A Patent for a new Esports

Figure 1

Esports has grown fast. Global tournaments are being played (League of Legends, CounterStrike, …) and remote audiences for those can garner tens millions of fans. Arenas have been built in many cities for teams to compete in, with seating for hundreds of fans and, of course, bandwidth to broadcast games to vast remote audiences. Colleges like UC Irvine have established courses in esports, acknowledging an intense interest in this as a professional activity by students.

But the story of esports is just beginning. Consider a typical esports event. A multiplayer game is played between 2 teams in the same room. Each player is on a very powerful PC. The game is a combat game, fighting the other team in a 3d world, whilst looking for prizes. The world is totally imaginary. All visuals of the game exist only in a server. But the key aspect is an audience watching gamers play. Some audience might be in the same room (arena is the preferred term), but most watch on the net. The audience defines esports.

The remote audience pays for esports. Akin to how a TV audience pays for Monday Night Football and the Rose Bowl game.

Separately, we saw the rise of 2 globally successful AR (Augmented Reality) games — Ingress and Pokemon Go. Made by Niantic, a joint venture of Nintendo and Google. Both games are scavenger hunts, played with smartphones in public areas. The smartphones are a crucial feature. There are hundreds of millions (maybe a billion) of these. Phones are not provided with the game; you use your own phone. This contributed massively to the uptake of the games, especially Pokemon Go. Players number hundreds millions.

What is underappreciated is that both games have very little in the way of audiences. Pokemon Go is de facto player-only. Discussions about the next great esports game or a successor to Pokemon Go largely ignore each other. They are seen as simply too different.

We have another view. In December 2020, we were awarded a US patent, Linket, esports and a theme park. It takes esports and applies it to a game like Pokemon Go. Instead of a game in a public area, it happens inside an area, like a theme park or an esports arena. Doing so allows special effects from custom equipment that cannot be kept in a public area.