Manchester City signs first e-sports player
What's the story
Manchester City has signed their first e-sports player to represent the club at e-sports tournaments. Keiran Brown is 18 year old gamer and will playing the official football game Fifa'16. Fifa'16 has seen a considerable growth as upcoming e-sport because of the Fifa interactive World Cup tournament. Earlier, in May, West Ham signed 24 year old Sean Allen to play for their e-sports team.
Definition
What are e-sports?
Electronic Sports (e-sports) is the competitive playing of sports video games. E-sports are often played in front of live audiences and also broadcast over the internet. The first large scale video game tournament was held on 1st November 1980 by Atari. The tournament had 10,000 participants. Since then various tournaments are held regularly and are typically sponsored by technology companies.
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Major games played
E-sports has a wide range of games spanning across various genres. Most popular among them are Dota, Star Carft 2, League of legends, Half Life: Counter Strike and Football.
South Korea
Hub of e-sports
After 2000, South Korea became the hub of e-sports with various new organizations being formed to encourage the 'cyberathletes'. World Cyber Games, the Intel Extreme Masters and Major League Gaming are few of the major tournaments that were founded and started attracting players and audiences towards cyber games. It is estimated that global e-sports industry generated a revenue of over $700 million in 2015.
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Match Fixing
In 2010, a horrible match fixing scandal broke out in South Korea involving 11 different players. The players had taken huge sum of money and fixed matches. After this incident, the popularity of e-spots in South Korea went down for a certain period.
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eGames at Olympics
International eGames Committee will run a new eGames international gaming tournament which will make its debut at the upcoming Rio Olympics. The competition is backed by the UK government and till now only Britain, Canada, Brazil and US have confirmed their participation.