Upton first heard about the nascent industry while running the Listening Company, the customer service business he sold to Serco in 2011 for £55m. “I had 4,000 employees at that company and most of them were under 25,” he says. “I’d have a beer with them on Friday and they would tell me about their plans to play videogame competitions all weekend. About 50pc of them were into it. This piqued my interest.”