The Legitimacy of eSports
eSports (the colloquial term for video game competitions) is something that many people don’t consider a legitimate sport. Regardless of the fact that eSports tournaments sell out regularly (sometimes more than NFL and other high visibility sporting events), have prize pools in the range of millions of dollars, and are covered both online and on television channels like ESPN, the legitimacy of eSports is still impossible to convince to the vast majority. A lot of people just don’t understand how something that doesn’t involve physical exertion (or a sports ball) can be a real sport. This notion is changing, however.
Anyway! Games Done Quick Express (GDQx) happened over the weekend at TwitchCon, and while I can go on and on about speedrunning and the GDQ charity marathons, I’ll leave that for another post maybe. The reason I mention the most recent GDQ is because what started as a jarring and annoying commercial break in the middle of a heated Super Mario race turned into something marvelous: Honda has announced a partnership with Team Liquid!
Team Liquid? What’s that?
Good question! Team Liquid is a professional eSports stable with many pro players and teams across games ranging from MOBAs, to strategy, to shooters, and even card games and fighting games. They’re a really really big deal in the eSports world, with sponsorships by Monster Energy, twitch.tv, and many other companies. But they’ve definitely stepped up their game with their partnership with Honda.
What is Honda?
They make cars and other stuff. You’ve probably heard of them.
What does that mean?
Honestly, I’m not sure. The press release is super vague (https://www.teamliquid.com/news/2019/01/24/the-horsepower-of-dreams-team-liquid-partners-with-honda). It seems like they’re getting some custom Honda Odysseys and Honda will also help them make a documentary series? I don’t know exactly.
That said, if a titan of industry like Honda is looking to do any sort of partnership with an eSports group, the legitimacy of eSports can no longer be called into question.
Sources: Team Liquid logo from Team Liquid, Honda Odyssey image from Honda presskit
Congratulations @reverendrum! You have completed the following achievement on the Steem blockchain and have been rewarded with new badge(s) :
You can view your badges on your Steem Board and compare to others on the Steem Ranking
If you no longer want to receive notifications, reply to this comment with the word
STOPTo support your work, I also upvoted your post!
Vote for @Steemitboard as a witness to get one more award and increased upvotes!
I've been a fan of Team Liquid ever since Miracle joined the squad :). Kuroky was a great leader there and GH was great in his position (pos 4). Mind Control is an aggressive offlane.
The thing that made me "off" with them is when they swapped Matumbaman with w33. Made me jumped with OG.
Great post! Upvoted from @scarletreign's curation post.
How dare they trade Matumbaman!? Honestly I haven't kept up with who is who as of late, but it's never fun when people you like get traded off.
Yes, and really big fan of Scarlet's curation initiative as well! Great for the platform and exposure of people's work.
yeah... i've heard this argument before but what else are they supposed to call it? For me, i find esports to be far more entertaining than a vast majority of "real" sports and you can't tell me it is easy for them to cover it either. Those world championships in the FPS games are intense.
Used to love watching the Counter-Strike tournaments, and EVO is always a blast. They're so entertaining.
I'd also try to consider the Magic the Gathering Pro Tours as eSports but they technically aren't electronic. AltSports maybe? Not a great name.
This post was shared in the Curation Collective Discord community for curators, and upvoted and resteemed by the @c-squared community account after manual review.
@c-squared runs a community witness. Please consider using one of your witness votes on us here