E-Sports, short for electronic sports, is one of the growing industries in the world, with prizes totaling around $25 million up for grabs in some tournaments. E-Sports are professional multiplayer video game competitions. Any video game with a strong competitive element is considered e-Sports. The competition models itself after traditional professional sports in several ways: it uses corresponding tournament formats, involves player contracts, and is governed by regulations. The athletes who compete in e-Sports competitions are gamers．
The history of e-Sports dates back to 1972 when some Stanford University students competed in the Intergalactic Space War Olympics for the opportunity to win a one-year subscription to the Rolling Stone Magazine. E-Sports pretty much continued on the rather quiet path until the 80s when competitions like the Space Invaders Championship shot them to the spotlight. 2002 marked the beginning of a new era for the sport and laid the foundation for what e-Sports would become thanks to the release of the Xbox live, which brought online play to consoles. Halo Ⅱ became the first game to be shown on national television for Major League Gaming in 2004, paving the way for e-Sports to become a global phenomenon.
Today, e-Sports are growing at a rapid pace thanks to advance in technology and the arrival of streaming services like Twitch which have exposed video game competitions to a new audience due to their extensive reach.
To understand how much impact Twitch has made, data from gaming analyst group Newzoo show that e-Sports global audience increased 43 percent from 204 million to 292 million between 2014 and 2016. Interestingly, this coincides (一致) with Amazon's acquisition of Twitch in 2014 and its effort to make the competition a spectator sport.
