When Drew Jacob Miser and his team take the floor at Oracle Arena on Saturday, he’ll be competing in one of the most popular games around. But he’s not going up against Stephen Curry and the Golden State Warriors.

Miser is captain of the Ninjas in Pyjamas team, which will battle 19 other teams for the top prize in a $200,000 “PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds” e-sports tournament. The game’s surprise popularity earned it a featured spot in this year’s two-day Intel Extreme Masters Oakland tournament.

“I’m super excited to be competing this weekend with the boys,” the 21-year-old Riverside County resident said by email while traveling from team practices in Sweden. “Feels surreal (that) it’s come so far so fast.”

More than 6,000 fans are expected for the 12th edition of the tournament, which for the fourth straight year is being held in a major Bay Area sports venue.

E-sports, which attract millions of online viewers and fill venues with enthusiastic crowds, continue to grow, gaining investments from traditional sports executives like Warriors owner Joe Lacob. E-sports are expected to generate about $660 million in revenue globally in 2017, growing to $1.5 billion in 2020, according to industry research firm Newzoo.

A 1,000-seat e-sports arena in the Jack London Square area is scheduled to open early next year — a year later than the original date — with construction scheduled to begin Monday, said Brian Fisher, spokesman for arena operator Allied Esports.

At Intel Extreme Masters, the big draw is the competition for a $300,000 pot for multiplayer first-person shooter game “Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.” The Electronic Sports League replaced traditional e-sports games like “League of Legends” with “PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds,” and a regional tournament of a new virtual reality e-sports league.

Software engineering student Ryan “Charizard” Shaw of Philadelphia practiced long hours preparing to compete in the VR game “Unspoken.” He has won up to $250 in smaller tournaments, so the prospect of a $200,000 prize pool in Oakland gave him more incentive to practice.

“It’s very important to understand all the different interactions in the game, to go into each match with a game plan,” Shaw said. “And we get a free trip out of it. I’ve never been to the West Coast.”

While the overall audience for VR remains small, the audience for “Battlegrounds” is already huge, even though it won’t be officially released for PCs and the Xbox One until next month. Publisher Bluehole began releasing early access, work-in-progress versions in March, yet has sold more than 20 million copies at $30 each, said Joost van Dreunen, CEO of game industry firm SuperData Research.

To put that in perspective, the big holiday title from Redwood City’s Electronic Arts, “Star Wars: Battlefront II,” released Friday, is expected to sell about 15 million copies, van Dreunen said.

“It’s as much of a blockbuster as you can get, but this one game that came out of nowhere has already obliterated those numbers,” van Dreunen said.

In “Battlegrounds,” up to 100 players drop onto a remote island, without weapons, armor or other tools, in a mad scramble to be the last one alive. Along the way, the players must find weapons and tools, stay within an increasingly tightening area of play and avoid being killed. It’s comparable to the plot of the popular book and movie series “Hunger Games.”

Michal Blicharz, Electronic Sports League’s vice president of pro gaming, said the group added the game to the competition because “interest in this specific tournament from the fan base, the industry, the teams and the players is actually greater than anything I ever remember.”

“PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds” has a chance to be the next big e-sport because each match is different, said Jurre Pannekeet, Newzoo’s head of e-sports research.

“But this form of randomness can also be difficult,” Pannekeet said in an email. “With e-sports, you want the outcome of a game to be based on skill as much as possible. If its gameplay can revolve mostly around tactics and strategical decision-making, it has a very good shot at becoming a big e-sports title.”

Miser, known as NiP Sweaterr, is already a full-time player and captain of Ninjas in Pyjamas’ “Battlegrounds” team. He said he hopes the game “continues to grow, so the longevity of my career and my team’s career isn’t entirely bottlenecked.”

Benny Evangelista is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: bevangelista@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ChronicleBenny

Intel Extreme Masters Oakland 2016 stats

Attendance: 6,500

Peak concurrent online viewers worldwide: 490,000

Hours of online content consumed: 6.4 million