Ten years ago, Sumail Hassan just wanted to play computer games at a cybercafe in his native Pakistan. So he did what many kids his age might do. He sold his bike “for a very bad price” to buy more gaming time.

“I bought like two hours for it,” Hassan, 18, recalled with a little grin. “I regretted it so much. ... But I was 7, so it was OK.”

What once seemed like a raw deal has turned into a lucrative career. Hassan, better known by his game handle “Suma1L,” is now one of the top gamers in the world. He and his four Alameda housemates are part of Team Evil Geniuses, winners of the prestigious International “Dota 2” championship in 2015.

Team EG pocketed a cool $6.6 million for the win, the largest purse ever for an e-sports tournament at the time, propelling the players’ celebrity in gaming circles to the stratosphere of Stephen Curry and Tom Brady.

While millions of fans will be glued to Sunday’s Super Bowl matchup between Brady’s New England Patriots and the Atlanta Falcons, a growing number will ignore America’s top sporting event in favor of video gaming.

Played by professional teams and viewed by huge audiences online and in-person, e-sports are the fastest-growing competitive market in the world. Total revenue from sponsorships, advertising, ticket sales and betting is expected to top $1 billion this year, up from $893 million in 2016, according to research firm SuperData. And while the average age of a Major League Baseball viewer is 53, e-sports demographics are a marketer’s dream: 18- to 35-year-olds, 75 percent male.

A report by research firm Newzoo found 22 percent of Millennial males in the U.S. watch e-sports — equivalent to baseball and more than hockey. Worldwide, viewership for e-sports championships eclipses that for the World Series and the NBA Finals.

“This audience is growing and at a rate that is breathtaking,” said Warriors co-owner and e-sports investor Peter Guber. “You can’t ignore that fact. E-sports defies the logic of sports when you look at the widespread emergence and the way it’s challenging other sports for attention.

“Let me say something very provocative — I think there is a high certainty e-sports will be an Olympic sport in 2020.”

The Bay Area is home to the top e-sports viewing platforms, including Twitch.tv and YouTube. For many in the over-35 crowd, the idea of watching others play video games or paying to see the action on big screens might seem baffling. But thousands attended the two-day Intel Extreme Masters event at Oracle Arena in November, where teams played the popular games “League of Legends” and “Counter Strike: Global Offensive.”

What’s the appeal?

“Everything,” said Allie Henderson, 25, who traveled to Oakland from Ventura. “It’s really cool to watch and see what the pro players can do compared to anyone else. The things they do — it’s just incredible. Faster, smarter, incredible skill. Half the time, I’m thinking, ‘I don’t know how you even saw that.’ ... What we find entertaining about the game is what fans find entertaining in other sports. What these pro gamers do is inhuman.”

“It’s the same thing as it is with football in some ways — you can watch someone make a Hail Mary pass and you’re like ‘Oh my God, I could never do that,’” said Wesley Hart, 19, who attended with his 17-year-old brother, Jesse.

A former high school wrestler, Wesley is also a traditional sports fan, but he says he can relate more to the e-sports players, who are usually about his own age and who interact with fans online while they stream their games.

“You’re able to communicate a lot more with them than you would with someone like Steph Curry,” Hart said. “And it’s a lot more accessible than regular sports. I can go home and play this game for hours on end. I could practice baseball or football for two and then go home for the day, that’s it.”

Hassan and his Team EG players, Saahil “UNiVeRsE” Arora, Ludwig “Zai” Wahlberg, Artour “Arteezy” Babaev, Andreas “Cr1t” Nielsen and coach Clinton “Fear” Loomis, spend nearly every waking hour practicing or strategizing.

“Dota 2” is considered one of the most intricate and difficult of the major e-sports. Draft preparation is key in the five-on-five battle arena game, in which each player controls a unique “hero” as teams try to destroy their opponents’ defensive base.

“Usually we play six hours of competitive matches against other teams and have the rest of the day for individual practice pretty much from when we wake to we go to sleep,” Loomis said. “We have a pingpong table in the garage. That’s usually our physical activity.”

Players also go to the gym, where they’re occasionally recognized by e-sports fans. Even though they spend up to 12 hours a day sitting behind monitors, they’re careful to stay fit and they eat fairly healthfully, too. They need stamina, alertness, quick reflexes and clear thinking.

Which leads to the obvious question: Are e-sports ... sports? Are e-sports stars ... athletes?

