Gambling Harm Prevention in Sport Review - February 2023

2.4 - Gambling in esports In recent years, gambling became an increasingly central segment of the esports industry (Grove, 2016; Sweeney et al., 2021). The global esports market has seen a significant expansion in the last decade from a revenue of $124 million USD in 2014 (PwC, 2020) to being valued at just over $1.38 billion USD in 2022 and forecasted to grow to $1.87 billion USD in 2025 (Statista, 2022). This growth is believed to have been associated with increases in esports betting advertising and participation (Abarbanel & Phung, 2019). Esports gambling was first offered by one major gambling bookmaker in 2012 and by 2016, it was offered by all major legal gambling bookmakers (Grove, 2016).

It is an increasingly popular form of gambling and just like traditional sports betting, individuals are able to wager on the outcome of a video game or on their preferred players or teams (Abarbanel & Johnson, 2019). Similar to sports bettors, esports bettors can believe they are able to develop a certain degree of skill, knowledge and analysis of in-game features and therefore they would have a better chance of winning due to their knowledge of the game (Brook & Clark, 2019; Macey & Hamari, 2020; Winters & Derevensky, 2019). Research has shown that esports betting is not only appealing to gamers, online gamblers in particular are attracted to video game-related gambling (Macey & Hamari, 2018; Lelonek-Kuleta & Bartczuk, 2021). More frequent esports betting is also associated with greater problem gambling symptoms (Gainsbury et al., 2017; Macey & Hamari, 2019; Zendle, 2020) and recent research found that in comparison to sports bettors, esports bettors are more likely to experience gambling problems which could be due to their involvement in emerging video-game related gambling products (Greer et al., 2021).

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