HBO Real Sports Features League of Legends

By: Michael ‘Zorion’ Poropat After the League of Legends Season 3 World Championships concluded and drew over 1.4 million concurrent viewers and a reported* 20 million unique viewers**, it would seem as though main stream media is beginning to take note and accept the legitimacy of eSports. HBO Real Sports correspondent Soledad O’Brien created a segment about eSports which featured an interview with Team Dignitas’ William ‘Scarra’ Li. The video, which aired on HBO Real Sports on Tuesday, October 22, was well received throughout the eSports community.

The video focuses primarily on the hard work and practice that eSports players must exercise to compete at a high level. It also talked about the recent legal classification of League of Legends as a valid way to be issued a US Visa. The main purpose of the segment was to explanatory and therefore you won’t find any breaking news in the video if you’re a big eSports fan, but its a great video to show to your friends and family who aren’t as interested as you are.

The Season 3 World Championship was clearly popular enough to grab the attention of some big name sports writers, but does the inclusion of this video in a “real” sports show the giant step for eSports that we have been waiting for? It would seem that it could only help legitimize eSports, and once someone makes a report like this, news spreads fast and we are likely to see other shows and paper media begin discussing eSports as well.

The reason why most “real”sports people don’t accept eSports as a legitimate sport, is because of the large gap between life styles. As our younger generations become older, they will carry this tradition with them and bring their beliefs into these big name companies like CBS Sports, Fox Sports, HBO, ESPN, etc. Hopefully, this segment will help to encourage sports writers to investigate eSports and come to their own conclusion on the industry, instead of just relying on social beliefs to write off eSports as a sport.

What do you think about the segment? Let us know below.

For more news about eSports and video games, visit CompetitiveGamer.net

Sources: CompetitiveGamer.net, PCGamesSN.com, HBO, GameInformer. Video courtesy of HBO.

*numbers reported by HBO Real Sports.

** Compared to Season 2 World Championship which had 1.1 million concurrent viewers and 8,282,000 unique viewers.