(introduction music) - However big you think E-Sports is.

It's bigger.

- Lets make some noise - (Crowd cheering) - It's one of the biggest growing entertainment verticals on the planet, theirs over 3 billion gamers every single year.

And on a daily basis, you'll have 30 million people online gaming at any one time.

- It's a billion dollar industry.

- It is absolutely on a rocket ship trajectory by every metric imaginable.

- They're really gaining the kind of momentum that is sustainable.

And I think that's what everybody wants to say.

Is it just a flash in the pan or is this here for good?

It's here for good.

So let's capitalize on it.

- Good evening ladies and gentlemen.

And welcome to tonight's game.

- (Crowd cheering) - E-sports is the involvement in competing in video games, whether it's online or in-person.

- At an international level, a national level, college level, amateur.

- It can be something as simple as card games, Call of Duty, League of Legends, Rocket League, Counter Strike, but it's where you're able to compete.

As long as you can group practice and showcase your ability to strive to be better.

That's really what it is.

- I started playing a lot more competitive games, pretty young, like 12.

My name is Al Lowe.

I'm currently a student at Colorado college.

Growing up I just loved playing games.

- My name's Sarah Williams.

I'm the area manager here at north street gamers.

We're local hosts Denver here in Lakewood, Colorado.

I remember playing games when I was a kid.

I think the first one we played with duck hunt there's a lot of halo is it went on.

- E-sports overall provides so much different opportunities, so much different entertainment levels.

- You can be leading an army on a real-time strategy game, playing a role in a role-playing game.

You can be playing with people from all over the world inside of an entirely different world.

- One of the reasons e-sports levels, the playing field is the fact that you can be anyone that doesn't make a difference from a physical standpoint, if you're a male or female, your gamer, and you can be professional at the exact same sport.

- E-sports is definitely disrupting the entire world.

It's a whole new animal, and it's just getting more exciting that goes on.

Every game brings in its own unique type of person.

Demographically, it is pretty much anybody.

- I'm Jared Polis, governor of the great state of Colorado.

My favorite game is league of legends.

I made a Navia and Maokai - in 10 seconds.

Let's do a dragon.

- I consider myself a typical gamer.

I mean, most gamers are governors or presidents.

And so I'm pretty typically.

- My name is Dan Migala co-founder and partner of 4front, 4front's a global sports and entertainment marketing agency.

I think one of the confusions of e-sports is you naturally fear what you don't understand in a digital era.

You have a generation that's never lonelier, but also has never craved togetherness more.

And e-sports fits that void on an emotional level.

I might've been as a child playing baseball in the park, instead of meeting in a Sandlot, they met through their console.

- E sports is a way to connect with a different community to, in real life, I would have never met and they became friends who I can talk to.

- Traditionally, we would work with NFL teams, NBA teams, major league baseball teams, call it your traditional stick and ball sports.

And I realized a generational shift in our own office when some of our younger staff members came and said, Hey, Dan, we need to look into this e-sports thing.

It's bigger than you think.

And that was about 2015.

I realized when Jerry Jones, the owner of the Dallas Cowboys is asking you about e-sports okay, this is getting very real in terms of the economic impact.

- I am Greg's Casco founder of Abacus three.

Once enough people are playing a certain sport, whether it be tennis, golf, football, if there is an eventual tipping point to where the spectator side of this continues to be.

- You go to an event and it's something that maybe you haven't really considered.

And there's 25,000 people that are locked in and it felt like a Beatles concert in the sixties, the crowd noise, the enthusiasm.

- It's a very exciting time for e-sports and gaming as an industry.

E-sports is the first stage of maturity.

It's still an infant.

That's starting to waddle around and gain balance and gain momentum.

So there's a lot of time to nurture and build it out to have that real identity.

- A lot of ways that people watch these tournaments as they're happening as they can either be in person or through the online streaming services, which are super interactive.

Now, while people are competing, there's sportscasters, there's people talking, but there's also like chat rooms on the side where they can have more conversations and discuss it more.

So internet is definitely a really big driver that really opens the doors and all the ways that you can really watch a team play.

- Yeah this is going to be so fun.

Especially the teams play is pretty much on the same level.

- It really hasn't been until streaming became popularized.

That e-sports really started to take off.

- The study of the history of how sports leagues and brands were developed.

And you look at the life cycle of where e-sports is.

There's some great parallels to the early days of the NFL.

My grandfather might've looked at it with a skeptical eye, but my dad loved it.

We take for granted that the NFL at one time was a startup to make money.

In the early days, they would play games on Sunday, obviously against other NFL teams, but to subsidize their income, they would play a friendly against Notre Dame's football team on a Wednesday.

It wasn't a competition, but it was just very much for the entertainment prospect of it.

So we're seeing that happen in e-sports where you have these great league of legends tournaments.

