After my advisory’s Secret Santa party, in which I received a $20 Steam gift card, I contemplated what to do with my newfound wealth. In spite of an ongoing Steam sale, I was still short a couple dollars from my desired purchase. Disappointed, I described my predicament to a friend.

At that point, I had encountered ads concerning online betting on eSports, but I had passed them off as scams. However, as my friend explained how the sites worked and the story of people betting three dollars and making $180 on their first gamble, I felt drawn in. In less than ten minutes, I had already bet the in-game equivalent of a couple cents which I lost an hour later.

The traditional negative view of gamblers as compulsive risk-takers throwing away their savings in a Las Vegas casino does not fit the case of younger people who don’t have ready access to a bank account or a credit card. The reality is that online gambling has become easier and more ubiquitous with the growth of eSports.

The general trend with business models in games is a marketplace of microtransactions of in-game content; a marketplace which uses tradable items worth real money as currency. This means that the gambling and betting system can completely circumnavigate the transfer of real money by using an in-game substitute.  

Viewers can bet online with no credit card information and using their game UserID as the only required verification. With less than ten clicks, one can bet the equivalent thousands of dollars.

Adrian Chu

Not only is betting readily available to younger viewers, but the entire community of over a hundred million people has for the most part accepted gambling as a part of the experience of the game. As players search for progression in their games through items that cost money game developers provide few viable avenues for advancing, causing players to take their chances on betting sites instead.

Along with the frequency of advertisements for betting sites in streams, gambling has become the norm for eSports instead of the exception. The situation becomes concerning when one looks at the demographics of eSports viewers who are largely between the ages of 18 and 24; an age group who are just beginning to develop financial responsibility that are more susceptible to the psychological consequences of gambling including depression, anxiety, and substance-abuse.

Though the betting of in-game items do not hold any immediate dire consequences, the long-term implications of habitual betting are profoundly detrimental. If gambling becomes normalized at a young age, it becomes much easier to become addicted to gambling later in life.

As the eSports community expands with increasingly large audiences of young viewers, efforts must be made to curve the pervasiveness of readily accessible gambling in order to allow for the scene to grow based off improved media content instead of luck and money.