The growth of computers and the development of the Internet have brought great changes in esports, as they are involved in many aspects of daily life ( Seo and Jung, 2016). One of the biggest advantages of esports is that people can enjoy it anywhere, anytime, and with anyone, all over the world, as they are free from time and place restrictions over the Internet ( Reitman et al., 2020). In simple terms, it refers to competitive professional video games and is equivalent to other terms such as cyber athletics or professional games -pro-gamers- ( Hiltscher and Scholz, 2017). Practical implications and future research directions are discussed.Įsports stands for “electronic sports” and involves an alternative way of sports assisted by electronic systems and mediated by human-computer interfaces ( Hamari and Sjöblom, 2017). Forecasts showed significant growth for each region.

Also, a positive relationship between Google trends in esports and the games market revenues is noted.

Predictive analytics with MS Power BI revealed a positive correlation between GDP per capita and market revenues and players in European and North American countries, while in Asia was just the opposite.

The games market revenues, total number of players, Google trends data, GDP per capita and online population were studied as possible key influencers to explain the industry's growth. For this purpose, descriptive, correlational, and forecasting analyses were used to assess the relationships among key variables associated with the growth of the gaming industry and to show different possibilities to address the data using data analytics. The purpose of this study is to show an overview of the recent evolution of the gaming market in representative countries in Eastern Asia, Western Europe, and North America during 2017–2019, and the corresponding growth projections for the next five years. Esports has seen a phenomenal explosion in popularity in recent years, gaining increasing interest from the media, sports, and technology industries.

Download rise of gaming industry