The Edge - Volume One

This provides locations to hold eSports events as well as a potential network for viewing parties, where audiences gather in cinemas to watch eSports events taking place in other parts of the country or world. Equipped arenas could serve as gathering points to create communal viewing events, adding another dimension to the video game viewing experience. Certain types of real estate locations with higher vacancies may serve as landing spots for venues to watch, participate in and/or practice eSports. Malls with retail vacancies could look

to eSports arenas and demo spaces to fill vacancies and draw young shoppers interested in playing and viewing video games. Older suburban office locations near major cities could utilize eSports as a repositioning strategy, as could retail locations with big box stores that are closing some or all of their locations. New developments and Class A locations will similarly be beneficiaries of this trend. Destination developments may utilize eSports locations as an additional draw for visitors. Theme parks have the space, technology and capital to create environments where players

experience games in very interactive ways, integrating eSports with virtual reality. Hotels can also benefit from eSports locations as an amenity and demand driver, as has been the case around the Blizzard Arena LA and the eSports Arena Las Vegas, the latter of which is situated inside the Luxor Hotel & Casino. All things considered, one could imagine the local eSports arena in all its different variations filling a physical and cultural space similar to arcades of the 1970s and 1980s.

8 The ESL One Katowice 2018 and Intel Extreme Masters Katowice 2018 events took place over two weekends at the end of February and beginning of March 2018.

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