Hell, it’s about time. In the ten years since, gaming grew up. As I am writing this, gamers from around the globe are convening on Seattle to battle pixels vs voltages, for over 19 million dollars. Viewers will be measure in the tens of millions. What happens next week inside Key Arena will change lives.

This rapid growth of gaming as a profession occurred concurrently with the rise of internet technology. Online gaming now has an audience and a clear goal, enabled by the distributed volume only the internet can provide. Just like the athletes of any other professional sports, professional gamers are expected to sign autographs, take pictures, and perform at the peak of human capacity. They in turn expect to make lots of money. Some of this money is partially injected by organizers, but the introduction of concepts such as groupsourcing and microtransactions have fueled explosive prize pools for tournaments such as the International, putting gaming on the same playing field as other mainstream sports.

Groupsourcing, or crowdsourcing, is the process of obtaining goods by distributing input across a group of people. If the good is sufficiently abstract enough to be easily contributed and combined (for example not cows), as the group of people participating becomes very large, the amount of resources realized becomes very large as well. Microtransactions is the concept of selling something of incidental value for a very small cost, but at a very high volume. As long as the methods of collecting payment and circulating the end asset are not costly compared to the price, microtransactions can be very profitable. The caveat here is sufficient volume, or upper limit.

The presentation and retrieval of information has historically never before been lazier than what can be achieved today through the internet and on computers. This current enables Valve to sell a digital book comprised entirely of 0’s and 1’s to millions of gamers worldwide, known as the International Compendium. With each $9.99 Compendium sold, a small portion of the price goes to the eventual prize pool of the International. In essence, amateur gamers who purchased a Compendium each personally made a contribution of $2.50 towards the progress of DotA as a professional sport. And the lunch money adds up, quickly. Take my energy BIBLETHUMP.

Along with the legitimization of gaming through enabling a large monetary end prize, technology has empowered websites such as Twitch to allow millions of people to watch and follow competitive games like never before. Twitch, and streaming in general, is unique in the fact that the content is consumed on the same medium from which it was produced. This creates an end-to-end integration with the internet from which content can connect on a more personal level. Scheduled programming on Twitch is much more casual than what would be on television, and the viewer chat is famous for making contributions to internet culture.

With all of this “never before”, “first ever”, and biggest <insert statistic here> happening the past few years, it appears that the first Golden Age of Gaming has finally bloomed. Today’s internet infrastructure developed a novel financial model to support massive tournaments around the globe and serves as the backbone of the massive global audience. Before these recent advances, electronic sports have had pockets of exposure in niche markets such as South Korea. The hype was isolated to mainly just Starcraft and although there were dedicated television networks and prize money, the scale of either could not compare to the present growth curve. Being the Golden Age of Gaming, popular titles such as Overwatch, Counter-Strike, Hearthstone and even League of Legends(ew) have all reaped massive spikes in the past few years by viewership and popularity alongside Dota 2. The surge is finally slowing down however, a sign of maturity and stability as we settle in to this first age of prosperity.