You think about it like a Superbowl, but also you have other teams that will come to a great city like Denver and do a friendly.

And that is really exactly the same playbook that the NFL did.

- Each game is a little bit different than who they attract similar to how you would say that a tennis fan looks like a football fan.

It's different people, different games are being played.

There's not one kind of e-sports championship that's overall, but there are certain mega events that draw international attention.

The last legal legends worlds had some opening ceremonies that would have rivaled the Olympics in some cases, which has been pretty fascinating to see.

Back in 2018.

I was the director of corporate sponsorships, Ray TMT.

I had been a gamer my entire life, and e-sports quickly emerged as one of the best ways to reach a younger demo of future buyers.

I find the majority of my time is guiding people from the traditional sports sponsorship world from automotive to telecom insurance banking, where is a safe place for me as a brand to go The FTX exchange, a naming rights purchase of TSM was reported to be $210 million over the next 10 years, which is a sizeable FTX is a crypto exchange.

There's a huge alignment between cryptocurrencies as well as the e-sports gamer.

So there's a huge alignment from a technology perspective of these new burgeoning economies and ways of doing business and playing that are aligned.

And so that to me is just reinforcing.

This is exactly where states and cities that want to attract a younger demo.

This is the place to go.

If you're trying to reach someone who is between 18 to 34, they are a gamer.

I played games in their past.

And so if you're not invested in e-sports, you're missing a huge opportunity.

- My name is Matthew Payne.

I'm the executive director of the Denver sports commission.

It's just as serious as all the other sports now.

And I think everyone's starting to realize that.

- I'm Mike Ashford.

I am the CEO and a shareholder in the e-sports awards limited.

I used to play a lot of soccer over here in the UK, and I ended up breaking my Fern, losing the competitive itch.

I started out playing a game called league of legends, got pretty competitive at it and ultimately fell a little bit short.

So it left me wondering, how could I get another way into the industry?

And I came up with a piece of idealism, which is I can't win awards.

Maybe I could give them out.

- We've arrived at the sports industry awards - 2016 and had around 50 and award categories, 80,000 live viewership, which was a pretty humble beginnings for us.

What it did is it excited us.

So we really doubled down in 2017 and grew to around 450,000 people watching this.

We started to create more shoulder content, more year round opportunities for the audience to be involved.

We created a whole system that allowed for the awards to be divvied out on a year round basis.

And that led to some huge growth in 2018, with over 5 million people tuning in it was the first year that America came online for us.

We trended so worldwide 2019, we enjoyed our biggest ceremony at the time to date with over 7 million people tuning in to watch it.

Everyone looks a sparse and says, I want to be the player on the stage.

Telling out on stage gaming as a whole was pretty stigmatized as being unhealthy.

Everyone's sat eating Doritos, drinking mountain Dew in the bedrooms gaming till 4:00 AM.

And I think e-sports has almost ended that stigma because there's now sports scientists and physiotherapists, and nutritionalists, they've worked out actually, if you're active and healthy and have a good lifestyle, you have better cognitive function.

You have better reflexes, better muscle memory to be a better player.

So all the players now keep themselves healthy and that starting to rub off on the audience.

- It's very common for a teenager to be an elite professional e-sports athlete.

You can be making a million dollars as a teenager competitively.

- I see some of the 16 year olds winning tournaments and they know how to run a PNL.

They know how to do tax returns.

They know how to manage their money.

You don't get, if you go and play, say amateur soccer.

- When you think about the focus, competitiveness, determination, overcoming adversity, teamwork, and they really are athletes.

It's the same attributes that you would see from the quarterback of the Denver Broncos, having a plan, training, mental preparation.

Stamina's a big thing.

These are the things that we've learned that e-sports really creates.

- It takes a lot of true skill and true discipline to really get to those levels.

It's just questioning everything completely.

- If you think about that as a parent and you're, do you want your child to participate in this?

I would say the answer is absolutely yes, those are life skills in Colorado is certainly a place that's very welcoming to that Denver residents that have an interest in e-sports are 16% more likely to have a college degree than the average American e-sports fan.

- My name is Dr. Angie Patroni.

I am the executive director of the Colorado department of higher education.

Gaming has been around for a very long time.

The early nineties that's when I first kind of heard about it.

- In the early noughties, that was almost a taboo that you were meant to grow out of gaming, but at some point you were meant to put down the controller and move on to academic studies.

- We didn't have the same kind of elevated status as it's getting now.

- People have started breaking down the barriers towards e-sports saying, actually, this is something that should be celebrated.

The people competing at doing something incredibly impressive that playing at a top percentile of a cognitive function or with muscle memory, I'm more people that would maybe be afraid to talk about the fact that they were into competitive gaming or they're into gaming in one way.

And now happy to be part of that community.

- E sports in Colorado at the collegiate level, virtually every campus, there is a club team.

