Esports World Cup: “Everybody born on this planet is going to be a gamer”

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The Esports World Cup demonstrated a future in which competitive video gaming blends with traditional sport and entertainment on a global scale.

In many ways the competition to win the Esports World Cup was a sideshow to the bigger picture laid out in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia of a future that fuses sport, gaming, music, social media, fashion and film with esports at its epicentre.

While the Saudi-backed Team Falcons defended its title on home soil, the seven-week tournament was a showcase for how culture verticals, both virtual and physical, are already mixing.

“Esports and gaming are no longer boxed in as being purely a standalone experience,” said Mike McCabe, COO of EWC organiser Esports World Cup Foundation. We see it as something much bigger.”

“Games are no longer just products but platforms to global culture,” added Paul Cairns, EVP & Chief Business Officer, Electronic Arts during a two-day conference running in parallel with the EWC final.

“There’s a reason we called it the ‘New Global Sports Conference’ and not an esports conference,” said Ralf Reichert, CEO, EWC Foundation. “In the not-so-distant future the lines will blur even more and both sports and esports will go hand in hand.”

The gap between traditional sports and digital versions of them are getting closer. F1 drivers, for example, spend 80% of their time in a simulator to improve the 1% on track. F1 driver Lando Norris visited EMC25 and was quoted as saying the skill on display was insane. “This is not hype,” said Reichert. “This is excellence recognising excellence.”

Although esports has had to fight for acceptance at the head table of governments, mainstream media and sporting governance in many countries, that’s not the case in the Kingdom where support is sanctioned from the highest level down. The Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud, also known as MBS, attended the closing ceremony while state ministers of communication, tourism, investment and sport took to the stage to espouse esports as a fundamental pillar of the country’s 2030 pivot from oil to human resources.

“He has grown up as a gamer,” said Reichert of MBS. “That's why he understands this. It is endemic here but generational change across the world means that political acceptance of gaming in esports will happen as a matter of course and pretty quickly. This is not step by step. This will have a huge impact across the world to the point where it will blend with most traditional sports.”

That the majority (63%) of the country’s 36 million population are under the age of 30 and 68% of identify themselves as gamers is an indicator of esports domestic popularity.

“The reality is that everybody born on this planet going forward is going to be a gamer,” McCabe said.

Traditionally, video games were a much more solitary experience in which kids sat in their bedrooms playing with a console or PC. Now games publishers are developing their products with mass participation and cross-pollination of IP in mind.

“With esports you combine entertainment, technology and sports which attracts a lot of young talent towards it,” said Paul Cairns, EVP & Chief Business Officer, Electronic Arts (EA). “We are evolving from a traditional video games company into more of a connected community driven entertainment company.”

This is particularly the case for EA’s biggest franchises like EAFC and NFL title Madden which have become massively connected online experiences.

“The reason we've done that is to offer more for our players to do in and around the game,” Cairns explained. “We’re also giving players the opportunity to create by personalising their avatar or introduce other forms of UGC. It's all about social interaction, self-expression and connection with your friends.”

He added: “Gaming is the fastest growing form of entertainment. We see the future of entertainment, much more like an interactive connected game rather than a passive sit back experience. Those who are natively interactive are in a really good position to lead that going forward.”

One of the most exciting new developments is the introduction of real world live sports matches streamed onto game platforms. Earlier this year EA integrated live broadcast MLS games inside the EAFC mobile app. The potential is for viewers to stream the match action live and then simulate match highlights, putting themselves in as a player in the match.

“Now, you can do everything that we've always dreamed of,” said Matthew Ball, CEO of consultancy Epyllion. “Could we out dribble Ronaldo? Would we have made a better substitution? Could we perform at the level that we imagined we always could? These forms of investment that are about intensifying community, intensifying culture, bringing the game to geographies traditionally overlooked or under invested. That’s where we're going to find the game industry growing from 2030 and 2050.”

Everyone’s a creator and everyone’s invested in the game

An obvious synergy is at Amazon which is exploring links between live sports matches streamed on Amazon Prime and its video game streaming platform Twitch.

“EA’s Madden is streamed on its own Twitch channel via our cloud platforms,” said Steve Boom, VP, Audio, Twitch & Games, Amazon. “We’re exploring how we bring that together with the NFL matches we broadcast.

“One of the benefits of this form of trans media across broadcast and video games is we have the opportunity to expose it to a huge audience. Whatever the audience is for a typical NFL game [17 million in the US], we can expose it to a gamer audience. Maybe we can instantly replay [rendered as photoreal graphics] some of the plays that they just witnessed live in the actual game. It's up to us to make it as simple as we can. If viewers don't have a game controller, could they use a TV remote or their smartphone as a controller and start playing. Stay tuned! There is some really cool stuff coming!”

McCabe declared: “The next paradigm shift is the merger of games with mainstream entertainment. We've seen it with IPs that have crossed over from games to TV or games to movies – some amazing, some not so much. Those lines are blurring from a combination of the technology that we have in gaming and the technologies that are being created for TV. We build worlds for games with Unreal Engine and film and TV creators use it to capture and create on volumetric stages and virtual studios.”

Participatory IP is also on the rise. The gamer community is encouraged to contribute and share their own content using game assets. Boom added: “Everyone is a creator, everybody wants to be involved and it actually builds affinity and retention in the game if they have a vested interest in what's going on. We are building those kind of tools.”

‘King of Meat’, a new Amazon-published dungeon creator action game released in October includes functionality allowing players to create their own dungeons and to upload them for the community to play.

“This is an area where we really see AI playing a big role because AI is going to make it a lot easier for the average person to create,” said Boom. “I would expect to see an explosion of content from that coming soon.”

