CHAPTER 2
LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1 Electronic sports industry overview 2.1.1 E-sports definition E-sport is a kind of confrontational competition that based on competitive computer games; it takes information technology and hardware/software as the core and equipment respectively and is regulated by a unified competition rule. Nowadays e-sport is becoming a new sport and people can exercise to improve their thinking ability, reaction ability, mind and limbs coordination ability and willpower as well as team spirit.
2.1.2 The significance of e-sport In addition to the economic utility we will talk about, it is understandable to say e-sport is just a pile of high-level codes. But the charm of e-sport is its permanent sport spirit of pursuit for excellence and going beyond themselves, which are consistent with the spirit of the traditional sports. The popularity of the Internet and the rapid development of information technology give birth to many new kinds and ways of sports, and e-sport is an important manifestation. Especially that the continuous development of its concept and connotation plays a unique role in developing and enriching sports events and spirits.
2.1.3 Classification of e-sport E-sports are generally considered as online games, but this is not the fact. E-sports contain more games on electronic equipment, and you may unknowingly become a member of e-sport.
2.1.4 Current E-sports market scale Including: 1, tournament revenue: including event tickets, peripherals, membership fees and sponsorship, advertising and other revenue generated from the event. 2, derived e-sport revenue: including the prize from participating tournament, and the revenue from e-sport clubs. 3, e-sport revenue: the total amount of consumption of e-sport
2.1.5 Tournament Domestic tournament includes: NEST (National Electronic Sports Tournament), which is sponsored by the State Sports General Administration of Sports Information Center; Dota2:i League, G League, supernova open and ISS China Internet bar super
International tournament includes: DOTA2 International Invitational, The world finals, the season championship, all-star game held by LOL Riot Games. WESG (world e-sports games, WCG (World Cyber Games), CPL (Cyber athlete Professional League) and ESWC (Electronic Sports World Cup) are known as the world's three major tournament. 2.1.6 The relationship between E-sport with P.E. This section describes the relationship between electronic sports, physical education and online games. In March 2013, after the General Administration of sport decided to set up the national team of e-sport, He Chao commented on his micro-blog:” could e-sport be sports? If one can win Olympic champion only by playing games, then what we have been training so hard is nothing, why not just play games?” His comment triggered heated discussion of Internet users, and also attracted the attention of mainstream media on e-sport for the first time. Many people can’t understand e-sport just like He Chao. Electronic game is regarded as the spirit opium for a long time, so it is incredible that e-sport was named by the State Sports General Administration as the 78th national sports project early in 2008.
In my opinion, on the one hand, e-sport are generalized sports, similar to I-go, mahjong, but not the same with narrow physical confrontation (basketball, javelin, etc.) games; on the other hand, e-sport may have some certain characteristics of online games, but it is not online games.
What is physical education? According to the definition of Baidu Encyclopedia: physical education (abbreviated PE or P.E.), is a complex social cultural phenomenon, which takes physical and mental activities as the basic means to promote all-round development and the improve of physical quality and the overall level of education, enhance physical fitness, improve the sports ability, improve the way of life and improve the quality of life a conscious, purposeful and organized social activities. As early in 1979, Alan Gutman summed up the seven characteristics of "modern sports" in his publication " From the ceremony to record: the essence of modern sports" as: secularism, equality, professional, rational (organization, rules), bureaucracy (rules and management) and quantitative (accumulation of data (such as several game strategy)) and the pursuit of record (a combination of quantization and win and beyond, to become the best desire – this is the concept). The emergence of the sports comes from human instincts the needs to fit social environment at that time. Just like that the public regard Chinese chess and Mahjong as the sports, the emergence and development of e-sport is also in line with the modern society characteristics.
Another article named "era calls for humanistic sports values" also describes that the entire human sports are developed in confrontation between people-oriented sports values and non-human tools of rational values. The actual development maintains a certain tension in the opposing pole, either tend to the former or tend to the latter, depending on the value orientation of mainstream status in social life and changes with the progress of social civilization and social mainstream values change. In addition to the development of science and technology in modern society, accelerating development of urbanization lead to the shrink of children's entertainment space and ways, leading to the phenomenon that children choose computer as the main carrier of entertainment. In this way, online games become more and more popular. The main reason why most people hate online games is that a lot of children indulge in the network and their leanings are delayed, of course, for children, the use of computer requires parental guidance and government control. However, what must be pointed out is that the essence of online games is no purpose, no organization.
2.2 live e-sport industry overview 2.2.1 Definition and mode of live e-sport There is no official definition for live e-sport yet. A popular argument is that internet provides anchors with websites, as a platform, to conduct webcast. Anchors can make use of subtitle and comments to interact with users.
Webcast breaks the tradition of the past relatively simple content delivery method, and increased sales by means of real-time interactive content interaction; therefore, the continuous diffusion of content plays a pivotal role in its future development.
