Fortnite developer, Epic Games, has pledged $100m into the first-ever Fortnite Esports pro-season leaving the sports books rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of another big esports hit.
I pull up outside the old house. It’s funny when I first got divorced. I still had a house key for the longest time, and I would drive home after work, walk into the front room, and my ex-wife would say, “Lee, you don’t live here anymore.”
These days, I sit in my car, outside, playing with my phone.
“Dad, you can come in if you like?” Said, my boy. “I’ll show you that game you write about.”
“What game?”
“Fortnite.”
And so that’s what I did.
100 players from all corners of the world dropped into the game world, including my boy, and I watched, fascinated, as he ran around collecting weapons, keen to dodge a sniper bullet to the head. 100 players is a lot, but the game was over quickly. My boy died with three people remaining from the original 100.
“This is going to be huge,” I said.
“Going to be?” My boy laughed. “It is huge.”
Millions of people per day play or watch Fortnite with the Battle Royle Edition making the biggest impression. There is an addictiveness to the narrative that you are one of 100 people fighting to the death. And when I use the word ‘addictiveness’, I’m serious.
In early May, in a weekly sample, The Esports Observer noted that 77% of viewed footage on Twitch streams belonged to Fortnite traffic with Tyler “Ninja” Blevins pulling in 6.8m hours of footage in a single week. Blevins has over 10 million YouTube subscribers, and millions more watching him on Twitch. He earns $500,000 per month playing video games, giving kids all over the world a two finger salute to parents desperately wanting them to get a life.
And it seems Fortnite is going to get even more significant.
Epic Games to Invest $100m in Fornite’s First Professional Esports Roll Out
Details are as skinny as the lamb chop bones of a stray dog, but we know all we need to know for now.
Epic Games, Fortnite’s developers, have promised to inject $100m into the first season of professional Fortnite Esports action. There is no more word than that. We don’t know when the season will begin, or how Epic will structure it. But no developer has ever invested that kind of money in a single season.
It’s huge.
A Gambling Dream
With $100m to be invested, it’s going to become the biggest esports title in the world quickly. With experts predicting that one day (closer to the time we terraform Mars than now) esports will overtake physical sports in popularity, people need to be directing their attention to this game, and no more so than the gambling industry.
Dropping 100 people into a world, armed to the teeth, in a fight to the death is a gambling dream. The game is already exciting to watch but add the opportunity to bet on your favourite Esports athlete and watch the money roll.
And why stop at a 100?
Why not run marathon sessions that run into the thousands?
In many ways, Fortnite reminds me of multi-table tournament (MTT) poker. Anybody who has gone deep in an MTT knows how scintillating it feels. It’s one of the reasons we keep coming back for more. But watching it is a different kettle of frogs. Blevins can attract over 650k viewers in one sitting. The World Poker Tour (WPT) pays you to attend their finals, and you would jump off a cliff if you watched the early tournament action.
But concerning creating a forum where thousands of people can compete in a winner takes all format, Fortnite and poker have a lot in common.
Back to the betting angle, and Fortnite provides the opportunity for an immersive in-play experience, but there is one problem. Fortnite’s video game look appeals to a much younger audience than say Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS: GO). A few weeks back, Team Secret signed 13-year-old Kyle ‘Mongraal’ Jackson on a professional Fortnite contract. The UK youngster had to ask his mum for permission to sign on the dotted line.
I can see how Luckbox and Unikrn are plunging deep into this burgeoning, bloody world, and I can also see why regulation and transparency are top of their list of essential things to do.
And then you wake up and realise that kids have been playing football with jumpers for goalposts for years, and yet people have been gambling on football for as long as I can remember.
