Lambert here: I don’t play electronic games, but I’m sure we have readers who do. Have any of you seen this “badvertising”? Can it be blocked?
By Andrew Simms, co-director of the New Weather Institute, co-founder of the Badvertising campaign, the Rapid Transition Alliance and assistant director of Scientists for Global Responsibility. Originally published at DeSmog.
As an insurgent sport among the sweat and strain of more traditional exertions, esports — short for electronic sports and synonymous with gaming — had a chance to chart a new course. Free from the sponsorship links with polluting industries that tarnish many established sports, and with an overwhelmingly young and growing player and fanbase, esports could have created a blueprint for sport in the 21st century and the critical climate issues it faces.
Unfortunately, esports have fallen into the same trap as football, cricket, and many other popular but easily exploited sports: It has become a playground for some of the world’s biggest polluters to promote themselves and mislead fans. Competitive gaming has made the leap from dimly lit bedrooms to the world stage, but, in the process, has slipped on an oil slick.
New research from the Badvertising campaign highlights the alarming trend of esportswashing. Taking a cue from the old tobacco industry playbook, major polluters are trying to co-opt a new generation and normalise climate polluting products and lifestyles. Since just 2017, at least 33 polluting sponsorship deals have been struck between the global esports industry and high-carbon polluters. Of these, 27 have been deals with car manufacturers, five with major fossil fuel companies, and two with the armed forces of the United States — the planet’s thirstiest consumer of oil.
Petrostates too, such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar, have sensed the opportunity and spent hugely into the esports sector, sponsoring teams of young gamers and even hosting tournaments in energy-hungry, air-conditioned arenas. In fact, the inaugural Esports World Cup is culminating in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where over 1,500 professional gamers have competed across 21 games, with over a million fans following online.
Despite its relative novelty, esports presents a huge opportunity for polluting companies feeling the heat on climate. It is a booming industry. There are already an estimated 500 million esports fans around the world. While this is just a fraction of the three billion active gamers, there is serious room for expansion — and polluters can see the opportunity to groom the next generation.
Shrewd Move
Alongside the massive growth of the industry is the esports loyal fanbase. It’s international, overwhelmingly young, and male. In the UK, over 50 percent of esports fans are aged between 18 and 34, and overwhelmingly male. Globally, in 2021, more than six in every 10 internet users watching esports were aged between 16 and 35 years old. To put this youthfulness in perspective, only one-in-four ‘die hard’ football fans globally are between 25 and 34 years old.
Built around this fanbase is a vibrant digital culture and community, buoyed by the proliferation of streaming platforms and threaded together through memes which are indecipherable to outsiders. Like with all great sports, it is the community that brings esports to life and makes it such a spectacle. Tapping into this community, and leveraging its global digital networks, is a shrewd move for companies clinging to a dwindling social license of public acceptance.
High-carbon industries targeting younger audiences is not new and comes in many forms, but esports presents an opportunity to communicate with hundreds of millions of young and loyal fans. It is an added irony that these young audiences will be the worst hit by climate breakdown — a crisis that the latest sponsor of their beloved esports is disproportionately responsible for.
Once again, regulators are asleep at the controls. The rise of esportswashing and its potential impact on younger minds requires bolder and better advertising regulation and coordination with the game franchises. But action to date has been limited.
The immersive nature of esports presents an added challenge for regulators and the limited scope they currently exercise to protect young people from exploitative influences. In-game advertising blurs the divide between what is advertising and what is the game. Take Shell’s foray into Fortnite in 2023, where players were encouraged to fill up their digital cars at a digital petrol station to promote its V-Power Nitro+ fuel. Here, the advertisement was part of the game. It is only a matter of time before other polluting companies take Shell’s lead.
With esports fans and athletes facing a precarious future in a warmer world, those responsible for this burgeoning sport and the community built around it must take the threat posed by polluting sponsorship seriously. To protect athletes, gamers and fans around the world, esports teams and governing bodies need to align their commercial partnerships with their values, duty of care to players and audiences, and policies for a liveable future and thriving environment. And when top gamers and streamers speak out about their fears of climate breakdown, they should be supported and nurtured.
