To improve the audience’s ability to track hero performance, we developed a new tool called Echo. Case Study: ECHO – Harnessing esports data for live tournaments the training of AI opponents or bots in esports games such as StarCraft. The definition puts esports analytics at a fluid boundary with game AI for esports, which has a strong tradition in its own right, e.g. This definition highlights that the fundamental challenge in esports analytics is to make the vast amounts of data available useful to the stakeholders, whether game companies, audience, tournament organisers, broadcasters, commentators or service companies. Following this viewpoint, proposed esports analytics as the following: “the process of using esports related data,, to find meaningful patterns and trends in said data, and the communication of these patterns using visualisation techniques to assist with decision-making processes”. This means that the analysis of behavioural telemetry, sales data, production etc., while occurring across a number of disciplines, use the same term to describe the area of work. There is no commonly accepted definition of esports analytics, but research and industrial applications in the area generally operate within the area of business intelligence work centred on esports. Furthermore, as different academic domains explore esports, a substantial amount of repetition is evidenced in publications as they investigate esports without awareness of the work across academia. as datasets are made obsolete due to game updates), the communities and the business models in use. However, academic research is at risk of being made rapidly obsolete on an ongoing basis due to the constant evolution of the games (e.g. Academic work on esports is published across a wide variety of disciplines, including AI, analytics, psychology, education, visualisation, ethnography, marketing, management, business and regulation. Not all of these use the term in the same way, and there is as yet no common definition of what constitutes esports, but the term generally refers to digital games being played in a competitive manner, whether at the amateur level, professional level or both. On the academic side, there has been a steady stream of papers with the term “esport” in the title being published over the past one to two decades. Collectively, the esports industry is producing knowledge at an increasing pace, however, due to commercial confidentiality this knowledge is not publicly available and building a reasonable state-of-the-art in esports is therefore challenging at best. The open availability of detailed behavioural telemetry from many esports titles has fuelled an emergence of start-ups that are building services on top of the data, or exploring new ways of monetising tournaments and audience. The esports industry has expanded in global size at a considerable pace in the past few years. Esports data and the analyses and statistics that can be derived from them, can be used both by broadcasters, viewers, analysts, teams and players of the game. Given the digital nature of esports games, all actions of players can be tracked and analysed, providing unprecedented volume and precision in performance tracking as compared to traditional sports. With more viewers, and more revenue on the line, comes a desire for something which is commonplace in traditional sports: accurate analytics. The goal of both games is to destroy the opponents’ base. Both are Multi-Player Online Battle Arena (MOBA) games, seeing two teams of five players, each controlling a fictional character, battling in a virtual arena. Two of the biggest esports titles, Dota2, and League of Legends attract millions of viewers, and their world championships boast multi-million dollar prize pools.
Spectating esports is an increasingly common pastime and important part of mainstream entertainment. pregame coverage featuring expert panels, athlete coverage, and post-match commentary, interviews etc. Broadcast coverage of esports follows the same approaches as traditional sports broadcasting, with e.g. Esports take different shapes, from digital versions of traditional sports such as soccer, basketball and football, to first person shooters such as Counter Strike: Global Offensive or games set in fantastic and magical worlds such Dota 2 and League of Legends. Not only is esports globally popular, but also supports a rapidly growing viewership. In 2017, over 388 million people worldwide played or watched esports, and the number of esports fans is projected to grow a further 50% by 2020. It is a rapidly growing subsection of the games industry and associated culture, which has evolved from a niche segment into a mainstream global phenomenon. Esports describes situations where digital (video) games are played competitively.