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This story appears in The Hollywood Reporter + Sportico’s September 2026 Sports issue. Click here to read more. Remember when professional esports team FaZe Clan IPO-ed at a $725 million valuation? Follow up: Do you even remember FaZe Clan? Though only six years removed from the pandemic, it is difficult to recall just how much it blew up and reshaped the entertainment world. The virus nearly toppled industries like theatrical exhibition, supercharged ones like streaming and created a level of insane hype around a few that now seems hard to fathom. Put esports into that last bucket. As COVID reshaped the world, we were told esports—live competitions often featuring multiplayer first-person shooters (like Call of Duty) or other online battle games (like League of Legends)—would soon compete with real-life sports for our attention and brand advertising dollars. That obviously never happened. And today, it can feel like the media noise around esports is so dim that we’ve caught ourselves wondering: Is it even still really a thing? Turns out, very much so—though how big and how much it is growing is hard to quantify. For one, the market size is hard to nail down, says Dr. Tobias Scholz, associate professor for Academic Esports at Norway’s University of Agder. Even defining what the term means is tricky. “Esports is human, digital and competitive: a human plays, the field of play is digital, and the point is to win. That is a deliberately broad definition,” he acknowledges. Scholz cited estimates the global esports market is worth somewhere between $2 billion to “well over” $5 billion. Measuring its audience is no exact science, either, though the numbers are inarguably significant. The single-largest esports title globally is League of Legends. The 2024 LoL finals had 50 million peak viewers and an average audience of 33 million viewers per minute, according to data shared with THR by Riot Games. Those numbers include China, where League of Legends is especially massive. (Excluding China, the finals had 6.7 million peak viewers.) Activision Blizzard’s annual BlizzCon fan event in Anaheim, which includes Blizzard’s Overwatch World Cup Finals and two different World of Warcraft Grand Finals, will take place Sept. 12 and 13. The game publisher expects 37,000 in-person attendees and “millions” to stream the battles and other elements of the convention, for free, at home. Activision’s popular Call of Duty League, not a part of BlizzCon, averages 109,000 concurrent viewers per match and has generated more than 45 million hours watched this season, according to the company. So that’s real audience. The “for free” part is great for attracting viewers but also financially problematic for an industry still attempting to reach its potential. Media rights are the golden goose of all sports, but for esports, they’re still in a “Wild West” phase, says Justin Kenna, CEO of GameSquare. Though YouTube and Twitch (and, to a lesser degree, Kick) dominate the space, none of them have any real exclusivity over esports competitions. As a matter of fact, individuals are even allowed to co-stream esports competitions on their personal pages. The former FaZe Clan Call of Duty pro Tommy “ZooMaa” Paparatto tells THR that some of his most popular videos have been co-streams of gaming events. That would be like you livestreaming a Dodgers game from your phone—and keeping the ad dollars. Not all viewers are created—read: monetized—equally. In nations like China, Indonesia, India, Brazil and MENA (Middle East and North Africa), the esports audience exists primarily on mobile devices, not PCs, which creates an analytics issue, Scholz says: “We are measuring the wrong screen.” That’s a big problem—one the television industry is still working its own way out of. To undercount one’s audience is to undervalue the content’s reach. Brands pay based on exposure, so for a platform to maximize revenue, every eyeball counts. Another growth hurdle may be that esports has no real governing body. The closest thing to a federation is the Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund (PIF), Scholz says, and that’s simply because it has purchased the rights to most of the major Western tournaments. Not that the pro players are complaining about the influx of Saudi money. Today, unlike his day, esports “prize pools are nuts,” Paparatto says—fueled by Riyadh money, the Esports World Cup now boasts a total prize pool of $75 million—“We’re filling out venues.” Case in point, in June 2025, the BLAST.tv Austin Counter-Strike major tournament held its playoff rounds at the Moody Center, the 15,000-plus seat arena where the University of Texas Longhorns play their home basketball games. The competing esport teams emerged onto the stage via lifts from the bowels of the stadium, with lighting that mimicked what you would see at an NBA All-Star Game. When the American FaZe Clan squad was introduced, chants of “USA! USA! USA!” rang down from the capacity crowd. A lot of excitement. Just not enough to justify a nearly billion-dollar IPO. In July 2022, FAZE opened on the NASDAQ at $13 per share. Members of FaZe Clan—a collective of 239 esports current and former pros spread across 22 teams—got to ring the bell and everything. Their grins only grew when FAZE reached $19 per share the following month, placing their valuation at $1.4 billion. But the boom times very soon went bust: Within 18 months, FAZE was delisted at a per-share price of 18 cents. It was just another meme stock. Joost van Dreunen, who lectures on the video game industry at the NYU Stern School of Business, called the FaZe Clan sales pitch “straight buzzword bingo” that created a “big market illusion.” Kenna, who was once CFO of FaZe Clan, was always skeptical of the IPO and got out just before. “You’re still bound to quarterly financials,” he says, and those “never really justified going public.” But he remains a believer. “Go to an esports event, and you’ll see how palpable the crowd is,” he says. “That entertainment value and packaging is as good, if not better, than any traditional sports game you’ll go to—ever.” Kenna eventually regained control of FaZe’s esports business for $14 million in stock. He says it is now profitable, with teams earning millions of dollars competing in tournaments ranging from Counter-Strike to Super Smash Bros. On a broader level, FaZe Clan fancies itself a “global lifestyle brand … bridging gaming, fashion, music, and entertainment.” The company brings in money via sponsorships and commercial partnerships, consumer products and merchandise, and, of course, tournament winnings. So FaZe lives on. But many teams have folded. At the esports peak, in 2022, there were roughly 300 esports orgs, which Sholz describes as “one that pays at least one roster a salary, fields it in a top-tier competition recognized by the game publisher, and employs people beyond the players—so a coach, a manager, commercial or content staff.” Today, the number of orgs sits below 100, he says. And though audiences have yet to decline, the industry has a new problem: recruiting a younger generation of viewers. League of Legends, Counter-Strike and Dota pros “have aged along with those games,” Scholz says. “Meanwhile, 11-year-olds are on Roblox, Fortnite and Mobile Legends.” It’s “exactly the mechanism that hollowed out baseball,” Scholz adds. You see: Just like real sports.