So you Boulder and Colorado college may have been some of the first to embark on that and really kind of grow it.

- My name is Josh Lauer.

I'm the e-sports coordinator for Colorado college.

We're pretty well known for our outdoor education.

My ambition when I originally came here as a student six years ago, was to create more of a gaming community.

It was crazy to me that there was no sign of a gaming community anywhere through my efforts and efforts of other students.

We managed to create our e-sports program about three and a half years ago.

Our president at the time found out about league of legends and kind of the e-sports atmosphere and the positive effects it can have on the campus community, as well as just the collegiate community as a whole.

I was offered a per professional position after I graduated to kind of continue developing these sports here.

- In our area, we have scattered the Southern collegiate fie conference.

We hire e-sports for that.

And we actually took first place.

That guy was really to administration noticing us.

So it's kind of just been more like improving on gaining more funding, gain, more respect from administration and faculty here, showing that we are successful in this industry and we want to continue doing it.

- I think it's going to be really fun.

My vision for e-sports in higher ed, number one, first of all, that they really get the respect of being a sport.

I think there's some working out that we need to do to see where does it sit?

Does it sit in the athletic department or does it sit somewhere else right now?

It's mostly club teams.

And so as a club team, it's difficult to offer a scholarship as this emerges.

I think you will see people really competing to bring that kind of talent to their institutions.

- I chose Cornell college because it had a good reputation academically.

When I found out it had a collegiate eSports scene that may be even more excited to come.

- When we think about intercollegiate athletics, we have a governing body of the NCAA.

- Collegiate competition is all over the place.

Actually, right now it's pretty much the wild west.

The NCAA has kind of taken a back seat in terms of e-sports development.

So it's kind of been on a lot of universities, as well as the game companies themselves to create those collegiate competitions.

You've got the free competitions that are usually hosted by the companies.

So you can join for free.

You just have to be a group of students from the same college and you can sign up there and compete against a bunch of other colleges around the nation.

You've got more exclusive competition that you can sign up.

The biggest one for collegiate is mace, which is the national association of collegiate.

E-sports, you're going to be playing against more official programs like us that have, you know, an area for our students to compete more well named schools, more opportunities for scholarships, as well as recognition when you're kind of in these more exclusive groups.

- I know that there are people my age and even older, who will listen to this and say, what are you talking about?

This is the person sitting in front of a computer with a joystick.

- E-sports is legitimising the passion that these players have in online gaming.

- I think e-sports can really help develop a lot of skills of collaboration, cooperation for kids of all ages as something boys and girls can play together, traditional stick and ball sports.

Sometimes they're regulated.

So you look for those things that you can do together.

As a shared experience.

- It's overtaking a lot of other traditional sports.

- You combine all of those attributes together and you could see the tsunami that started to happen.

- I would love to see it become a real competitive sport in the state.

And I'd love to see our institutions become the best in the world and have our students coveted if you will, not just in terms of the gaming industry, but really in business and industry, as a result of being excellent in this field.

- It's very common that at age 25, you're ready to retire.

- They can no longer handle the stress.

They can no longer handle the competitiveness or they just can't get back to that level.

And we'll move on to either a different game or to a different career path.

- You think about your resume.

And a lot of times it's what your degree was, where your internship was.

What we're seeing is a lot of progressive companies are actively recruiting competitive e-sports players to the next generation of executives.

What they see in them is a very tech centric mindset, problem solving, independent team structure, and a desire.

to win.

- A lot of the passion that people develop from e-sports can develop into a career.

- There's this a whole new career wave growing.

- And it's only growing faster.

You think about international business technology, computer engineering, all of those skill sets that your kids are adapting in their tween years are a huge competitive advantage for them to be part of this marketplace.

And the more that Colorado fuels that community, you're actually helping your kids with future jobs.

- I would say for many e-sports helps inspire them to become programmers developers.

They could also be an important driver of economic growth to make sure that developers and gaming companies, including indie gaming companies and large ones really choose Colorado as a place where they know that folks can be inspired to really make that next break in.

- I never would have dreamed of ever working for a video game company.

I just didn't know it existed here at north street gamers and Lakewood, Colorado.

We've got 18,000 square feet, over 112 computers, as well as X-Box console switch and PlayStation.

The biggest drive behind her and street gamers is bringing e-sports to everyone.

So it's really lowering that barrier of entry.

Most people can't afford the high end computers or high speed internet, or just have a place to game.

And we're just trying to remove that from them.

So someone has a place to go and they can make that career path from being just an everyday player to hopefully a professional player recreating essentially a whole new industry as we grow.

Our Denver location here was one of the first local hosts to open outside of Philadelphia where we're headquarters.

And the big reason behind Denver is there's already a huge gaming community out here.

We really saw that there was a need just to have a facility and a place to bring these communities together.

Colorado could definitely become the hub in place for people to compete and collegiate e-sports.

