League of Legends has changed e-sports forever

Now I know what you’re thinking, e-sports is a joke, how can I watch a bunch of people playing a video game? At first I was skeptical too. As a long time traditional sport fan, e-sports seemed just silly. There was no real backing and not enough money in the scene. That has all changed within just the past year in specifically the League of Legends scene.

On June 30, 2015 Mark Cuban invested $7 million dollars into a startup called Unikrn focused on e-sports betting. That’s the same billionaire entrepreneur who owns the Dallas Mavericks and one of the “sharks” on ABC’s Shark Tank which a recent JMU alumni was on (it didn’t go so hot for the JMU alum unfortunately). Nearly half a year after Cuban invested millions into the scene, Rick Fox bought a spot to compete in North America’s League of Legends Championship Series (NA LCS). The three time NBA champion created a team to compete this season.

The team is aptly named Echo Fox. Fox has already admitted that his business venture is “equal parts business and pleasure” as he has been a continuous fan of League of Legends. Echo Fox is not the only team in the NA LCS to have the backing of big name investors. Immortals, currently the top team in NA, is funded by a venture capital that includes Steve Kaplan, owner of the Memphis Grizzlies, and Linkin Park, the famous rock band. Yet another team, NRG Esports, is owned by two co-owners of the Sacramento Kings.

2013 World Championship in Staples Center

E-sports is here to stay despite what many  traditional sports fans may think and it’s a lot closer than you think. Here at JMU we have three teams that competed in the 2015 North American Collegiate Cup. The cup is exactly what it sounds like, a competition for any team of college students. The goal? To win $100,000 in scholarships and hopefully achieve every teenager’s dream of playing video games for a living. There are professional players that first started in this cup.

Now I know while we were growing up, playing video games as a job seemed like a pipe dream. It was inconceivable to make a decent living playing a game. With all the money flooding into the scene this has changed. Players are able to make a living and provide for themselves by solely playing these video games. The scene is still relatively new so not many player salaries have been officially released nor are they required to. A North American Challenger Series (NA CS) team, Ember, became the first team to release their player’s salaries and every single player made at least $70,000 in base salary and bonuses. Note that the NA CS is something like a lower league that plays to get into the main league being NA LCS. This is sort of like the minor leagues in baseball and the 2. Bundesliga, Liga Adelante, or the Football League in soccer. Now there have been a lot of speculation that these salaries were inflated and these players were being overpaid. But even so $70,000 is almost double the average salary of a K-12 teacher. Another Korean player, Easyhoon, was a highly contested free agent this offseason. Easyhoon was a substitute player for one of the top teams in the World. After a 3 way bidding war, his salary is nearly $860,000. That’s not a typo. His salary is nearly one million dollars. I would venture to say this young man could make a decent living for himself.

2015 NA LCS Finals in Madison Square Garden

For those of you who want to learn more about the game itself, the webpage for the game and the company behind it is here. If you also wanted to see what all the hype is about their YouTube has previous games and live streams current games Thursday/Friday at noon and Saturday/Sunday at 3 PM. There is also fantasy for LCS and I run a blog catered toward professional esports.