Inside the $70M Tournament: Esports World Cup CEO Ralf Reichert on Building the Olympics of Gaming

Sure. I mean, look, gaming has become the largest entertainment medium in the world. Everyone under the age of 40 has played video games or plays video games. So it's speaking to three billion regular video gamers in the world. And the esports World Cup is the largest competition because it unites all the different games. There are fantastic tournaments out there for League of Legends, the Worlds, for Dota, for Counter Strike, Call of Duty, but the Esports World Cup is the only place where the 24 best games come together and 2,000 players from over 200 clubs, fighting for $70 million of prize money. So it really unites the global gaming and esports industry.

So I mean it's only the second iteration, right? The first year was getting it off the ground and making sure we don't get it wrong. Luckily it was very successful. Year 2 is really about telling that story, and that story is multifold. First, this is really the backdrop for this generation of young athletes to become stars. Basketball had its Michael Jordan moment, right? Which became greater than the sport itself. We're really trying to be that platform for the players in esports as well. Number two, it's really a bridge from the east to the west. The video game industry is a little bit separated in these two sides and we can bring that all together. Last but not least, it's about the next generation of fans. Every sport is only as successful as its fans, and we had 500 million viewers last year and we're clearly aiming to break a billion fans. That's maybe not this year, but that is the trajectory. So telling the story across all of these three things and reaching a larger amount of people to make the sport more popular. That's step one and two and hopefully the next steps.

Absolutely. I mean if you go 10 years back, you probably would have like 200 million esports fans where we're now reaching the billion. If you look at players themselves, it has been going through the roof. When I was young, 20-25 years ago, when this was starting, there were tens of millions of players in the world and then it became hundreds and now we're talking about 3 billion people playing video games on a regular basis. So this is continuing to grow three, four, five, six, 7% a year. On an already big number, it's stacking up. And the generational change, the youth today, there's literally no one across the world who doesn't have access to a smartphone and that is the basis to play. So this number is just going to continue to keep growing for the next decades.

I think it's actually accessibility to start with. We as human beings, the first thing we did after we could have enough food, a cave and fire, we started to play. If you look at the very early findings, dice, humans created dice is one of the first things. So the idea to play something together then went on chess, a 200-year-old game. This evolved, evolved, evolved. It was board games, they became more complex, cards, and video games is just a digital version of this which is much more accessible and has an incredibly higher complexity. And with the smartphone boom that started in 2007, this really became the largest thing in the world.