Electronic sports, a competitive event involving video games that is often considered the province of millennials, has caught the attention of the Aquilinis, one of British Columbia’s most prominent business families.
Dota 2, a wildly popular multiplayer online video game whose official name is Defense of the Ancients 2, has more than 10 million active players worldwide. The championship featured US$25 million in prizes, with over US$11 million going to the winning team. The six-day event sold out the 20,000-seat venue and some 15 million viewers streamed the action online.
The upshot was a boom in global audiences, which reached 380 million viewers in 2018 and is expected to grow to 557 million by 2021, with an annual growth rate of approximately 14 per cent. The hours that viewers spent watching e-sports rose from 1.3 billion hours in 2012 to 6.6 billion hours in 2018 — an increase of almost 1 billion annually.
“E-sports has a sexy feel and represents a convergence of arts, gaming, sports and media in a space where young people spend a lot of time,” says Toronto-based Robert Mason of Norton Rose Fulbright Canada LLP in Toronto, who with colleague Walied Soliman, led the legal team that took the Aquilinis into the e-sports realm.
The company now boasts the largest gaming network in North America and the United Kingdom and one of the largest vertically integrated video game and e-sports companies in the world.