- A lot of cities, a lot of states would like to say, we'd be a great home for e-sports.

So we set out to do was to prove it based on Denver and Colorado consumers, online behavior, what we learned very quickly, Denver is the only market that has both the millennial families and also the young millennials, the post-college crowd at a high index number than any other market here in north America.

And that is the number one.

And number two audiences that e-sports events want to attract Denver's at a huge advantage.

And that tells a brilliant story to support governor Polis, his initiative to make Colorado the home for e-sports.

- Colorado in particular has the right zeitgeists of the gamer.

It has the right pioneering innovative mentality.

It's got the right social responsibility, that's attractive to gamers and technologists.

Overall.

- The other thing that's really attractive about the Colorado e-sports fan is their financial attributes.

Just as a starting point, the household income tends to be 27% higher amongst e-sports fans in the market than the average American.

- We're very supportive of e-sports in Colorado.

We're excited about high school and collegiate level competition hosting, large gaming e-sports conferences.

We're also excited about jobs for developers here in our state.

- The young millennials that are moving here, that group is coming here with a natural passion and interest in e-sports.

And you could see it.

They were consuming that level of data more consistently than other forms of music, traditional sports.

So their fans, right, 54% of them have kids at home.

They grew up on devices.

They're used to being in front of a screen, but they crave togetherness and they crave the environment.

- The younger demographic, they're more interested in experiences rather than material possessions.

And so Colorado with its natural beauty is a natural place for gamers to want to be.

And for event organizers to come visit.

- We have the walkable city, had the culinary scene, the art scene.

And of course, we're just a drive to the Rocky mountains.

- You finished grinding out a game and you look out your window and you can see mountains or trees or this trails near by.

- This audience is more likely to invest in the technology in a tech centered home.

- Water and Hinshaw, COO of Lumiere fiber, certainly ranches a master plan community about 30 minutes, Southwest of Denver.

Typically you think of a master plan.

Anything if soccer fields and baseball fields, we're looking to build not only those types of fields, but e-sports fields.

We've noticed this real groundswell of interest in e-sports and gaming here already.

And we want to continue leaning into that.

- I've talked to other developers, I've talked to other e-sports businesses.

They all had the same response, never heard of anyone to do it.

Why didn't I think of that that's genius.

So that's the part of the forward thinking nature of Colorado to see around the corner, to continue with the vision that Colorado is the home of e-sports.

It's just telling the story of why.

- We have a great airport that serves international destinations.

- We're in the middle of the United States.

And so we're able to really be competitive with east and west coast.

And also with Europe, - We also have very robust economy.

We have been number one, the US for many years, - The great quality of life for people from across the country and across the world to come here and do game development.

We really have one of the greatest places to live access to skiing, boarding, rafting, hiking, hunting, fishing, you name it.

- Our arenas and stadiums that are downtown are some of the largest in the country.

Within walking distance.

- The ability to have an event at ball arena, mission ballroom the Denver Colosseum.

- It's about the nightlife and bars afterwards.

It's about the accessibility.

It's about the hotels that are modern high-speed internet access wifi, all through the downtown area.

- We have a convention center that's right in the heart of downtown.

That's one of the largest, most high-tech facilities in the country.

- What this bill does very simply.

He creates the meeting and events, incentive program, $10 million of stimulus funding, a rebate to cover a portion of the hard costs of hosting an event in Colorado.

It's officially the LA.

- Our vision for e-sports committee is to really create this festival atmosphere, something that's three or four days of content, maybe multiple venues throughout the city.

- You think about the audience and what they crave a shared experience, competition, unique experiences, nature, red rocks has it all.

I think an event at red rocks would open up the global stage.

- We're hoping that we can close the weekend of all of this E gaming activity in Denver with a really cool red rocks concert, something that we don't think other people can provide something to want to make sure we highlight.

- With the governor support with the corporate support.

It's only going to grow in a compounded way over the next 1, 3, 5, 10 years.

- Colorado's is home to the Olympic training center, all star game 2021, hopefully world cup soccer, 2026.

And e-sports really is taking its place among the prominent competitions hosted right here in Colorado.

- There's things today.

I never would have imagined even just five years ago.

And so just to think about how different it's going to be in another five years, you're going to have your town teams.

You're going to have your town mascots, your colors, and people are going to be super excited for it.

- We want to attract investors and sponsors, and then we want to open the doors and say, come on to Colorado.

Let's do this.

- I think we're going to have a full calendar of all kinds of things.

Education-wise tournaments competitions.

- The more that Denver and Colorado tells the story that we're the most e-sports friendly city and state in the country.

The more they're going to come knocking on our door.

- We're ready for even more e-sports events right here in Colorado.

I'll even come as governor to help cut the ribbon or kick it off.

Maybe I'll compete incognito.

You never know (music playing)