2.2.2 Cost of direct broadcast platform structure
Cost of bandwidth Cost of content Cost of operation occupy 40% occupy 40% occupy 20%
Cost of signed professional player and Cost of copyright anchors 2.2.3 Industry value chain
2.2.4 Market situation Currently the most successful webcast platform in foreign countries is twitch. Twitch is a real-time streaming video platform focusing on the game-related content webcast. Twitch has more than 38 million visitors per month, and there are more than 20 million gamers gathered in this platform, each user accesses the site for about 1.5 hours a day. The platform supports the languages from 28 countries and regions, including Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese.
There are mainly 5 webcast platforms in Chin, namely, DouYu, Panda, HuYa, LongZhu, and Zhanqi-TV. DouYu-TV currently occupies the largest market share and obtains the most audiences.
Panda-TV is the second most popular platform created by Wang Sicong. ZhanQi-TV is the product of the Tencent. Although China’s webcast platforms are still in their primary stages, the platforms are still throwing money to sign up famous anchors to promote its platform. Watching the webcast of favorite anchors after study and work every day has become a fixed form of entertainment in most of the young people's daily life On December 6, 2016, the Daily Economic News reported that the Huayi Brothers failed to exquisite Beijing Hero mutual entertainment Inc. On the reasons for the failure, Huayi said: “ultimately failed to reach an agreement on the overall valuation of the assets of the reorganization and the transaction price." According to its stock price before the suspension, the market value of Beijing Hero Entertainment reached 15 billion Yuan—just 2 years after listing with an increase of 6 billion Yuan compared with when Huayi Brothers first acquisition 20% of its shares one year ago. Although Huayi tasted the sweetness, its growth rate is significantly higher than expected.
According to the data from the Dutch market research firm Newzoo, revenue from the global e-sport market in 2015 is $ 325 million based on five dimensions of media copyright, merchandise & ticket sales, online advertising, brand sponsorship and other game promotion. Revenue from online advertising increased the most with an increment of about 99.6% compared to 2014. Newzoo predicts that the revenue of e-sport in 2017 is expected to grow 43% to 463 million dollars, of which the Chinese market will account for 15%, namely 69.45 million US dollars. From a fan's economic point of view,comparing E-sports and traditional sports makes sense to a certain extent. As the Esports Economy matures, draws more advertisers and increases its merchandise and ticketing revenues directly from consumers, the average annual revenue per fan will continue to rise toward that of traditional sports. In 2016,Newzoo anticipates $3.5 per Esports fan, still almost five times lower than that of basketball($15 per year) but up from $2.2 in 2014. Using a conservative scenario, Newzoo estimates the annual average revenue per esports fan will reach around $6.0 by 2019.
In the number of participants, Newzoo predicts that the number of global e-sport audiences in 2017 will reach 256 million, of which 131 million are e-sport enthusiasts, and 125 million are general audiences. Another data from the “Superdata research” shows that the number of e-sport audience in 2015 increased to 188 million, more than 1/3 of the e-sport fans choose to watch e-Sports match because of favorite players and teams the United States. SuperData research predicts worldwide Esports viewership will increase 14% in 2016, reach about $2.14 million, 85% of men, from 18 to 24 year-olds are 46%.
The "2016 China Electronic Sports Industry Research Report" issued by IResearch shows that in 2017, the overall size of the e-sport users is expected to reach 170 million Yuan, and the main drivers of future e-sport users overall size growth are as follows: besides MOBA, the number of other types of e-sport game users grows; a large number of mobile e-sport games bring mobile e-sport users.
As mentioned in e-sport industry in the Q2 report, "Le Jing media (NiceTV) combined with PLU, TGA mobile, sports hero Grand Prix, have done the multi business event integrated binding, the establishment of VSPN, to create the world's first mobile e-sport event operators." This will be a future of almost all aspects of e-sport industry chain organization, and will have a positive impact on the mobile e-sport industry matures. Mobile electronic games and the rapid growth of 2.1.6 as this paper mentioned, all fit with today's social environment (improvement of the intelligent mobile phone LCD screen, collocation of 4G, WIFI and mobile phone performance etc.). In addition, according to the survey results, 2015 e-sport user group sex ratio: 77.7% male, 22.3% female. The income：
Education level and Occupation distribution
The prospect of economic benefits and rapid growth of the market has greatly exceeded people's imagination. With such a huge market size, it’s reasonable for the game company to invest in the live platform. On the one hand, the highlighted huge business opportunities in the field can be explored. On the other hand, it is more conducive to its existing game development, distributions and media operations, and the formation of games, video and other multi-level user complementarity, thereby attracting more players and enhancing profitability.
