It’s time to take a serious look at esports gaming

During open hours on any given day, six to eight gamers ages 10 and older can be found playing competitive video games in the new Respawn lounge at the Dublin, Ohio, Community Recreation Center. It’s the first open-use esports center in the city of about 50,000 residents, which aims to provide tournaments and programming in partnership with Dublin City Schools and esports leagues.

The goal for creating the lounge is to provide gaming space for kids who don’t have the technology at home to play or to help people with limited or no esports experience get started, said Phil Gross, the city’s preschool, youth and teen recreation program supervisor. 

“Everybody wants to elevate the esports community in general and just help foster the growth,” Gross said.

In fact, esports is becoming so popular that the International Olympic Committee will vote in July on the creation of new Olympic Esports Games. And even smaller cities like Dublin are getting in on the trend. Benefits include increasing the number and diversity of people who use rec centers, upskilling residents and increasing revenues.

“Esports is growing massively. It’s a larger industry worldwide now than music and movies combined,” said Claire LaBeaux, chief advancement officer at the Network of Academic and Scholastic Esports Federations, which works with communities and schools to develop esports and related programming.

Although the history of esports—video games played in an organized, competitive environment—dates to the 1970s, the term was coined in 2000 and popularity has only increased since then. In the United States, the esports market is projected to reach $10.9 billion by 2032, with a compound annual growth rate of almost 21% between 2023 and 2032.

Several public universities, including the universities of Utah and California at Irvine, and The Ohio State University, offer esports scholarships and degrees. Since 2018, more than 8,600 high schools have added esports as an extracurricular activity. 

As a result, many municipalities are seizing the esports opportunity. In October 2022, the Aurora, Colorado, Recreation and Sports Division set up an esports program at a rec center with gaming consoles and computers. A little more than a year later, Hampton, Virginia, began welcoming people at four community centers-turned-gaming-sites called “Tap In” Zone for Gamers. And two months ago, Baltimore’s first esports lab opened with 20 computers in the renovated Medfield Recreation Center. 

At a ribbon-cutting for the center, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott said, “Our long-term vision is to create esports teams that kids not only understand and get things that they love, like gaming, but they can compete—and also, they can grow up [and] they can gain scholarships on the collegiate level.”

In Dublin, Respawn, named after the ability in gaming for a human-controlled character to come back to life after dying, opened last fall. A former training room, it now has 12 Alienware gaming desktop computers and two wall-mounted flat-screen televisions. 

“We worked with our [information technology] team in terms of making sure we had the correct connection and bandwidth to be able to do this at a high level,” Gross said. “Obviously, the internet is critical to be able to game, and a lot of the new games require pretty high-level equipment.”

Gamers can drop in during set afternoon hours three days a week and pay $4 per hour if they’re residents or $6 if they’re not to play popular games such as Fortnite, Rocket League and Fall Guys. The space is also available to rent for parties, and this summer, the center is hosting its first esports summer camps. Demand was so high that hopeful campers joined a waitlist, Gross said.

He also envisions working with Dublin’s three high schools to hold competitions and expanding the lounge’s uses. 

“It’s called an esport room, but if you look at it on the surface, it’s essentially a computer lab with 12 high-speed Alienware computers that can do any sort of non-esports platform that you want,” he said. “We started to tap into some video editing [with Minecraft Education], which is really popular in the schools now as well, and coding.”

States are taking notice of esports, too. Recognizing the potential for large-scale gaming events to boost tourism, North Carolina has an esports industry grant program that offers producers of esports events financial rebates of up to 25% on qualified expenses, provided that the company spends at least $150,000 in the state per event.

“I’m seeing a lot of cities, when they look at things like revenue for the city, recognizing how many tournaments there are and how profitable those can be,” LaBeaux said. “It’s a whole different group of people who go to tournaments, and [cities] can do them maybe off season from sports, and so it can drive revenue to the city essentially by implementing a different sport.”

But perhaps the biggest boon esports can provide to cities is improved mental health among residents, she added. Loneliness, especially among teens, is on the rise, and esports can help combat that. 

“If you can take what [teens] are interested in that’s been maybe looked down on before and instead you elevate that and make it important, then you change their perspective and confidence,” LaBeaux said “So many places are dealing with things like suicide rates and bullying. A lot of that can be addressed by building more community among the youth.”