Casinos embrace esports to attract millennials

Like most other ways gambling halls have tried to attract millennials and their disposable income, it hasn’t been easy. Atlantic City was first city in the nation to adopt skill-based slot machines to woo millennials but bailed on them after a few months when the response was underwhelming.

Competitive video game tournaments, known as esports, are a growing industry around the world. The fast-paced action, vivid graphics and often violent on-screen action is catnip to millennials, the audience casinos are targeting as their core slot players grow old and die. But it’s been difficult to move them from the video console to the craps table.

"Everybody’s still trying to figure out, how do you make this appealing for the consumer and make sense for the business? How do we all profit from this?” said Kevin Ortzman, Atlantic City regional president for Caesars Entertainment, which owns three casinos in the city.

The company in March hosted an esports tournament at Caesars that drew about 900 competitors and spectators.

"We certainly experienced a spike in our hospitality offerings — the hotel, food and beverage side of things,” Ortzman said. "We didn’t see as much on the gambling side, which we weren’t terribly surprised by.”

But he said coming up with ways to attract millennials is a necessity for the casino industry as a whole, adding that esports players could be cultivated to embrace casinos for video game competitions the way their parents and grandparents went there to play slot machines.

The Caesars video tournament offered US $200,000 in prize money, including a US$ 70,000 top prize, that lured players like Jose Mavo, of Charlotte, North Carolina, who has been playing competitively for a decade and has become a casino customer as a result of being in tournaments hosted by gambling halls.

"We had a tournament in Vegas, and that was the first time I went to a casino, so ever since then, I’ve been gambling quite a bit,” he said, listing blackjack and roulette as favorites.

Newzoo, a company following the esports market, predicted in a report that esports will generate nearly US$ 700 million this year, including media rights, ticket and merchandise sales, brand partnerships and game maker investments. The company projects that figure will surpass the US$ 1.5 billion mark by 2019.