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Esports events are frequently held in traditional sports venues retrofitted to fit the higher-tech standards required for pro esports. But cities are now beginning to build stadiums specifically designed for video games.
Fans attending traditional sports events desire stable WiFi connection to browse their phones during gameplay, with even physical sports becoming augmented and gamified with data. But at esports events, the internet connection is the backbone of the entire competition.
“[Playing with a bad network] would be like playing basketball underwater,” said Jonathon Oudthone, the founder of NGAGE Esports and esports project lead for Esports Stadium Arlington, to SportTechie in August. “That’s a term in esports, playing underwater. With high ping or low bandwidth connectivity, your response time is dramatically decreased.”
Esports Stadium Arlington, which measures 100,000 square feet and opened in November as the largest dedicated facility in North America, is equipped with a one-gigabyte dedicated symmetric line—meaning the download and upload speeds are the same—that can be expanded out to a massive five gigabytes if necessary.
Flashy LED lights beam across esports stadiums in ways that mirror electric dance music concerts more than sports events. The reality is that venues specifically dedicated to esports are so new that standards for their construction are still being worked out.
Whereas the most desirable seats to traditional sporting events are seats that are closest to the field or court, the opposite holds true in esports arenas. Most esports events offer general admission tickets, and the seats around the perimeter of the stadium are the fastest to fill up.
“The venue itself is quite a bit different,” said Brian Mirakian, design project lead for Esports Stadium Arlington, in August. “Normally when you think of the valuable seats, you think of Jack Nicholson in the Staples Center. [In esports] what you see is that people would rather gravitate to positions in the back of the bowl because they have better sight lines to the screen. It’s similar to how seating works in a movie theatre.”
In March, a 30,000 square-foot esports arena opened at the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas, featuring a competition stage, 50-foot LED video wall, telescopic seating, PC and console gaming stations, a network TV-quality production studio, and virtual reality platforms. In November, HyperX bought multi-year naming rights for the stadium, marking the first time a company purchased naming rights for an esports venue in North America.
Esports Stadium Arlington is more than three times larger than HyperX’s arena in Las Vegas, and contains an 85-foot long video wall. The University of Texas at Arlington, which has one of the top collegiate esports programs in the country, has its own team room inside the stadium to use as training space. Gamers competing at Esports Stadium Arlington are treated to a player’s lounge that features a massage table, protein bars and pre-workout drinks. There is also a merchandise area for fans to buy shirts and hats representing esports teams, and a gamer computer space where amateurs can buy time to train or play in small local tournaments.
Events at Esports Stadium Arlington are managed by NGAGE esports, an event management company that’s part of Infinite Esports & Entertainment. The stadium was funded by the city of Arlington in a $10 million project. The opening event was an eight-team Counter-Strike tournament that offered a $750,000 prize pool, and this month, Esports Stadium Arlington has plans to host tournaments for popular gaming titles such as League of Legends, Rocket League, and Madden NFL.
Esports Stadium Arlington surely won’t remain the largest esports facility in North America for long. With the esports industry expected to reach $1.5 billion in global revenue by 2020, more American cities will likely soon follow Arlington in building venues dedicated to esports. But the arena in Arlington might serve as a model prototype for the future esports stadiums of America.
“My dream is to pack this house out every weekend, to expand and grow this venue to a 20,000 to 60,000 seating venue one day, so we can compete with the NFLs, the MLBs of the world,” said Oudthone in late November, according to CBS Dallas-Fort Worth.
For leading the design of live esports arenas in the U.S. by being the biggest, newest, and perhaps the venue with the grandest plans, we have selected Esports Stadium Arlington as SportTechie’s Outstanding Venue for 2018.