Remember all those days lost trying to pass through that world in your parents basement as a kid? This generation is finding a way to make those days not lost — in the form of competitive and team video game playing.
Not only is it a real-life thing, but it is also becoming a big time investment. The latest clue in that area came on Friday, as Bloomberg Business reported that former Los Angeles Lakers forward Rick Fox is buying eSports’ Team Gravity for $1 million.
Yes, you’re reading that right. No we aren’t kidding with you.
It’s a team that competes in the North American League of Legends Championship series, which is the most popular of the online gaming world for eSports.
Before you think Fox is crazy, he may be getting in on the ground floor here, as this crazy stat will tell you:
League of Legends, which is published by Riot Games, is the most popular game as measured by game-play, according to the report from Baird. More than 27 million people watched the 2014 League of Legends World Championship, more than watched the 2015 NBA Finals (19.9 million), and the live competition drew 11,000 fans to Madison Square Garden for the title event.
Folks are actually paying money and spending time watching others play video games…something most of us did while waiting our turn to show off to our friends or beat their collective rear ends in at some point growing up.
However, the world of gaming is growing up and the world of competitive gaming has gone from novelty to mainstream.
Bloomberg Business also shows us that Fox may be getting an investment steal as estimates of the growth of the sport (still getting used to calling it that), is expected to grow from around $300 million this year to $1 billion by 2018.
Helping to mainstream the sport is a TV deal with Turner Broadcasting, which is set to start airing a league for Counter Strike: Global Offensive — a first-person shooter game — in Atlanta and will air competitions on Friday nights starting in the summer of 2016.
“I see the way that the eSports world is growing and I know we are on the verge of something massive,” Fox said in a statement.
However, it shouldn’t be all that surprising to see Fox invest in gaming, as he was a well-known gamer during his NBA career and has been at the forefront of the gaming-as-sport movement from the get-go.
Fox is also a partner at Twin Galaxies, the official video game world-record and player-ranking authority that was founded in 1981, and he donated his three NBA championship rings with the Los Angeles Lakers to the fundraiser #Right2Game, which supports professional gaming.
With his latest investment, Fox is putting more than his muscle behind his thought that competitive gaming is about to become as mainstream as (if not bigger than) the world of poker on TV.
