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6 Types of Esports Games

This is an excerpt from Esports Business Management 2nd Edition With HKPropel Access by David P Hedlund,Seth E Jenny,Gil B Fried.

By David P. Hedlund, Seth E. Jenny, Gil Fried, Russell Hamer

Esports can be classified into six major categories or genres: (1) multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) games, (2) shooting games, (3) fighting games, (4) sports and racing games, (5) strategy games (including real-time strategy games), and (6) other types of games, such as trading card games, rhythm games, and massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG); see table 1.1.

Multiplayer Online Battle Arena Games

Multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) games are played by two teams competing against one another, in an effort to destroy or eliminate the opposing team or its base. At the beginning of each game, players choose a single character to control from a number of characters (i.e., heroes), each with unique skills and abilities to use during the game. Teams coordinate to take down the opposing team and slowly push toward their base throughout the game. MOBAs traditionally have a top-down (i.e., God’s eye) perspective on the game, because they were initially developed as mods (i.e., fan-made modifications to an ­existing video game) for real-time strategy games. In recent years, mobile MOBAs have become increasingly popular because they usually have shorter game times than PC MOBAs. According to Spezzy (2023), there are approximately 180 million League of Legends players, in part due to the popularity of Riot Games’ TV series Arcane. The mobile version of the game League of Legends: Wild Rift has around 16 million active monthly players (ActivePlayer, 2023b).

Shooting Games

As the name suggests, shooting games allow players to feel like they are actually holding and operating a weapon (e.g., a gun) in their hands (which they can see on-screen). Shooting games usually have players or teams competing to complete certain objectives related to the game mode, or the purpose of the game is to kill all the opposing players or teams. In the early 2000s, two of the most popular first-person shooter (FPS) games for PCs were Call of Duty and Counter-Strike (Evans-Thirlwell, 2017). More recently, the game Apex Legends set numerous records during its initial launch in early 2019, including signing up 10 million players in its first 72 hours of operations (Zampella, n.d.) and garnering 8.28 million hours of Twitch viewership within the first eight days after its unveiling (McAloon, 2019). Surpassing those records, Fortnite, which is often described as both a first-person shooting game and a battle royale game, is played on all three major gaming platforms and had approximately 290 million players at its peak in May of 2021 (ActivePlayer, 2023a).

Fighting Games

The fighting games category, as the name suggests, includes titles in which players can choose a character with a multitude of skills and abilities and then engage in fighting-style combat. In-game combat is often undertaken using martial arts styles, and competitions occur over multiple rounds. Common among the fighting games community (FGC), local tournaments are frequently held as open-bracket competitions over multiple days, where anyone willing to pay the entry fee has the opportunity to compete (Murray, 2018). However, larger competitions often have qualifying rounds that feed into a championship playoff. While most esports competitions occur online, fighting games are somewhat unique in a preference for offline play due to lag and input delay concerns.

Sports and Racing Games

Sports and racing simulation games are generally modeled after traditional sports and motor racing competitions, and traditional sports teams and players frequently license their likenesses to game developers for inclusion in the games. In recent years, sports games representing traditional sports such as soccer, gridiron football, basketball, baseball, ice hockey, and racing have all become more popular. Evidence of this can be seen through the creation of eMLS and the NBA 2K League, in which professional traditional sports franchises have formed esports teams (e.g., Atlanta United, New York City Football Club, Mavs Gaming, Warriors Gaming Squad) and compete for championships. These teams are often made up of top players from around the world.

Racing games are meant to mirror the action of driving a motor vehicle in a competitive race. Interestingly, in early 2019 while competing in a traditional real-world racing competition, the Race of Champions, a novice driver trained in sim racing defeated a former Formula 1 driver (Tangermann, 2019). Released in 2023, the movie Gran Turismo chronicled the true story of video game players who eventually became competitive race car drivers. Moving forward, it is increasingly likely that professional drivers will spend more time training using sim racing games. ­Furthermore, there will be opportunities for those wishing to become professional race car drivers to first show their skills in sim racing games before having the opportunity to apply those skills in traditional race car driving (Janas, 2019).

Strategy Games

Akin to the game of chess, strategy games generally entail outthinking one’s opponent by knowing the opponent’s options, making effective moves that anticipate the opponent’s strategies, and responding effectively to the opponent’s moves (Hamer and Besombes, 2024). The most popular form of esports strategy games are real-time strategy (RTS) games. The goal of RTS games is for players to build armies consisting of different types of characters and destroy an opponent’s base. Additionally, to succeed in RTS games, players must build and accumulate structures and resources, while in MOBAs, players generally earn rewards for accomplishing tasks such as destroying important buildings or in-game characters while only controlling one character. To be successful as an RTS player, one needs to learn how to manage all the resources (e.g., armies, buildings) under one’s control, while at the same time strategically positioning oneself to limit the opponent, who is attempting to complete similar tasks.

Other Games

The final category includes a multitude of games such as digital collectible trading card games (not including games such as poker and blackjack), rhythm games, and massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG), among other types of games not classified elsewhere. Fall Guys, a popular non-shooting battle royale, consists of randomly selected challenges and obstacle course–like competitions, in which individuals or teams of individual competitors collaborate and compete to win sequential challenges leading up to a championship round of competition. In terms of online digital trading card games, Hearthstone is the most popular game today. However, many people are introduced to this genre through other games such as the Pokémon Trading Card Game Live and Magic: The Gathering Arena (Switzer, 2020).

Based on traditional trading and collectible card games, online card games consist of electronic decks of cards, and each card displays a different character with unique skills and abilities. ­Players draw cards and have a chance to use them to attack or defend against their opponents. All of this is done electronically on-screen, with ­players being able to see only their cards or the cards in play. There are also mobile games like Clash of Clans, where players place units on a board and the units then fight automatically, generally with some randomness affecting the outcome.

More Excerpts From Esports Business Management 2nd Edition With HKPropel Access

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