Keeping an eye on what’s happening
It’s a funny old world. During the gestation period of this organ, in our wildest imaginings not a man jack among the original editorial team had the slightest idea that in a few short years the Rust would become one of the world’s most popular go-to websites or achieve its current ever-growing global readership and commercial success.
It may surprise not a few but, as with many of today’s household name brands and businesses, we simply came up with a concept, stuck with it and the rest is history.
However, down here in the Rust’s sports department bunker we like to think that we’re unique in the sense that – whilst remaining true to our policy of seeking to avoid parroting the professional media reporting of sporting matters – we make a virtue of trying to champion new, different and off-beat opinions and angles upon what’s happening.
And what’s currently happening, perhaps to an extent given greater emphasis than ever by the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, is the world of E-sport.
Given the effects of national lockdowns, self-isolation strictures and the issues that participants and clubs in every world sport has had to come to terms with or accommodate in their race to re-start and ‘get back to normal’ before they go bust, it is easy to see why.
Through exponentially-developing technical/graphic sophistication, the all-pervading access to computers, the obsessive devotion of light-fingered youngsters in bedrooms and elsewhere, the unlimited popularity of social media communication and the means to make livings out of it, E-sport has become a 21st phenomenon.
You cannot argue with the proposition when estimates of this global industry’s global worth are rapidly approaching US$2 billion per annum and active audiences a billion. Never mind the traditional market leaders in entertainment – music and movies: computer gaming and E-sport in particular (to coin a phrase) are ‘whole new ball games’.
In evidence, here’s a link to a piece that I came across by chance overnight – Vithushan Ehantharajah reviewing the success of Formula One’s first five ‘virtual’ Grand Prixs, that appeared recently upon the website of – THE INDEPENDENT
Sobering stuff especially when you consider all those real-life sports which are desperately wrestling the issues surrounding the problem of how they are ever going to return to stadia full of ticket-buying, noisy, beer-filled, merchandising-buying crowds that used to be such an important part of their commercial life-blood.
What price crowds (and all the issues that go with them) … or even potentially hitherto-lucrative television broadcasting deals … when elsewhere your competitor E-sports can attract comparable or better customer numbers at home on their computers?
Just a thought.