The following is the financial situation from www.qianzhan.com from2014 to 2015. 2.3 research hypothesis One of the most spectacular events is the involvement in the industry of the so-called “National Husband" Sicong Wang One of the most spectacular events is the involvement in the industry of the so-called “National Husband" Sicong Wang, chairman of Beijing PuSi investment Co.Ltd and director of WanDa Group. On September 5, 2015, he announced that the "Panda-TV" live e-sport platform will be deployed, and he will serve as the CEO of Panda-TV. Panda-TV hired many famous e-sports anchors like RuoFeng and XiaoZhi(Yang Fengzhi), and Panda-TV even offered a certain amount of shares to the latter. As one of the most famous web celebrities, Wang SiCong started the club era of those born with a silver spoon in their mouths, which is the first wave of the reform of the e-sport clubs in China, but it spawned more impetuous industry atmosphere as well. The influx of capital allows the clubs to offer higher salaries which increased from 2,000-3,000 Yuan/month to about 10,000-20,000 Yuan/month. The emergence of hundreds of thousands of signing fees and transfer fees made the whole industry atmosphere more panic. That is, you play the game in this team today, but you do not know if the team still exists tomorrow. Maybe your teammates are still there, but the name or the boss of the team have changed.
An article named “Wang Sicong's gaming ambition – Panda-TV join in live e-sport platform melee" pointed out that, before Wang Sicong announced the birth of Panda-TV, a number of anchor job-hopping events took place in DouYu-TV. Later in the evening of September 14, DouYu-TV put forward an announcement to condemn a rival platform’s malicious competition behaviors. The announcement pointed out that in order to attract more attention, the rival platform lured away a number of famous anchors from DouYu-TV by making abnormal offers, moreover, the platform even promised to settle lawsuits for the anchors who breached the contract, which had brought the whole industry and DouYu-TV with a lot of negative influences. Later, DouYu-TV prosecuted these anchors, and the court had accepted and placed it on file.
Hypothesis 1: the massive influx of funds has a negative effect on the development of e-sport industry.
Content is the main part of webcast platform and the anchor is the core of content, so what is the reason for the massive job hopping between platforms?
（1）Operating mode
In addition to the economic effects of Twitch been acquired, most webcast platforms establish user stickiness through their popular anchors and expand the publicity of the platform by broadcasting and commenting games like LOL and DOTA, then domestic broadcast platform soon rises in recent years. Domestic platforms are so obsessed with quantitative standard like “flow” and “rank” that they create false prosperity through fraud and abnormal investment, what’s more, once they starts investing heavily, they have to keep morbid investment otherwise the flow will decline and result in a dilemma.
Popular anchors have larger audience group, and larger audience group brings economic benefits to the platform and anchors. More audience means more gifts, and more gifts means higher ranks of the anchor and higher exposure. Therefore, well-known anchor becomes more important for the platform and it is no wonder that platforms invest more money to compete fiercely for anchors. The competition between platforms has made anchors the biggest beneficiary. During the grab for famous anchors between platforms, the price to sign up an anchor gets higher and higher, resulting in a new word – millionaire anchors. Here are the prices of some well-known anchors.
(2) Profit model
That prospective industry Research Institute released "electronic athletics business model -- European and American Model VS South Korea Model”, which mentions that e-sport is mainly sponsored by computer hardware and software vendors in the United States, their main motivation to invest continuously is to increase the visibility of their products in related fields through the game and improve the market share of high-end games, therefore in Europe mode, sponsors are more concerned about expanding the influence of the hardware and software on high-end consumer and fancier level game player. While the revenue of electronic sports industry in South Korea mainly rely on broadcasting and advertising , rather than rely on more sponsors, which makes the Korean e-sport game business model very dependent on the degree of concern, but also rely more on e-sport video and other derivative products sales.
First financial daily article published in August 27, 2014 B03 an article:" Capital blows live e-sport bubble”, which mentioned that the value of the anchor has exceeded the game and the platform itself according to the current value of millions of anchor. The most profitable mode of webcast platform in recent stage is the props mode and fans rewards, but it is difficult to achieve the expectation of the platform. There are four ways for the game industry to profit, advertising, games intermodal, membership subscription and virtual props. Platforms generally starts to collect lots of traffic flow by famous anchors, and then think of ways to achieve large-scale realization. Concerning the user experience, most platforms don’t advertise at all in case advertisements drive users away, thus advertising revenue is basically negligible. Since Chinese consumers have not yet developed the habits, the membership subscription is far less. As a result, 100 million investments can only sign up the rights of some anchors to live for a year and the business reward value of these anchors are even less than 10% of the investment.
