Why Intel Is Betting On Esports And Virtual Reality

Birmingham, England—Near the back of the EGX Expo hall, two players battle it out over a game of Hearthstone. Watching their moves on two large screens is a crowd of maybe 40 people, with commentators discussing each play.

- Adam Smith

Surrounding the players are suits of armor and fake bags of loot from the eSports League and Intel, two organizations looking to push eSports further into the public consciousness.

EGX isn’t Intel’s first foray into the eSports market. It’s been hosting much bigger events for 12 years now, starting in 2006 with the first Intel Extreme Masters, a series of international eSports tournaments. This year, there have been Masters’ events in Sydney and Shanghai; later this year, the competition comes to Chicago before stopping in Katowice, Poland, early next year.

The phenomenon is only going to grow, Scott Gillingham, Intel’s Gaming and eSports lead, told PCMag at EGX. He pointed to the 2017 Katowice competition, which attracted 173,000 attendees in the arena and more than 46 million viewers online. Gillingham tells us that the number of online views hit an astonishing two billion.

For Intel, the increased interest in eSports has a number of benefits—most notably that more people will need computers capable of running today’s most popular PC games. On the EGX show floor, there were a number of compact laptops and tiny gaming powerhouses, as well as the traditional “gamer PCs.”

These PCs must support a collaborative experience, something Intel touted on banners that read: “Game, Record, Stream.”