The Esports World Cup officially kicked off last week with its second annual tournament in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, drawing over 2,000 competitors from 84 different countries.

Riyadh

The CEO of the Esports World Cup Foundation provided insights into the second annual tournament held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, which brought together over 2,000 competitors from 84 countries and featured a record-breaking $70 million prize pool. The event aims to elevate esports to a broader audience and establish it as a recurring fixture in the global sporting calendar.

Organizing the tournament involved coordination with game publishers, managing logistics, and balancing financial considerations. The CEO emphasized the industry's growth potential, citing 500 million viewers from the previous year and a global gamer base of three billion. Monetization strategies include direct-to-consumer offerings and partnerships, with the belief that esports athletes could become as prominent as traditional sports stars.

Esports World Cup Foundation CEO discusses future of the industry

We have 2,000 of the best athletes here which is a huge number. There's very few sports events in the world overall which has more than 2,000 athletes coming together, 200 clubs, 70 million dollars of prize money which is record-breaking in esports and then again doesn't have to hide on the big stage. So bringing all of these things together and putting the spotlight of not only the esports industry and not only the gaming industry but bringing it wider, having my mom care about it, that's what we're looking for and that's what we want to achieve this year. If the moms care then everyone should care. That's a really good barometer. Was it difficult to bring everyone together because this year you've got Valorant which is quite significant. So give me a sense on how difficult it is to coordinate this. Sure. Is it difficult to bring all these things together? Yes. Was it a lot of convincing? I mean did you have to do a lot of negotiating and convincing and say come let's go into one manner. There's a few different angles to this. I mean first and foremost the game publishers need to trust us that we take their game and build something meaningful with it which is ultimately good for the players in the community. So that was the starting point but it's not only about the trust and the licensing of it, it's as well scheduling, it's logistics, it's a commercial opportunity to do it right. Bringing 2,000 players here is not an easy feat from a budget perspective either. So all of these things together and that's the beauty of live sports actually. They need to happen at one point in time. If one of these things is missing it's not working. This is more than just hosting a tournament right. Riyadh and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia have done they have helped build this industry, build this platform, are in this for the long term. We've already announced at the very first day right this is a yearly tournament. It's out there to stand the test of time and then if you look at it from a finance perspective compared to a singular esports tournament it's incredibly expensive. But if you look at it from a traditional sports perspective and compare it to the largest tournaments in the world it's actually pretty reasonable still. So we're trying to hit exactly that balance, building something new, making sure we invest what it takes to grow the sport, to put it on the right platform, to create it at the right scale while not going too crazy. Okay let's talk about viewership and online viewership because actually that's a super fascinating story. So you've got 7,000 hours of content live streaming. It was like how do we monetize but I'm sure you're sitting and looking at the numbers 500 million people logged in last year to watch the first esports world cup and you're thinking how do I monetize 500 million people. I mean that's that's amazing revenue if you could tap into that. Is there any way that you could tap into it? Absolutely so and the 500 million last year is just a start. So we're very convinced that esports is nothing but growing over the next 10, 20, 30 years with generations of gamers growing in age, growing in average. So the absolute number of gamers in the world is going up. We're speaking about three billion people that are our core target group of gamers. Monetization about it we're very convinced is coming right and it's coming obviously platforms the ones that have the biggest viewership very gamified way where we directly work with the media partners we have to monetize. And then there is indirect ways we spoke a little bit about its sponsorship but it's most importantly direct to consumer revenue. Trading cards, fantasy games, so games actually around the games that's the big future that's a big future actually for all of entertainment to directly create a user relationship and work with them beyond the pure broadcast. I was talking to a few people yesterday here at the esports world cup and they were saying you know we we view ourselves as athletes we view ourselves as you know the next multi-millionaires in the sporting world the new messi's and the new ronaldo's. Do you view this this industry in the same way? 100% yes. The next Michael Jordan will be an e-sports athlete and we hope we can have him on this stage in the next few days.

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