A burning question on all gamers’ minds in the UAE: Is there room for Esports to grow? Not to say there already isn’t a huge scene, with official Fortnite competitions and internet café battle royales with prize pools worth tens of thousands of dirhams taking place in the last year. However, when it comes to the standard of the rest of the world, where individual gamers make a living out of being professional, is there potential for the UAE’s Esport scene to soar? Some of the region’s biggest gaming industry leaders, including John Lacey, founder of Power League Gaming, and Serge Zabbal of Empire Entertainment had a thing or two to say about improving the gaming scene in Dubai and beyond.
How can gamers make it in the industry?
“The bigger challenge for Esports is the promise that people can ‘make it’ in competitive gaming. That’s almost a lie. There are millions of gamers, and very few can make a living – a tiny proportion,” says Lacey.
“If anything should be done, it is to highlight the genuine opportunities in the industry as opposed to competitive gaming. Take the last ten events I have worked at, I can tell you that if we employ 500 people for the event, only ten percent are gamers. The rest are cameramen, producers, designers, people from all walks of life, sport and music industry too. They are all content creators.”
How does the UAE do in the gaming scene?
“There are more world-class players from the UAE in Esports than in any other sport out there. There are dozens who are winning in an extremely difficult and competitive space. These people are not celebrated enough,” adds Lacey.
So, how can the UAE Esport scene thrive?
“For teams from the region to compete successfully on an international level, they first need to compete more in the region,”
says Zabbal.
“We need regular local or regional platforms and leagues to get gamers to improve every round, but it takes a lot of time. We need a scene – bootcamps and regular competitions. It is a chicken and egg situation, that is why it is taking time to create an ecosystem which will equip players with the tools to make it.”
Gamers, it’s only a matter of time until we reach the big, international leagues.
