Text/Contributing Writer Conan On July 23, the 142nd Session of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in Paris, France, unanimously adopted a resolution to host the first Olympic Esports Games in Saudi Arabia in 2025.

It seems that a "competitive event" with the potential to be tied with the Football World Cup and the Summer Olympics is coming.

The IOC and Saudi Arabia will co-host the esports Olympics for a period of 12 years, and the two sides will hold the esports Olympics on a regular basis. Immediately after the adoption of the above resolution, the two sides will proceed with the selection of the host city and venue of the event, and confirm the details of the competition time, events and the promotion process of the players.

Strictly speaking, holding the esports Olympics alone is a compromise. Previously, the e-sports referred to by the IOC was not an e-sports project dominated by game companies such as Riot, V Club, and Blizzard in the traditional sense, but a digital scene of sports with the help of virtual technology.

To put it simply, it is to use some digital technology to carry out traditional sports in a virtual scene or medium, rather than from the popular adversarial and competitive video games as a carrier or medium to compete to generate a relationship between victory and defeat.

In addition, based on this understanding, the IOC held the first "Olympic Esports Week" and "Olympic Esports Series" in June last year, emphasizing that "virtual sports" will complement and enhance "traditional Olympic sports".

In the era of professional sports, the Olympic Games, a large-scale sporting event that takes countries as a unit and caters to "de-globalized" players, has become less and less appealing.

From the perspective of content quality, the NBA, Super Bowl, and UEFA Champions League, which are club-based sports events, cater to the "global" trend, and clubs can select materials all over the world according to demand, in line with the reasonable allocation of human resources brought by capital on a global scale, so as to create high-quality games for commercial realization.

In contrast, on the one hand, due to the social responsibility of popularizing sports and the Olympic spirit, the Olympic Games cannot be developed more systematically, resulting in some niche and unpopular events still being listed, and on the other hand, the participating teams must be composed of all players of the same nationality, resulting in the inability of the participating teams to achieve the optimal allocation of human resources, which will inevitably affect the quality of the event.

As a result, the most obvious manifestation is that the attention of the Olympics continues to decline. In the United States market, for example, NBC owns the rights to broadcast the Olympic Games in the United States until 2032. During the Tokyo Olympics three years ago, primetime viewership fell 27 percent from 2016.

In order to save viewership and attention, the introduction of new sports is the most direct and effective way, and esports, which is popular among young people, has entered the vision of the IOC.

Different from traditional sports, e-sports is a project driven by game companies, and has formed a stable game rules and business ecosystem.

Unless the Olympic Committee agrees on the core interests of the gaming companies, the process of entering the Olympic Games will be extended indefinitely. At the Olympic Summit in Lausanne, Switzerland, the IOC said that gaming is a "business-driven" industry, which also goes against the Olympic "values-based" sports philosophy, and it is too early for esports to be included in the Olympics.

At such a sensitive moment, global esports ushered in a big cooling. According to the "2023 China E-Korea sports Industry Report", in 2023, the actual revenue of China's e-sports industry will be 26.35 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 1.31%. In terms of revenue composition, e-sports content live streaming accounted for the highest proportion, reaching 80.87%. Event income, club income and other income accounted for 8.59%, 6.42% and 4.12% respectively.

To put it simply, if game companies don't use external forces for ecological construction, they will soon be unable to hold back. In this case, an intermediary is needed to make adjustments.

The Middle East tyrants, represented by Saudi Arabia, have played this role perfectly. Strong capital and enthusiasm for esports investment are enough for the two sides to sit down and negotiate, as evidenced by the inaugural Esports World Cup (EWC) in Riyadh, with a total prize pool of up to $60 million and a wide range of competitions. E-sports, an emerging sport, is one of the important measures to "de-petrolize" the Middle East tycoons, and in the first half of 2022 alone, Saudi capital has invested more than $10 billion in the field of e-sports.

In this way, a tacit understanding has been reached in the tug-of-war between the three parties to maintain a delicate balance by holding the esports Olympics alone, the IOC can continue to defend the Olympic sportsmanship, the game companies can also seek market increments with national confrontation as the selling point, and the Middle East tycoons will accelerate the process of "de-oiling". As for the e-sports Olympics alone, it remains to be seen whether video games can enter the core of the "nation" spirit, share the concept of "national team", and further gain the recognition of the official and non-governmental consciousness after the "national" unit is involved. After all, since the dawn of video games, they have been the opposite of real sports, and from the real concept of the "nation-state" – the simple reason is that video games don't need to be physically fast, and players don't need any of the same social identities.

But objectively speaking, from the E-sports World Cup to the E-sports Olympics, the Saudis are playing quite "meta-universe".