Esports are on the cusp of repeating the mistake of other traditional sports in letting themselves be used as a billboard to promote polluters, but it is not too late to clean up. Those polluters that are gaming the climate should not be given free reign to game young minds too; or it could soon be game over for everyone.
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Not sure what this has to do with esports specifically. Is the author suggesting we make special advertising rules just for esports? What sort of “bolder and better regulation” are we actually talking about, and why wouldn’t we just apply it to advertising generally? Are we pretending that relegating truck commercials to baseball and Golden Girls reruns is a serious attempt to address climate change? Should we have an international ministry of esports advertising to determine which wealthy advertisers get permission to plumb the tender and easily-influenced 30-yr-old male who is the average fan of this sport? (esports, if a sport, is probably the most geographically distributed one). Should esports “athletes” who earn much, much less than their counterparts in real sports, be also much more noble in their selection of sponsors? The irony of this is that getting people to focus on “esportswashing” as if it is a unique and important thing corrupting our youth, seems like exactly the sort of thing oil companies would like to finance.
My thoughts are similar. This article reads in spirit like Between Optimism and Despair: The Messy Middle Paths Through Climate Breakdown which was posted here a couple weeks ago.
More chatter by dullards. I’ll start taking these thinkpieces seriously when they advocate for significant alterations in the “consumer” economy. Until then, it’s capitalistic hedonism until the oceans boil.
Edit: You can imagine just how proud the author was with this quip at the end:
Throw this rubbish navel-gazing into the oceans with the rest of this species’ refuse.
“The immersive nature of esports” is absolute poppycock. Firstly, the overwhelming majority of participants in “esports” are observers, not athletes. And the idea that playing video games is somehow more “immersive” than playing soccer or basketball should be patently ridiculous even to someone who has played neither. Competitors compete in competitions which are primarily watched live, on some channel like espn, or on youtube or some other unexceptional medium to watch 2 dimensional media on. There is nothing remotely unique or particularly immersive about any of this. I can tell you from personal experience it is more “immersive” to sit on your own couch watching 2 friends play video games than to watch 2 guys doing the same thing in saudi arabia from your laptop.
Secondly, it’s only “esports” if it’s in a structured competition with some sort of prize for winning, and some spectators and organizers and such. Absent these things, “esports” is traditionally known as “playing video games.” This is indeed an immersive activity, but claiming that a deluge of pro-climate-trashing advertising is using the “immersive” nature of playing video games to create uniquely effective or ubiquitous anti-climate propaganda is frankly silly to anyone who plays video games. Likewise, the claim that “esports” – a fringe nonsport that is closer to sports like bowling and competitive poker than behemoths like the NFL or Cricket or any actually popular actual sport – deserves some especially unique advertising regulation is equally absurd to any gamer because, frankly, a video game is one of the ONLY places where it is actually possible to escape being advertised to for a few hours, and there is literally nothing different about esports ads than any other ads on the media we watch them on.
Finally, the fact that an article like this can be so blithely written in PMC land does highlight something that non-gamers might be oblivious to: there is a hard taboo among the PMC against playing video games more than occasionally with your kids. Kids who played video games all day didn’t get to harvard, and don’t do triathalons, after all.
To be honest i think the audience is the key thing here – contrary to their female counterparts male youth is noticeably less interested, for god and ill, in green things in general and pmc values in particular.
Clearly video games are to blame.
Yeah the article conflates various concepts in a way that isn’t really coherent and would paint an inaccurate picture. All your comments are on point and explain why what they’re arguing is a bit strange. What they outline is bad (general sportswashing) but not unique to esports or being done in a new or unique way. Except for the Fortnite example they eventually get to.
