on Feb. 27 would have to watch it online from their hotel rooms and bars. 

But this wasn’t a traditional sporting event. The fans had come from around the world to see their favorite teams play Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, the most popular competitive shooter video game at the IEM Katowice World Championship.

It was the first time the coronavirus had seriously hit esports, a booming global industry forecasted to eclipse $1 billion in revenues and grow its audience to 495 million people in 2020, according to the Newzoo analytics company. Now, with more tournaments canceling their live-audience events due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the industry is losing profit from ticket and merchandise sales.

But even without thousands of screaming fans, the final of IEM Katowice broke the record as the most-watched non-major league esports event of all time, with a peak of over 1 million online viewers. At one point, there were more viewers watching the Russian-language stream than the English one.

The reason is NaVi, a Ukrainian esports club whose team played and won in the final. NaVi, short for Natus Vincere, meaning “Born to Win” in Latin, is the crown jewel in the thriving Ukrainian esports industry. By some estimates, Ukraine produces 80% of worldwide Russian-language gaming content and has 2 million people following esports, according to Newzoo.

Because of the coronavirus, IEM Katowice became the last world championship in esports for now. But unlike traditional sports, regional tournaments in esports still continue online with some minor adjustments.

And the viewership of these online matches is at an all-time high, as more than half of humanity is staying at home to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. This means more profits from advertising, sponsorship and media rights for the industry.

Privileged as they are in this global crisis, esports companies are finding ways to contribute to the fight against the coronavirus with charity tournaments and fundraisers. Ukrainian companies are also doing their share.

Back to its roots

Competing in online tournaments from the comfort of their homes is nothing new for professional esports players. In many ways, tournaments switching to an online-only format is a return to esports’ roots in the 2000s. Games played face-to-face in massive arenas filled with fans were a later add-on that helped legitimize esports in the 2010s.

But there is one technical limitation of the online-only tournaments that does not allow them to be truly global. To compete on equal footing in the fast-paced games, the players must have similar ping — the time it takes to get from the player’s computer to the game’s server. That is why online tournaments can only be organized by region.

Ukraine plays in esports’ CIS region, which mainly corresponds with membership in the Commonwealth of Independent States – nine post-Soviet republics, including Russia. It should be noted that Ukraine was never a member, but only a founding state of the Commonwealth. In 2018, it terminated its participation in the organization’s statutory bodies after Russia invaded Crimea and started a war in eastern Ukraine in 2014.

A Counter-Strike tournament visitor tries out a professional esports computer outside the main arena of the Counter-Strike Championship at the VDNH exhibition center in Kyiv, Ukraine on May 4, 2019. (Volodymyr Petrov)

More views

Usually, matches in esports happen between teams in each region online. Then, the best teams advance to the world finals held on-site with a live audience. Now there can be only online regional finals with no way to determine the world champions. This means no grand world finals, which draw the largest viewership.

“This complicates the task for tournament organizers and clubs in promoting their sponsors and partners,” NaVi CEO Yevhen Zolotaryov told The Kyiv Post. “But everything is good in the digital world.”

Indeed it is. Twitch, Amazon’s go-to platform for game streaming, has seen a 16% increase in average concurrent viewers from 1.41 million in February to 1.63 million in March, according to Twitch Tracker analytics. The average for April so far stands at an all-time high of 2.52 million, another 54% increase.

Much of that viewership is centered on Ukrainian esports. Zolotaryov says that NaVi is currently the number one esports club in the world by viewership in the year’s first quarter. 

Ukrainian esports commentator Roman “CaspeRRR” Lepokhin says that viewership has doubled for his streams of Dota 2, the world’s most popular battle strategy game.

“People now have a tremendous amount of time to spare,” he says. “And some of them are discovering or rediscovering things like esports on Twitch and YouTube.”

Filling sports’ void

The fact that traditional sports are on hiatus also benefits esports, Lepokhin says. Esports can help lovers of traditional sports fill the void for excitement from competitive games.

Sports broadcast television channels are realizing that. The U.S. ESPN sports network has already been broadcasting esports on its subsidiary ESPN2. Now, with no traditional sports matches, the main ESPN channel is starting to fill its programming with esports counterparts — NBA 2K20, a basketball game, and Madden NFL 20, a football game — or even matches from Rocket League, a video game in which race cars play soccer.

