Will esports boom in Southeast Asia like it did in China?

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The esports market in China is huge. With 16 percent of the global total in 2017, it is the second-biggest gaming market after North America. The rise of mobile esports can boost it even further.

See also: China’s esports market is booming—and now it’s going mobile

Will we see this kind of growth in all of Southeast Asia? Is the esports industry worth investing in if we look at long-term growth? We asked a couple of investors for their thoughts.

Editor’s note: Answers have been edited for clarity.

Saikit Ng, chief executive at Captii Ventures

Esports is certainly a growing industry, predominantly driven by the maturity of game development. This is also supported by the growth of internet penetration (especially mobile internet) and the ever growing screen time spent by teenagers when playing games and streaming live games.

But the industry, particularly in Southeast Asia, faces a few concerns, as compared to the US, China, and South Korea. We discussed this internally at Captii some time back and discovered the main factors for why investments were not yet strong:

• Internet speeds are not uniform, which resulted in less optimum game experience.
• There’s a lack of sponsorship budget at a time when conventional digital media buy still has much to catch up, compared to more mature markets.
• Professional esports development is still nascent, causing many issues, including stability of professional esports teams (i.e. frequent changes in team composition result in sponsorship budgets remaining as experimental marketing spend).

Societal acceptance of esports player as a profession may also be the biggest hurdle in this region.

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