From a group of online competitors to the next massive market opportunity: how much will business shape the future of the e-sports industry?

The history of sports is the business of sports. Pele, Namath and Jordan won sports fans hearts, but Monday Night Football, ESPN, and Nike won their share of their minds and wallets.

In the history of professional sports, business shaped the conversation, broadcasted the message, sealed the deals, filled the stadiums and sold the merchandise and broadcasting rights that grew sports into the global behemoth it is today.

And now with those same forces eyeing the next prize, the 100-year story of professional sports is set to play out in just a few short years in e-sports.

The e-sports scene, once a loose and informal collection of online competitive gaming parties, has fast become one of the most promising new markets for a range industries. Exploding viewership numbers and market size are being met with eye-watering investments. New companies are being established every day with the aim of repeating the success of sports, and the hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue that this represents annually.

The driving forces behind this push into e-sports are the promise of accessing the millennial market and the growing popularity of gaming and e-sports.

Legacy media and advertising has been trying, with little success, to get the attention of millennials, particularly males aged 18 to 35 who don’t watch traditional TV or respond to conventional advertising as they used to. Signalling a broader shift in the future, the current share of millennials in the e-sports fan base is two to three times that which tunes into the broadcasts of major US sports.

Gaming is now a mainstream activity, with more than two billion people worldwide playing games that will generate more than US$100 billion of revenue in 2017. China alone is expected to generate US$27.5 billion of this. Of these two billion, approximately 300 million are e-sports fans, and the number is growing every year.