Gaming
eSports means big money and big numbers – let’s add some real-world context for you.
Research has revealed that over the last year we've racked up some eye-watering numbers in terms of eSports watched, prize pools offered and events attended. To help put them into perspective we've done some handy conversions. Read on to find out the weight of the world's eSports viewers, how many tanks World of Tanks is worth and how many chocolate bars a Dota 2 prize pool could buy...
71,500,000
This is the number of people who watched competitive gaming in 2013. That's more than the entire population of the UK or France and double the population of Canada. If you take the average human weight it's also 4,402 million kilograms of flesh, bone and assorted nerves and fluids all focusing on eSports. Perhaps we should have just left it at the population stuff when we tried to put this into perspective...
2,874,380
That's the number in US dollars of the largest eSports prize pool from last year which came courtesy of Valve's Dota 2 tournament, The International. If you'd prefer to have that figure in pounds it's about £1.72 million. If you'd prefer to have it in terms of how much confectionary it can buy, it's about 2.9 million Twixs. The Alliance made off with the grand prize of $1.43 million last time but they're a Swedish team so perhaps Daim bars or salted liquorice would have been a more appropriate choice of sweet...
32,000,000
The number of people who watched the League of Legends World Championship Season 3. If Riot had invited everyone to watch it in the same place (rather than just the 18,000 people who had tickets) they would have needed a venue more than 350 times the size of Wembley Stadium. Or they could have borrowed the entire country of Morocco.
2.2
That's the average length of time in hours for an eSports viewing session. If watching eSports earned you the UK national average wage those sessions would net you about £28 a time, which is about the same as a dozen classic League of Legends character skins. By comparison, the average YouTube user only watches five hours of online video per month.
475,000,000
The amount of money in US dollars World of Tanks made in 2013. The creators at Wargaming could theoretically spend said money acquiring no fewer than 55 M1 Abrams tanks IRL. That’s not all: Wargaming is expected to increase that to about $506 million in 2014 and $590 in 2015 (58 tanks and 68 tanks respectively, not allowing for inflation of tank costs).
