Kent State Explores Possibility of an eSports Team

Kent State’s main campus could soon join the growing number of college campuses in getting their own eSports team.

ESports are online multiplayer video games with a winner and loser, that are played in a competitive environment, typically by professional players.

Kent Salem was the first of Kent State’s campuses to get involved with eSports. Donald and Katie Larabee founded the club along with the help of family studies professor, Dr. Steven Toepfer in the fall semester of 2017.

“We both agreed that there was a severe lack of connectedness at the Kent Salem Campus,” said Larabee. “Being a nontraditional campus people just show up, take their class and go home. There is no reason for them to hang around or feel like there is anything more than just a class for them here.”

By the fall semester of 2018 Salem’s eSports club will have a varsity eSports team that will focus on the game “Overwatch”. As of February 13, Kent Salem began offering scholarships to incoming freshmen to play on the varsity team.

One Salem student, Johnathan Haas, has already received one of these scholarships and will be the captain of Salem’s Overwatch team.

Salem has also gotten a practice space that will be available to all Kent Salem students. The practice space has three 65-inch televisions, three laptops and three Alienware gaming PCs with Overwartch and Harthstone pre-downloaded onto them.

Kent State Main will be holding an eSports tournament in May that will be used to gauge student interest and practicality for the university. Not much has been announced about the specifics of the tournament but students interested in signing up can go to www.kent.edu/eSports and submit their entries.

The number of teams for the main event will be capped at 32 teams of six consisting of 192 students total, along with other side events going on. While PCs will be provided students are encouraged to bring their own keyboards and mice if they would like to use their own peripherals.

The first collegiate eSports team was established at Robert Morris University in 2014. Since then, 58 different colleges have established eSports programs. Some of which include the University of California-Irvine, Stephens College and Boise State University.

The first reported eSports tournament was in 1972 at Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. It consisted of 24 college students playing a game called “SPACEWAR”.

While eSports have been around for a while it has really increased in popularity in the past few years. Official eSports teams started popping up around 2006, and different organizations that have held tournaments soon after. Some of these teams and organizations include: Team Liquid, OpTic, Major League Gaming (MLG), Tespa and The Overwatch League.

Rules and regulations vary from game to game and organization to organization. However, the prizes for these tournaments are the same, money.

The prize pool for eSports events and tournaments are almost always in the millions. On the high end the 2017 Dota 2 national’s prize pool was $24 million, on the lower end the 2018 Overwatch League’s prize pool is $3.5 million.

newzoo, a market researcher, predicts that eSports will earn $906 million by the end of the year, which is a 36 percent increase over 2017.

In an industry survey that newzoo gave to teams late last year, they expect eSports to take about five to ten more years to mature fully as a business. However, brands and agencies expect the industry to be fully professionalized in the next three to five years.

There will be multiple factors that dictate the future of eSports: new fans, growth of mobile eSports, franchise structure and team profitability.

“On its current trajectory, we estimate the eSports industry will reach $1.4 billion by 2020. If any of these factors accelerate, a more optimistic scenario places revenue at 2.4 billion,” said newzoo.

If newzoo’s estimations are correct then that can create a very favorable environment for eSports teams not only at Kent campuses, but other college campuses.

Dr. Toepfer is currently looking into bringing eSports to Kent’s main campus with the Project Director of Kent State System Integration, Tim Pagliari

Pagliari hopes that this eSports team will help give students who don’t feel connected to the school feel like they have a home here.

“It’s the same things you see with traditional athletics where students can compete and represent their school in a way that is meaningful to them,” Pagliari said. “I think that’s going to help the student experience plus create a community for these students to get involved with each other.”

However, this is not the first time Kent main has been involved with eSports. There are multiple clubs and organizations on campus that revolve around eSports or an aspect of them: The Overwatch Association, The Pokémon League and Video Games Club.

The Overwatch Association has already established their varsity team made up of their best players in the club. They are also looking into getting involved with Tespa in the fall so they can compete in tournaments with their team.

What Dr. Toepfer and Mr. Pagliari are working towards is not just to have eSport teams on every Kent campus, but creating a united eSports program across all the campuses. This can include tournaments between the campuses, and even an all-star team made up of the best players from every campus.

“There is an opportunity here to have one of the biggest eSport footprints in the united states because we are including the entire university in this. We have a leader on every campus that is extremely excited about this. Whether it’s an administrator or a faculty member to get this rolling,” Toepfer said.