“Pretty much everything but the actual stuff we’re doing is the same,” said Wahlberg, 19, who is from Sweden. “We have teams, rivalries, fan bases, regions, North American teams vs. European teams vs. Asian teams. Competition at its highest level is very intense, and people enjoy watching that. It’s very, very similar to a traditional sport except for the fact we’re sitting behind a PC.”

The lines are increasingly being blurred between traditional and e-sports. Several English Premier League and Bundesliga teams have hired e-sports players to represent them in FIFA video game tournaments. The Pac-12 and other college conferences are adding e-sports divisions. Riot Games, which publishes “League of Legends,” is finalizing a $200 million deal with MLB Advanced Media to stream e-sports competitions.

“The NBA is very interested, the Premier League is very interested, because the audience is so robust, so young and so hard to reach,” Guber said. “They’re not cord cutters — they’re cord never-ers.”

E-sports viewing pioneer Twitch.tv was purchased by Amazon two years ago. The San Francisco company broadcasts e-sports competitions along with individual gamers’ live streams. Subscriptions and advertising linked to those individual streams have allowed some popular gamers to make millions without leaving the house.

Twitch allows for an immersive e-sports experience, with users able to broadcast their own game play and interact with viewers via chat functions; viewers can direct receptive gamers’ strategies or request specific moves.

“I can say something in the chat room, and they’ll see it and respond. Kobe Bryant isn’t going to respond to me, but in e-sports, you’ll see that happen all the time,” said Nick Allen, Twitch’s director of operations for e-sports. “The players, the fans, they’re all in it together.”

On YouTube, 27-year-old Swedish gamer Felix Kjellberg, known as PewDiePie, is the most-subscribed account with more than 50 million subscribers and more than a billion views — topping Justin Bieber, Rihanna and Taylor Swift.

Facebook has finalized partnerships with game developers to stream content to Facebook Live, while Electronic Arts (Redwood Shores), and Intel (Santa Clara) have long paired with gaming promoter ESL to put on worldwide events, a natural partnership based on e-sports’ need for powerful processors.

Gaming is becoming an increasingly popular in-person social activity, too, as Millennials age. Folsom Street Foundry in San Francisco holds Game Nights on Tuesdays and Thursdays, organized by C.J. Scaduto, the president of e-sports event organizer ShowDown.gg. The gatherings draw 300 to 500 people, mostly young adults who pay a $10 entry fee for tournaments and to “hang out with friends and play games, be competitive,” Scaduto said. “Street Fighter” and “Super Smash Bros” events are especially big, with some of the top players in the world showing up.

Later this year, a dedicated e-sports arena is scheduled to open in Oakland next to the Jack London Square Amtrak Station. The 1,000-seat arena will include a bar and cafe, and will provide monthly memberships for gamers while holding regional competitions nightly.

“I think it will be significant,” said ESL CEO Craig Levine. “It will give gamers a chance to socialize more. You’ll see more and more centers pop up, and training centers where you can learn from the best.”

If you’d send your kid to tennis camp or golf lessons but scoff at the notion of video-game instruction, consider this: At $20 million, the prize pool for the 16-team “Dota 2” International in 2016 was double that of the Masters.

That’s why Team EG’s Babaev, a 20-year-old from Vancouver, British Columbia, no longer gets pushback from his mother about his gaming aspirations. Babaev said she was skeptical at first about his taking time off to train for video game competitions, but came around a year later. Team EG has won its last two events, January’s Dota Pit Season 5 in Croatia, and China Top in December.

“I told her, ‘This is very beneficial for me monetarily, and it’s enjoyable,’” Babaev said. “Now she is very supportive. She watches every game the whole way, even if I’m in China and it’s 4 a.m.”

What’s ahead for e-sports? Virtual reality headsets, already used for live-stream audiences, are inching their way into the games themselves. Geographically based e-sports teams and leagues are on the horizon, especially with the involvement of traditional sports leagues used to handling large-scale logistics.

And as many cable subscriptions decline, traditional sports broadcast outlets like ESPN and TBS are jumping in with e-sports content. Xfinity, part of Comcast, already sponsors teams and events. Everyone is trying to grab a piece of the pie.

“This is the Wild West or the Forty-Niner Gold Rush in some sense,” Guber said. “This isn’t the end of the beginning — it’s the beginning of the beginning.”

Susan Slusser is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: sslusser@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @susanslusser