Hypothesis 2: Network anchors’ tens of millions annual salary have brought a lot of pressure for webcast platforms
Although the high salaries and “Panda-TV" founded by Wang Si Cong have attracted a lot of attention. An article that records the work status and salary of a famous network anchor (Strawberry) circulated on the Internet:
November 2011, he entered e-sport industry. Salary: 3,000 Yuan/month; March 2012, became a regular worker. Salary: 4,000 Yuan/month; November 2012, won the world champion. Salary: 7,000 Yuan/month; May 2014, Salary: 10,000 Yuan/month; June 2014, Salary: 20,000 Yuan/month. September 2014, retired and became a network anchor, Salary: 5 million Yuan/year. Exaggerated but it is a fact. “Compared with working in e-sport industry, being an anchor is really much more relaxed" said Zhang Zhi Cheng. “When being a professional e-sport player, I was thinking about how to win the game all the time and my rest time were assigned in line with the requirements of the team. When the training is of high intensity, it’s common that I only sleep four to five hours a day, and my mental and physical status was very poor. In contrast, game anchors usually have less mental and physical pressure and higher income, the job is very attractive”. Zhang Zhi Cheng admits: “The salary of top E-sports player, no matter he plays DOTA2 or LOL, is around 30,000 Yuan/month. While the monthly income of the game anchors may be ten times or even dozens times more than professional players."
At present, more and more top E-sports players realize this situation, and they will not turn a blind eye, then the situation becomes subtle. A thornier problem is, an E-sports player can live on webcast, then e-sport may become their sideline and no longer important.
A famous network anchor AYi’s cheating reflects more problems, network anchors don’t need to enhance their e-sport ability level to maintain and attract fans any longer, instead, they only need to act and just be a network anchor. In her two years’ webcast time, her best record in the game LOL was just a “platinum support” technical rank. This achievement is clearly not enough to support her fame. So, she hired a top player to play for her so as to lay her position. Thanks to the “good record” and gender, she managed to get a lot attention, and became a famous female network anchor in DouYu TV with tens of millions annual salary.
Hypothesis 3: The savage growth of network anchors’ income affected the normal development of the E-sports industry.
In addition to the above mentioned data fraud and cheating events, in order to obtain huge economic benefits network anchors even broadcast vulgar or even illegal content, and some webcast platforms has repeatedly been exposed with indecent video or other controversial content. For example, in May 2015, a female network anchor forgot to turn off the camera, and broadcasted her bath for nearly two hours; in December 31st the same year, a network anchor broadcasted racing and encountered car accident, causing many injuries. In 2016 a female network anchor’s sash suddenly slipped etc. At present, the webcast contents are uneven in quality. Due to the imperfect of laws and regulations at present, the network anchors only need to change the webcast platform and continue his/her career if his/her broadcast booth is banned.
Another problem is the emergence of subtitle video, although it greatly broadens the information dissemination channels, its negative effect is also very obvious, such as the problem of audiences’ low quality and bad information. The subtitle video achieves real-time interaction among the audiences, audiences may attach real-time comments and the comments would be displayed while watching. In this way, the information is widely spread, but the spread of bad information is very rapid as well. For example, the regional discrimination problem often occurs. Some low quality audiences often speak things like “Everyone in XXX Province is a thief”, unrelated with the webcast content, once these words occur, a heated war of words would be inevitable with baneful influence. Some other audiences like to abuse game anchors, not taking into account the feelings of others at all. A more serious phenomenon is that a part of audiences became "opinion leaders", and once they began to attack the anchors, a lot of audiences follow, but none of which are controlled. It can be seen that there exists a lot of problems in the management of video subtitles. Each technological revolution would bring impact on media management, from the beginning of the Internet era, the public discourse right has been greatly strengthened; everyone is both the receiver and transfer of information. Moreover, the popularity of micro-blog, WeChat, subtitle video and other communication channels push public discourse right to an unprecedented height. This is a huge progress in the communication history, and worthy of alert and reflection of all the new media.
Hypothesis 4, the savage growth of webcast platforms reflects the lack of strong supervision from regulatory authorities.
The influx of thousands of anchors, super stars, and large amount of funds shows the industry’s prosperity to the society, but it may affect the choices of the young. On November 25, 2015, the “City Express” published an article named "12-year-old juvenile network e-sport anchor earns 30,000 Yuan/month ", the article presented: 12-year-old juvenile XiaoXin earn an income of 30,000 Yuan/month through webcast, and his mother has already discontinued his schooling. In the face of a lot of social criticism, his mother argued: "Why should a 12-yeae-old child who is a mater in LOL be criticized but those who do well in piano or chess are called child prodigy? It's not fair!” However, I personally think that there are only few anchors who can earn tens of millions a year; besides, the efforts they pay are unimaginable. In November, 2015, the China Education Daily pointed out that it’s not appreciate to regard the e-sport and webcast industry with tainted glasses and completely deny their positive function just because of their disadvantages. But we must also recognize that childhood is an important stage to learn, and the study of literacy is indispensable, giving up schooling is inadvisable.
Hypothesis 5: The chaos of live E-sports industry has negative impact on the young.