We are seeing a worldwide decrease in exercise because legacy sports can’t compete with video gaming and social media. Skyball can change that.
Like many sports, Skyball has the potential to improve people’s lives via exercise, entertainment, and opportunities. These benefits are best achieved when young people are introduced to the sport.
Nick Paterson
Playing video games has been recognized as an ‘electronic sport’ (“eSport”), and the audience for eSports have expanded from a few million since 2011 when twitch.tv started it’s streaming service for videogamers to hundreds of millions. Younger people are especially drawn to the eSports. NewZoo, a source of eSports market data, reports that percentage of leisure time devote to videogaming is 18% for Gen X, 21% for Millennials, and 25% for Gen Z.
In 2016, 160 million occasional viewers tuned into esports along with 121 million enthusiasts, a total of 281 million. In 2017, the League of Legends final drew 33 million views while the NBA finals drew only 20 million. In 2022, NewZoo predicts that global viewership will total 921 million. That’s a compound annual growth rate of 21% from 2016 to 2022.
What explains the growing popularity of eSports? eSports may be more accessible and more interesting to play and watch than traditional ‘Real World’ Sports. Playing ‘real world’ team sports involves organizing leagues; and professional teams with the most money contract with the best players so contest outcomes are somewhat predictable (and less interesting to watch).
Tens of billions of dollars has been spent on facilities for legacy sports. These need to be adapted to a new generation of sports.
A sedentary lifestyle has been shown to contribute to health problems such as obesity. The more that ‘real world’ sports fail to compete with eSports, the more that such health problems will grow.
