Esports battles on in the clouds via online games
With sports coming to a grinding halt during these unprecedented times, there’s one sport that has continued unabated. Thanks to its digital nature, Electronic Sports allow athletes to connect to their competitors directly through the cloud, all while staying safe at home.
Electronic Sports, referred to as Esports, is the competitive play of video games. Gazetted as the 70th Sri Lankan sport by the Sports Ministry in September last year, Esports has been recognised as the fastest growing sport in Sri Lanka based on its growing number of participants and spectators.
With a following in the millions and tournament viewership numbers overtaking some popular traditional sports in the country, Esports is on its way to becoming a top three sports in the coming years. Globally, Esports viewership is estimated to overtake traditional sports viewership by 2024, with global millennials already watching video games and Esports content more than traditional sports today.
Esports will be a medal sport at the 2022 Asian Games in Hangzhou, China, having made its debut as a demonstration sport at the Asian Games 2018, where the Sri Lankan national Esports team represented the South Asian region in the title StarCraft 2. Esports athlete Amruth ‘AmyPie’ Alfred beat competitors from Pakistan and the Maldives to secure a qualifying spot in Indonesia.
“What’s different about Esports is you can connect digitally to each other without going anywhere. If you have an internet connection even on a mobile phone, you can connect and compete with your opponent physically while you stay at home. The number of people who are actually sitting at home and playing and watching these events have increased because a lot more people are basically at home with not much else to do,” said Raveen Wijayatilake, CEO and Founder of Gamer.LK which has been promoting Esports since 2007.
Gamer.LK decided to cancel Sri Lanka Cyber Games – the largest physical Esports tournament in the country – in early March where 10,000 participants and spectators were expected to gather over three days. Plans to stage the InGameEsports South Asia Cup last month in partnership with the National Olympic Committee of Sri Lanka were also scuttled because of the pandemic.
With physical events off the table, Gamer.LK has moved competitions online and currently running multiple tournaments with over 3,000 Esports athletes connecting to their matches from home.
“We were planning to conduct physical tournaments such as Mercantile Esports Championship, Inter-University Esports Championship and the Inter-School Esports Championship this year. All those three events we have basically put on hold because we are not sure what the situation will be. They are physical events but we are basically organising online events instead,” said Wijayatilake, the founding President of the Sri Lanka Esports Association.
The events are Red Bull Fight or Flight, Samsung Online Esports Showdown and Play From Home live streams powered by Sri Lanka Telecom which has a reach of over half a million and racked up 180,000+ views. Red Bull Fight or Flight matches received over 300,000 views across six days of competition with the tournament climaxing on April 11 where the best PUBG Mobile squads battled it out for a prize pool of Rs. 250,000 presented by Gamer.LK.
“The Showdown event we are organising will be going on till middle of May. It has 11 titles, as in athletics it has different events. The Samsung event is dedicated to web-based television viewers. Instead of TV stream it will be on YouTube and social media so people can tune into anytime and watch. It is very similar to television but on the internet. Now we basically started our events online,” he explained.
Online or video gaming is ideally attractive to get millions of Sri Lankans on the social distancing band-wagon since video games requires no physical contact, allows you to maintain social interaction remotely and provides endless entertainment.
“We plan on hosting more popular games such as Minecraft, COD Mobile, Free Fire and Call of Duty 4 which covers a significant percentage of gamers in Sri Lanka. Our target base is youngsters. The biggest age category of gamers is 18 to 24, 19 to 24 and 13 to 17,” added Wijayatilake.
Team Erbiv champions
The winners of the Red Bull Fight or Flight in which 1,200 participants signed up were nA | ERBIV, while WG | XHOUSE and WG 24K GOLD clinched second and third place respectively. Over 2,000 participants signed up for the Samsung Online Esports Showdown.
“It all started for us as a game to just play for the sake of playing it but then it wasn’t an ordinary game. It was very competitive with all online players around the globe matched in one match and we got to fight for survival in order to obtain the Winner – Winner Chicken Dinner (‘that’s what we call when we win after the game’),” said Vishwa Adeepa, captain of the winning team who created a record by winning three qualification matches in a row.
“Red Bull Fight or Flight was one of the major tournaments being hosted by Gamer.LK was very much competitive in terms of the teams that were at the grand final and also making our way through the qualifiers was indeed a tough challenge for us. Red Bull Fight or Flight 2020 wasn’t with the ordinary settings which made it even more competitive where we had to play what you call Advanced Room Settings,” he said when asked about the tournament.
“Winning never comes easy in a major tournament, with so many tough and skilled players out there. We, as a team, has always had our differences but we managed to put aside all our ego and attitude and play as one team which we formed two weeks ago. ErbivVish has always found ways on how to guide and lead the team and make sure we were able to always find a loophole among those competitors to become champions,” said Vishwa.
Team Erbiv consisted of two mixed squads which used to play as Captains and FRags, the team players being Vishwa ‘Vish’ Adeepa, Nimna ‘Lucif’ Keshantha, Gaveshka ‘Root’ Lakshan and Thushan ‘Bitcoin’ Prabodha.
“All of us were very well experienced in PUBG mobile (PUBG mobile being a Battle Royal Mobile Game) as we have been playing it as competitive and non-competitive for two years now,” he said.
Asked what he thinks of Esports, Vishwa who is a professional gamer said: “According to me Esports isn’t just E-Gaming. It’s a platform that lets players to connect with new friends and keeping their differences apart, they get to have fun no matter the caste or religion. Esports has always been a dream to us and we wish to achieve the highest end as possible through Esports.”
“Team Erbiv, as I mentioned before, was a team we put together two weeks ago before the tournament and ever since then our coordination as always been on point. That being said the top two Fraggers of the Red Bull Fight or Flight 2020 were Erbiv Root and Erbiv Bitcoin with Erbiv Root being the MVP of the tournament with 29 kills,” he added.
“A special mention and a big thank you to our Esports organisation Noob Alliance for consistently supporting and helping us and the other teams at nA. The practice sessions, the constant advices, the friendly admins, and the international scrims which were all together were very helpful for us inorder to reach the top spot. Last but not least, I would like to say that Team Captains and FRag were meant to be reborn as Erbiv to be crowned ‘champions’,” said Vishwa Adeepa, skipper of Team Erbiv, who are engaged battling in the International Corona League finals, the only Sri Lankan team to have qualified for the grand finals.