To clarify, in general there’s little advertising in videogames, with a few exceptions:
1. In sports simulation videogames, where, presented as simulacra of real pro sports events, the advertising and licensing presented in-game mirrors that of the real world (advertising hoardings, certain players contracted to certain boot manufacturers etc)
2. advertising for purchases within the game’s own little market ecosystem: that could be for DLC, or Downloadable Content: additional content that alters the game experience either superficially (new costumes for characters) or substantially (adding new gameplay story/mechanics etc). Or it could be for things like “loot-box” microtransactions which supply little nuggets of in-game items (which can either be superficial or substantive) at random, with some items more rare than others, and which are a grimy business in their own right that typically adopt the same habit-forming, psychologically cynical mechanisms as online gambling (and are quite strictly regulated in some EU countries, like Belgium iirc). ‘Gamers’ tend to be okay with things like DLC if it’s substantive and they feel they aren’t being taken for a ride by the developer or publisher. They typically express opposition to things like loot boxes.
Advertising for these things will typically take place in the game’s menus which are separate from the substantive gameplay experience. Their obtrusiveness/obnoxiousness will vary drastically from title to title. Many games, especially indies, don’t have this stuff at all.
3. Things like Fortnite, as the article mentions, which have regular crossover “events” which are exercises in marketing and branding, like the Shell example given in the article. They usually tend to be comic book franchise or pop music crossovers, though. But as funemployed points out, that’s not really eSports, it’s just playing a popular videogame. This is a relatively recent phenomenon. It’s not widespread, but some of these titles, like Fortnite, are extremely popular.
For a bit of extra background not especially related to the main article, games like Fortnite are referred to as ‘Games as a Service’ or GaaS. The game itself becomes a kind of platform. ie in the past, kids would have a Nintendo or a Playstation and form their brand loyalty to those hardware platforms, on which you could play many different games. Now kids have an allegiance to Fortnite, say, which is a software platform and which is available on both Nintendo and Playstation and many hardware platforms besides. They’re usually free to play, and make most of their money from aforementioned microtransactions, including something called ‘Battle Passes’ which require not just a monetary but time commitment of customers if they’re to maximise the value of the purchase of the battle pass (goodies aren’t randomised, but the more you play, the more goodies you get). Again, despite their popularity, gamers like to complain about GaaS, bemoaning their tendency to try and exploit the player as a customer and gouge them of their money and time, when in days gone by you could just buy a game and play it, and in the case of multiplayer, not feel as if you’ve been left behind if you’ve gone a period of time without logging in. Many prefer games that don’t feel like they’re trying to extract maximum value out of the player at every opportunity. Thankfully, many such games exist.
After the success of Fortnite, many publishers have redirected development resources to GaaS games but this seems to have backfired: there’s a finite amount of time that players, even young ones, can spend playing games, and therefore probably a critical mass of viable, successful GaaS games (which, in turn, rely on having a large user base to be successful and viable as an ongoing concern). This has been pretty bad for some companies, in an industry which has also been haemmorhaging jobs in the past 18 months (not just because of the misplaced bets by publishers on GaaS of course, but that’s surely part of it; the transient free-time boom of 2020-21 is another). Many very talented developers have been rather miserably and unceremoniously shut down by their owners. Many others have downsized quite dramatically.
Yes, in the games themselves there is rarely any advertising since it’s simply not a very effective monetization model compared to the alternatives (the loot box/battle pass system is an established pattern that works very well, and the vast majority of modern games follow this model). The exceptions are games like Fortnite or GTA that are simulating a real world environment close to our own (not sci fi or far future or anything) and want familiar brands and products to improve the quality of the simulation. Typically in that case the money flows the other way, with gaming companies paying the likes of Coke for use of their trademarks. Driving games want real car models, and will have a network of licensing agreements with car manufacturers. Football games want to let you play as Messi or Ronaldo, and that doesn’t come for free either. For sports games in particular, companies will often pay extra for exclusivity (EA Games is notorious for this) forcing all their competitors to use player and team names that are obfuscated or outright made-up.