AI to supercharge player participation

The industry has a long history of players making modifications (mods) to games to make new games out of them. Just as in film and TV production, Generative AI could democratise a domain that used to be the preserve of financial gatekeepers and specialists.

“It shouldn't be foreign to games publishers either,” Boom said. “Maybe you lose a little bit of control over your IP but at the same time your IP gets bigger and people have a stronger affinity to it. The community itself will eventually start enforcing its own standards and rules. If someone tries to take the IP in a direction it shouldn't go, a vibrant community will rein that in. In an age of infinite content, we believe the way to cut through the noise is to build trust in a community. If you're an IP creator, you need to get comfortable with the fact that this is where the world's going.”

Sony’s Chief Strategy Officer, Toshimoto Mitomo seemed relaxed about the idea. “You're going to see interesting advances from the big game development companies but like every new technology the really innovative stuff is going to come from people we've never heard of.

“A lot of innovation will come from the AI-native generation – kids who are graduating college now. For them, AI is just what you do. They don't have to relearn the way they did things. That's why I think in the next 3-4 years we’re going to be blown away by what we see.”

Ball suggested that AI will accelerate the emergence of new game experiences and original ways for how we play a game. “We will soon see new genres being born as AI is adopted. I cannot underline how important that is the growth of the games industry which hasn’t seen a new genre or groundbreaking IP in a decade.”

Experiential and global

On the ground at EWC25 the organisers had extended the video game world into a festival of gaming, music and entertainment throughout the venue area of Boulevard City. This block of Riyadh is designed as an entertainment and sports hub all year round. Ronnie O’Sullivan has a branded snooker excellence club there. At EWC25, space was devoted to activations of games open to the public, drawing more than three million visitors in the heat of the summer.

McCabe explained: “Post COVID people have pivoted to experiential moments so running the festival in parallel with the Club Championship has been an opportunity for people to celebrate everything that's gaming.”

Stars from the traditional sports world including Cristiano Ronaldo, Tony Hawk and Alisha Lehmann made appearance to generate headlines. YouTube creators The Sidemen were in town. Superstar game creator Hideo Kojima (Metal Gear) talked about

the blurring boundaries of cinema and games. Post Malone and K-pop boy group SEVENTEEN performed at the EWC opening ceremony which took its cue from Super Bowl halftime shows. Norwegian Grandmaster Magnus Carlsen brought the intensity of world championship chess to the EWC stage, winning the inaugural event and $250,000.

Soccer star Alex Morgan, two-time FIFA Women’s World Cup Champion for the USA, drew parallels between the rise of esports and women’s football.

“Seeing these new esports formats being created in a lot of ways relates to women’s sports because of the progress made. As an advocate for women’s sports I see great change and it’s impressive to witness the change that can be made even in a few months. The progress here in Saudi Arabia with girls and women and the inclusion of them in sport is encouraging.”

By its own metrics EWC25 was a roaring success. It set new records with 750 million viewers and a peak of 7.98 million viewers during the second week’s League of Legends tournament. Some 340 million hours of content were watched, outperforming 2024’s inaugural event across the board (the comparative figures for 2024 saw 250 million hours of content streamed to 500 million viewers and a peak viewership of 3.5 million).

The effort to attract a wider audience outside the esports community was centred on EWC Spotlight, a new global broadcast production managed by IMG. In total, 7,000 hours of live content were produced (proudly proclaimed to be second only to the 2024 Paris Olympics) across more than 800 channels and 97 broadcast partners including DAZN and ITV, in 35 languages.

Casey Wasserman who leads the Los Angeles Olympics 2028 Olympic committee was given a front row seat. He said: “There’s no question esports will be a permanent part of the ecosystem 10 years from now. As the technology evolves to where you’ve got billions of connected devices, zero latency, 4K video and hundreds of people playing together in a peer-to-peer environment, that then becomes a different version of esports, a different sort of competition.”

As if the EWC were not enough, a new multi-title tournament Esport Nations Cup was announced for November 2026 (also in Riyadh) which pits national teams against each other. Nothing on this scale has been attempted in esports before – and with good reason, since pride in playing for one’s country has no legacy in the sports’ development. The Foundation is confident it can change that.

“There are 600 million esport fans around the world and that's already very significant. But there are more than three billion gamers globally. That’s a gap we need to bridge,” said Mohammed Al Nimer, CCO, Esports World Cup Foundation. “By leveraging national fandom and national pride we can achieve an additional step to making it more mainstream.”

Focus on emerging markets

As with film and TV so it is with the business of gaming. The mature markets like US, Germany, UK and even South Korea have stagnated and the future hubs of global creativity belong to India, China and the Middle East.

“In the US there are actually fewer active players on a weekly basis than prior to the pandemic,” according to Ball. “South Korea has also seen a 5-7% reduction in active players. Globally there has been stagnation or marginal decline since the peak in 2021.”

Yet this is largely a western mature market issue. Emerging markets are exhibiting growth as high as 6% a year. “Look no farther than the Middle East and Africa where over the last five years an average of 45 million new players have onboarded,” added Ball. “That’s more players in five years than the US has in total. In parallel, close to 30% of total global player growth in each of the past five years has come from the region.”

Ball predicted significant returns to growth globally over the next few years as many billions of new players will be found “with billions of new experiences to support them, but we have to look in slightly new areas.”

Key to this growth for Ball was not population demographics or smartphone adoption, but regional specificity. “When we look outside of North America, Australia, and Japan, we see very different leaders, much larger players, and clear differences in culture, religion, in art.

“It’s not Ariana Grande, but Blackpink, it’s not Christmas, but Ramadan. It is Bollywood or Chinese language movies dominating those markets, not Hollywood. It is essential that games developers and international content creators reflect this cultural understanding if they want to grow in these markets."