LAS VEGAS – Brian Mirakian understands the potential and the current reality of esports. His company builds the glimmering arenas where League of Legends and Dota 2 competitions attract global celebrity teams and fans for events that are streamed around the planet.
Mirakian is also a sports bettor, a dabbler on the apps that are available at home in Kansas.
If there was to be a person bullish on the intersection of esports and sports betting, a gambling industry pet topic and viral big idea for years, it would be Mirakian.
He is. But there’s still a lot to do, he said.
“I think if the right competitive integrity, boundaries, guardrails are established, that it can be viable,” he told Gaming Today at the Sports Entertainment Innovation Conference in July. “There are natural sorts of challenges just with digital entertainment that don’t exist in a physical stick-and-ball type of sport that have to be taken into consideration.
“And I think that’s some of the issues certainly people that are trying to figure this all have encountered. But …
“I believe that it does have a viable future. And, and I do think candidly, it’s an important part of increasing the popularity around a number of these competitive esports.”
Various states, including New Jersey and Nevada, have sanctioned wagering on esports competitions with restrictions, but usually just for major events. COVID-19 paralyzing almost all other sports rekindled the notion of esports as gambling fodder in a world under quarantine. But with horse racing and Eastern European table tennis proving more popular for bettors seeking constant stimulation, esports’ time was once again not right.
There are options in some states and on some apps. Colorado has certified a raft of esports betting markets and DraftKings currently has posted odds for the League of Legends World Championship.
Daily fantasy site PrizePicks recently launched an esports “educational hub,” claiming in a release that esports ranks fourth on the site in fan engagement.
But esports betting circa 2024 remains a niche among niches. In Colorado, it sits somewhere in the catch-all “other” category on revenue reports that detail handle by sport. NASCAR and numerous other oddities in the “other” zone combine to account for 3-4% of the amount bet there each month.
Esports Cannot Be Regulated Like Other Games
“I’ve literally said the industry is struggling…”
xQc’s ideas on how to “revolutionize” esports
– Add live betting to enhance viewer interaction
– Expand co-streaming and watch parties
– Focus on the social aspect of watching esports pic.twitter.com/bVXaqVA5TJ— Dexerto (@Dexerto) September 10, 2024
Some believe that game publishers like Nintendo or Blizzard Entertainment, which have proven loathe to have their intellectual property pored over by organizers of NCAA esports competitions, would be unlikely to humor the kind of scrutiny gambling regulators would demand to expand esports betting.
“Fundamentally, esports is different in the sense that all of these respective video games are [intellectual property] of a Riot or Blizzard,” said Travis Yang, the director of esports competition at Syracuse.
“They own these games. They have full control over them, whereas the sport of basketball, the sport of baseball, nobody owns that. You get to build whatever you want around that.”
Yang added in trying to set up intercollegiate competitions, “Sometimes Nintendo does not communicate at all, in terms of basic questions.”
Mirakian said game developers would need to be “incentivized” to participate more broadly. There’s plenty of cash as an incentive now, he said.
“Looking at it from a competition model, [game developer] Valve and Dota 2, they’re putting on a major championship event in Seattle, and you’re talking about a $10 million prize pool,” Mirakian said. “If a publisher like that, just as an example, were to be involved with DraftKings and you have mobile betting in sort of partnership so that they could create competitive standards and integrity, this is kind of an interesting thing to consider.
“But I think it would take a joint collaboration, most likely between a publisher and a reputable mobile betting platform to really come together to solve that kind of question.”
Minor Factor a Major Factor in Esports Betting’s Future
Companies like Bayes Esports and Oddin provide a framework for esports odds and integrity to satisfy sportsbooks and state regulators in the US. Oddin landed its third sports betting license in the US in July, with West Virginia joining Colorado and New Jersey.
Jessica Feil, the vice president of regulatory affairs and compliance at OpenBet, a sports betting tech firm, acknowledged at a 2022 sports betting conference that esports is an “important thing” for the gambling industry but underscored how difficult it will be to manage as a market.
“How do you protect the integrity of a game that’s played on a platform, on software that is managed by a game publisher who has no tie-in to the sports betting business necessarily?” she asked. “There’s some really complicated issues at play there, but I think to those who can sort of untie that knot and figure out where the opportunity is, you’re going to see a big growth opportunity.
“There’s a lot there and a good way to reach a new demographic, but there’s going to be some really thorny questions around it, too.”
Mitigating the fact that some professional esports athletes are minors is also a concern. States do not allow betting markets for competitions – like high school sports or the Little League World Series – where players are not adults.
“A lot of the players are literally children. So you see prohibitions on betting on esports where the majority of the participants are underage, which is reasonable because we need to protect those players and those participants,” Feil said.
The vast majority of the 40 US jurisdictions with legal sports betting have a minimum wagering age of 21. And even though a 2024 study asserted that the average age of an esports fan is 33, there could be regulatory resistance to expanding sports betting markets in a competition widely perceived as dominated by minors.
Meanwhile, the esports community keeps waiting for all sorts of watershed moments.
“I’m waiting for the day where it’s mainstream to have esports in a sports bar,” said Joey Gawrysiak, the executive director of esports at Syracuse, “where I can go and hang out in a restaurant and yes, there’s [soccer] on, or there’s UFC or whatever else might be on there, but there’s Smash Brothers as well and some major competition is going on and I can eat some dang chicken wings and drink a beer and watch some Smash Brothers.
“We’re getting there. It’s coming sooner and sooner, and I can’t wait.”
And one day, Gawrysiak might grab the phone and tap out a Smash Brothers parlay.
But might have to wait a bit longer for that.
About the Author