Some traditional athletes are in on the game. ESPN hosted an NBA 2K20 charity tournament between 16 real NBA players. The Madrid Open tennis tournament will have the top players compete in the Tennis World Tour simulator, including Ukrainian Elina Svitolina.

In Spain, the Movistar+ broadcaster hosted a fundraising tournament in the FIFA 20 video game between actual soccer players from the country’s top La Liga division. Ukrainian Oleksander Zinchenko also played FIFA 20 with other professional soccer players from 32 countries in a virtual tournament called Plan B, which ran from March 26 to April 4.

Ukrainian TV is behind on the trend of esports broadcasts. Sports channels like Football 1 and Sport 1 are currently broadcasting reruns of sports classics and matches of the soccer league in Belarus, one of the few countries, alongside Tajikistan and Nicaragua, where professional sports carry on.

Esportscasters Nikola “Hairy_Freak” (L) Babic and Kyle Freedman give a running commentary a Dota 2 match in the WeSave! Charity Play online tournament in March 2020 in Kyiv. The charity tournament raised over $188,800 for organizations helping to fight COVID-19. (WePlay! Esports)

Esports against the coronavirus 

Meanwhile, some Ukrainian athletes are participating in esports events that help fight the coronavirus. Zinchenko and Ukrainian footballers Andriy Yarmolenko and Mykola Morozyuk played Counter-Strike in the We Strike charity tournament on April 15-16 to raise money for the fight against the coronavirus along with Ukrainian and Russian celebrities.

Kyiv-based WePlay! Esports company was among the first to organize a charity tournament aimed at fighting the coronavirus on March 20-26. Its WeSave! Charity Play tournament in Dota 2 featured 24 international teams competing in six regions and dozens of commentators – all working for free.

“We brought everyone together in less than a week,” WePlay! Esports’ general manager, Oleh Humeniuk, told The Kyiv Post. “Everyone was inspired to do some good for this cause.”

With the company’s prize pool of $120,000 and sales and donations from the esports community, WeSave! Charity Play raised over $188,800. The money was split evenly between the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, which is helping to develop a vaccine against the coronavirus, and Global Giving, which sends medical workers and supplies to communities affected by the pandemic.

Ukrainian pop music celebrities Onuka and Michelle Andrade supported the cause in video messages. WePlay! Esports’ chief producer, Maksym Bilonogov, also says that a Ukrainian TV channel approached the company with a broadcasting proposal.

“These are the kinds of things that help esports become a little more known and normal, so to speak,” he told The Kyiv Post. “We are seeing some positive tendencies globally.”

What’s next

Three-quarters of esports’ revenue in 2020, or $822.4 million, was expected to come from brand investments, according to Newzoo.

With big names like Samsung and Intel already in the game, early this year major brands such as Nike and Kia Motors announced partnerships with esports teams competing in the League of Legends battle strategy game world championship, which is sponsored by Louis Vuitton.

But with traditional sports out of the picture and esports gaining viewership, many expect more big brands to join.

“This could be a positive moment if sponsors from traditional industries, non-endemic brands, TV and video streaming will turn their eyes to esports,” Zolotaryov says.

“Globally, esports is in an active phase of forming as an industry. The current crisis is accelerating this process,” Bilonogov says.

Another big question is what share of the current audience will keep watching esports after the quarantine is over and traditional sports return. In many ways, that will depend on the companies’ abilities to keep the new audience engaged.

“I’m curious to know myself how many people will remain,” Lepokhin says. “But I’m sure many of them may join in, especially if they watched quality tournaments.”

For now, nobody is sure what will happen next, so esports companies are mostly improvising, Humeniuk says. Tournaments are quickly adapting and coming up with new initiatives for every game in esports, Zolotaryov says. There are new strategies extending to six months.

Still, the esports community wants things to return to normal so they can travel to live-audience tournaments, Lepokhin says. Everyone is waiting for the Dota 2 tournament called The International – esports’ most grandiose live event, which in 2019 had a prize pool of $34 million and 18,000 attendees. 

The International 2020 should take place in August, and fans are wary that it may be converted into an online-only event.

“It just won’t be the same,” Lepokhin says.