That’s gaming itself. Esports is simply a spectator sport like any other, just a bit more digitally native and with better coverage tools. It will use a streaming platform like Twitch or Youtube to broadcast rather than the traditional sports networks, but other than that there’s not much difference. Traditional sports fans might be mystified by the game itself, but all the surrounding details – the hype, the analyst coverage, interviews, advertising, all the rest of it – would be instantly familiar to them. You are not getting some kind of unique immersive experience – you’re watching professionals play the game, on a screen, non-interactively, just as you would for any other sport. Maybe there’s a poll or a contest or a chance to submit live questions or the like, but other sports are doing that kind of thing now too.
The Chicago Cubs did not have lights for night games until 8/8/88, when owned by The Tribune Company. Prior owner Wrigley had lights built but not yet installed at the outset of WWII, but then donated them to the U.S. government for the war effort.
A bit of perspective on petrostates and sports. The Esports World Cup is happening in Saudi Arabia. The total prize pool for one of the most popular games (Tekken 8) is 1 million dollars, with 100k going to the winner. This person is probably the single best in the world at this game, and that prize will make up a major portion of that competitor’s annual income.
Also, in Saudi Arabia, the football club Al-Nassr will be paying Christiano Ronaldo about 200 million dollars to play a season of football on a team with a bunch of other expensive players.
Exactly. This problem exists in most of the biggest professional sports today. Esports might be growing fast, but they’re still a minor player in the overall sporting world in dollar terms.
To focus on esports particularly, while ignoring the very much larger sums of sponsorship money being spent on established offline sports with a longer history, feels like a moral panic.
When you are talking or competing with others in person – I recall reading (I may be off the mark) that as much as 80% of in person communication is non-verbal. So I wonder, because of the great loss of data/communication content that digital communications of all sorts creates: that people of every age may feel an unhealthy atomization of community, politics, sports, safety, trust etc.
Video games are a menace, and they certainly are not sports, but the other kind of sports “gaming”* is an ongoing disaster: Here and here.
I don’t watch televised sports except for 4-5 times a year, but the DraftKings and FanDuel ads and promos are constant…Prop bets on golf? Are people really that stupid? Rhetorical question.
Oh, and Shohei Ohtani, the second coming of Babe Ruth? Yes, he did it. There is no way his “interpreter” could abscond with millions from his accounts without his money managers and bankers sounding multiple alarms. But Major League Baseball could not have its once and future star of the first magnitude go the way of Pete Rose, although they did recently ban a relative nonentity for life for gambling.
Anyway, if you must gamble on sports, your local bookie is a lot safer. He might cut you off before you sink beneath the waves.
*When “gambling” became “gaming,” all bets were off.
I think there should be a regulation that broadcasters should provide an option where those who wish to watch sports without seeing ads for alcohol and gambling should be allowed to choose that. I can’t imagine being a sports-lover struggling with an addiction to either and trying to relax and enjoy a game, and I’d wager that’s a pretty sizeable demographic.
The source cited defines “diehard” football fans as those who hold season tickkets. Seems a bit of a reach to highlight the “youthfulness” of a fan demographic whose modal fan and competitor is a 29 y/o man, and whose biggest spending fans are in the 30-45 y/o (and even more heavily male) range. There isn’t some huge surge of youthful interest in video games. The demographics of esports fans are exactly what you would expect of a hobby that blew up in the mid 80s among young people and has remained a fairly consistently popular (yet still somewhat niche due to the large time investment necessary to really be a “gamer” in the sense of being part of the gaming community) activity among young people and those who grew up playing video games. The main demographic change is that more girls and women play games now.
Framing this as somehow specifically a young people problem is another tired rehashing of the “video games are corrupting the youth in a new and especially pernicious way” narrative that has been going strong for 4 decades now. I’m not defending video games at all. I think the amount of time children spend staring at flickering screens is a horrific tragedy. I just don’t think the tut-tutting that gets directed at video games for being uniquely awful is justified. IMHO, they are more active and social, and less propagandistic than many other forms of screen time.