Introduction:

As of January 14th, ESPN (Entertainment and Sports Programming Network) have ventured into the world of eSports. However, this doesn’t come as a surprise as more and more organizations are going into eSports and Counter-Strike such asOpTiC Gaming andFaZe Clan with the inclusion of former rostersex-Conquest andex-Gamers2 respectively. Unfortunately, there was some backlash from fans around April of 2015 surrounding one of ESPN’s channels showing a League of Legends match.

The April Backlash:

So around April 2015, ESPN's second channel was streaming a League of Legends match to test out how eSports would pan out on television under a sports channel. The results were below mediocre to say the least. Many people took to Twitter and started ranting about how it was stupid and idiotic. Some examples included: “This whole ESPN 2 thing is shining a light on a whole new breed of idiot.” and ”cant believe ESPN 2 is airing League of Legends gaming right now lmfaoooo”. There are a lot more tweets that are similar to these and this really hurt ESPN’s reputation for a while. After this outrage, ESPN stopped streaming gaming as a daily programme and after about 9 months, they have decided to return bigger than ever with a full team ready to start.

The New Era:

This really cannot hurt the eSports scene at where it is currently sitting. The more exposure the scene gets, the more organizations are going to want to get involved as there are too many opportunities for more money to be missed. ESPN have just recruited a few new members into their lineup. These people include some writers that are known as Rod “Slasher” Breslau and Tyler “Fionn” Erzberger. Both of these newly recruited members have loads of experience as Rod used to write for TheScore Esports and Tyler used to write for LOLEsports. A third recruitment includes Azubu’s managing editor Darin Kwilinski who will be leading the entire team for now. Unfortunately for us Counter-Strike fans, ESPN doesn't have anything for us just yet. However, according to @darinjk2, ESPN is looking to go into the first person shooter scene fairly soon.

Conclusion:

As ESPN retry to venture into eSports for the second time after a failed attempt, we simply need to wait and see for what this means for the scene and for the company. ESPN as a company has seen how much love there is for eSports and they have wanted to go into the scene for a while already. On top of this, many current sports are declining in viewers while all of eSports is growing insanely quickly due to the interest of kids and young adults.*Thank you for reading and if you have any comments, suggestions or edits, please leave a comment below. =)