In The Online Arena

With more prize money, tournaments and acceptance, the competitive online gaming industry is coming into its own.

- Naandika Tripathi

At the Asian Games 2018, which ended in September, India won bronze in a unique category, though it didn’t count in the official medal tally: It was in the collectible card-based video game tournament Hearthstone. Tirth Mehta (23) from Gujarat created history of sorts by winning the country’s first ever e-sports medal. (Hong Kong won gold, while Indonesia won silver.)

Short for electronic sports, e-sports involves competitive team based gaming of spectator sports with ranked matches. Basically, the games are like traditional real life sports but are played online.

They are different from online gaming because while gaming is mostly steeped in entertainment and leisure, e-sports is held at competitive national and global levels. It takes the form of structured, multi-player competitions between professional players.

While e-sports has been around for a few years, of late it has gained popularity and support, with well-known companies and gaming giants holding leagues and tournaments in the Indian market.

U Sports, founded by Ronnie Screwvala and Supratik Sen, with a focus on three sports—kabaddi, e-sports and football—launched a league U Cypher this January. A month-long championship aired on MTV, it had games like Counter Strike Global Offensive (CS:GO), Defense of the Ancients 2 (Dota 2), Tekken7 and Real Cricket 17, and a prize pool of 51 lakh.

“Our main motto is to popularise the sport in India. If you want to make any sport scalable, it needs to succeed on a larger medium, that is television,” says Sen.