How eSports Will Change in 2020

You don’t need us to tell you that the world is in the midst of a global pandemic. As a result, eSports events, and seasonal patches for games, are getting postponed, and in some cases cancelled. The whole eSports industry is in a bit of a pickle at the moment, to be honest. In fact you could say the same for the whole of online betting industry too; there are virtually zero sports matches to bet on (aside from grey hound racing for example), and thus many people have been turning to online casinos and slot sites for games online that can’t be cancelled.

eSports Industry analysts predict that the whole industry will see a drop of about 45% in revenue for the year, and that is assuming things start to fall back to normal within the next few months. So, what does this mean for us? How will eSports change in 2020? We can take a couple of guesses, but we reckon they won’t be far off.

Smaller eSports Tournaments

It is important to remember that people haven’t stopped playing games. In fact, traditional eSports games (CS:GO, Rocket League etc.) have hit some of their biggest player counts in years. The same is happening over on the consoles. We have absolutely no doubt that a few companies are going to try and monotonize this.

In the past, setting up a huge eSports event was rather costly. You would need to have countless sponsors on board, and you would probably need a few people buying a Battle Pass in order to cover the cost of the running the tournament and the prize money. We can’t do that now. We can’t run major events. So, something needs to change.

We reckon that many small companies will start to sponsor their own individual tournaments. The prizes probably won’t be as high as their arena-based counterparts, but it should probably be enough to keep people playing games. It is a bit too early to know exactly what will happen here and how it will happen, but don’t be surprised if you see a couple of smaller ‘online only’ tournaments pop up soon.

Tournaments will move to ‘streaming only’

At some point, the big tournament organisers will realise that they have to do something to make ends meet. As a result, we would expect many of them to ditch the whole arena concept and run some bigger tournaments ‘online only’. It wouldn’t be generating as much cash as some of those bigger affairs (merchandise sells incredibly well at these things), but it may be just enough to keep them in the black.

For the next year or so, we reckon that nearly every major tournament that is run will be online only. Expect to find them streaming on Twitch and YouTube. Actually, if Microsoft can get their act together, we may find a few pop up on Mixer too. Now is probably a great time for Microsoft to capitalise on that.

This isn’t something which is going to happen any time soon. Not with social distancing measures in place still. You can’t travel to most countries, and you need to stay a reasonable distance away from others. This means that you can’t really pack all of the participating gamers in the same room. You don’t want to run a major with internet connections either. It needs to be all local play.

Patches will get delayed

Normally when the eSports tournaments are over for the year, we start to see some meta changes. We doubt that will happen now. There may be small tinkering here and there, but the meta is going to remain the same going into next year’s tournaments. In fact, it seems that the only company that is really trying to shake up the meta of their games is Activision-Blizzard with Overwatch. The rest? Nah. Things will remain the same. People will probably get bored, but we may actually see massive skill boosts when people are stuck in the same meta for ages.

New and Older Games Will Emerge

Some older games seem to be attracting a ton of players in the midst of the lockdown. Look at Steam or console gameplay charts, and you will see the most-played games starting to have a couple of older multiplayer games appear. While we can’t imagine there will ever be major tournaments based around these older games, we envision that older games may attract some of those smaller tournaments, just to keep people playing a little.

The eSports Betting Industry Will Get a Boost

This pandemic comes at a time when the eSports industry was getting bigger in the world of online betting. You would think that it would shut down that whole industry, but we don’t think that will happen. There will be fewer majors happening. That is for sure. However, we feel like the limited number of majors means that each event will attract a lot more bets. This will have a massive impact on the odds (eSports tends to have low odds due to the limited number of people betting), and the result is that the eSports betting industry will become a lot more profitable. In fact, as a result, you may even start to see bigger bookmakers offer odds on eSports. This could lead to rapid growth of the whole eSports industry in 2021 and beyond, with more online casinos adding options t

What changes do you think will happen to the industry in the coming year?