Esports is not new. Around the world, more than 200 million people from all walks of life consider themselves as esports enthusiasts.
Esports has enjoyed incredible growth in recent years boosted by the success of big games such as League of Legends, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Overwatch and Dota 2, Streaming platforms like Twitch, which allow fans to spectate live, gather an average of 30 million viewers every day.
Awareness is growing too. According to the NewZoo Global esports report, around 1.9% billion people or 23% of the entire world’s population are a least aware of esports. Meanwhile, the entire esports audience stood at 495 million by the end of 2020, with more than half of those only being occasional viewers.
Esports is clearly big business globally, but what about the UK? According to statistics from UKIE, the esports sector in the UK (excluding publishers and tourism spillovers) earned an estimated £60m in revenue in 2019, just under 8% of the global market (£745m) and growing at 8.5% per annum.
However, there have been obstacles to the growth of esports. Many esports players around the world are not able to participate in “direct” competition with other players for cryptocurrency due to local, religious, or gambling laws.
Now a new esports company called EsportsRef.com has found a solution that could well take esports participation and popularity to a new level.
As opposed to “competing directly for crypto”, which brings legal and religious issues into play, esports players can instead participate in a mutually-agreed “skill-based” game to win a special ESR NFT token prize. T
The esportsref solution will offer users the option to pay a “game entry fee” to play for an NFT token prize. Both players pay the entry fee to esportsref to compete for the prize, and esportsref will accept both HPB coin or ESR tokens as the entry fee.
In this unique scenario, the winner will receive a special, automatically-minted ERC721-compliant NFT token. Unlike HRC20 ESR tokens, each HRC721 ESR NFT prize token is unique and can only be generated by esporstref NFT token generator smart contract. The token will have
specific metadata attached to it, including the total “game entry fee” value agreed by the players.
Bringing to the NFT world to the esports world looks like a match made in heaven and one that will boost the already-burgeoning esports industry even further.
