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ESL CEO: eSports Will Be Bigger Than The NHL
With the League of Legends Finals selling out the Staples Center and Dota 2 International watched by more than 20 million viewers, it's tough to deny the rising influence of competitive gaming. That's why you can't blame eSports League CEO Ralf Reichert for having high ambitions for his competitive gaming league.
Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, Reichert laid out his plans. "Our honest belief is it's going to be a top five sport in the world," Reichert said. "If you compare it to the NHL, to ice hockey, that's not a first-row sport, but a very good second-row sport. [eSports] should be ahead of that... It's already huge, it's already comparable to these traditional sports. Not the Super Bowl, but the NHL [Stanley Cup Finals]."
To give you an idea of what kind of gulf there is between the two, take last year's Stanley Cup Finals averaged nearly five million viewers in the United States for each of the five games. By comparison, the ESL Intel Extreme Masters' finals drew one million peak concurrent users, and garnered 10 million unique views across the globe.
Our Take
The growth of eSports is certainly encouraging, but they have a long way to go to catch entrenched sports. The NHL isn't all about TV ratings. It also sells 18,000 tickets on average for 1,230 games throughout the year, plus the capacity crowds for the many best-of-seven playoff series during the run to the Stanley Cup. Maybe one day eSports will reach parity, but it won't be for a while.
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