Russian billionaire and Arsenal co-Owner Alisher Usmanov, who invested $100M in competitive video-gaming last year, "is seeing the money put to work as the company he backs, ESforce, attempts to dominate the growing sport in eastern Europe," according to Ilya Khrennikov of BLOOMBERG. ESforce is "hosting eastern Europe’s biggest online-game tournament next month, having lined up Western sponsors and players," according to a statement from the company Monday. It is also spending $5M "to build an e-sports arena in Moscow for local competitions and buying content rights from teams to parlay into revenue from online broadcasts and sales of both virtual and physical goods." Usmanov is "betting on rising popularity for the events, which can attract tens of thousands of paying spectators and hundreds of thousands more online." ESforce Founder & CEO Anton Cherepennikov said, "We have exactly the same monetization tools as offline sport teams like Arsenal do, and even more of them. E-sports is already comparable with traditional sports such as football or hockey by audience and is rapidly catching up by revenue." Asia "accounted for about a half" of the global $748M e-sports market last year, researcher SuperData estimates. The market is "set to grow" to $1.9B by '18 as other regions led by the U.S. and Europe are "boosting spending on e-sports," according to SuperData. SuperData said that more than 188 million unique online viewers "watched e-sports last year." ESforce said that about 30 million of them "were from Russian and former Soviet Union" (BLOOMBERG, 4/4).
