Georgia and eSports

Hello dear reader. As you might have already guessed we will be talking about eSports in Georgia. But we can’t just jump in, because before we do that, we have to talk about each to understand them both individually. First of all, let’s start from eSports. What is it? Why is there e before sports? Well, be patient my dear reader, because I’m going to tell you everything i know about it. E stands for electronic, so eSports means electronic sports. You might be thinking, yea I get it, but so what? What does this mean? It might be nothing for you right now, but for some it is everything. According to Wikipedia, Electronic sport is a term from organized multiplayer video game competitions. The most common video game genres associated with electronic sports are real time strategy, fighting, first person shooter and multiplayer online battle arena. Yes, it is fun but it does not end there. Today, in 2015 eSports is one of the largest and faster growing industries in the world, it already makes more money than filmmaking. Yes, video games make more money than Michael Bay’s blockbusters. This whole power surge began early 2010’s when China decided to fight against stereotypes and they first announced it as a regular type of sports and now they are trying to make it Olympic sports. More and more people are watching hundreds of professional players daily. Boys of my age have more than 20,000 live viewers every day on twitch.tv. And when it time for big tournaments, eSports starting to compete with regular sports like soccer and basketball. Last championship tournament in League of Legends had more than 1.5 million viewers. In 2000’s it was considered as time wasting activity but today, professional players are considers as sportsman in various countries across the world. Did you get my hint at the end of last sentence? Unfortunately for me, I meant to say only various countries, because not all of them think as China, most of the Europe, Russian and US.

This brings us to Georgia. Georgia, small country located on south-east part of Europe. We try our best to part of the world we deserve but sometimes not all goes as we wish. constant power struggles with Russia influenced how country is developing. Before we talk more about modern Georgia, I would like to speak about its history. Small country, always at wars, really hard time surviving waves and waves of enemy forces across whole world. It became part of Soviet Union at some point but after union was weakening from bad economy, we used it to escape grasp of cold bear. But past always leaves scars, and this scars don’t go away easily. 

    Georgia now is country of stereotypes. If you consider yourself as a gamer, be ready to be called looser, or even get bullied for that. But things change. As time goes, our Generation is becoming older, we are becoming big brothers and even fathers, we defy mindless stereotypes, we are breaking its shackles slowly but surely. Today we achieved things we could not do one year before. We started to host Tournaments, quality is not the best but that is no reason to give up. Only in one year we achieved so much in this direction. First tournaments on GameJam Tbilisi, followed by creating community of games all around Georgia, eSports here is starting to bloom. Day by day we are getting bigger. Bigger than ever before.