Zeitguide “Content” Image by Kris Porter

A year ago, an event at the Staples Center was sold out within one hour. And to our surprise, it wasn’t a Lakers game or an Iggy Azalea concert.

Instead, it was the World Championship of the video game, League of Legends. Some 12,000 ticket holders, as well as more than 32 million fans online, watched a team from South Korea earn the Summoner’s Cup, one of the big titles in “e-sports,” a term for organized video game competitions.

“That’s more people that watched the World Series live,” CMO of Gannett, and ZEITGUIDE friend, Maryam Banikarim told us. Indeed, the 2013 MLB World Series drew between 12.5 million and 19.2 million viewers per game. “There is this whole demographic that companies can connect with through gaming,” she added. (For its part, Gannet is trying connect to this demographic by experimenting with immersive news delivered via virtual reality headsets by Oculus Rift, the company Facebook bought recently for $2 billion.)

Other companies are also taking note; even Coca-Cola now has a Global Head of Gaming, Matt Wolf, who plans to have a huge presence at this year’s League of Legends finals on Oct. 19. It will take place at Sangam World Cup Stadium in Seoul, which holds even more spectators than Staples: 45,000 people.

We’ve known for years that video games are big business. Last year’s blockbuster, Grand Theft Auto V, made $1 billion in just three days while the highest grossing movie of 2013, Frozen, made $1.2 billion in theaters worldwide. Even Kim Kardashian’s mobile game has made $200 million.

But what’s most fascinating to us is how video games are coming out of the man cave and onto the arena stage. Isn’t that backwards? Banikarim attributes this trend to the fact that massive multi-player games already hook fans with entertainment, participation and community—and the events tap into to gamers’ desire to improve their own techniques.

There are several indications of how gamers are eager to set down the controller and watch.

One of the biggest YouTube stars, PewDiePie, has 31 million subscribers who watch him play and critique games. As a result he earned $4 million last year and is now talking about creating his own video network.

Amazon is acquiring Twitch.tv, an online streaming service for watching video games, for close to $1 billion. That’s the second-largest deal Amazon’s made, behind their purchase of Zappos. According to Fast Company, Twitch.tv attracts more than 45 million visitors watching over 1 million players, racking up 13 billion minutes watched per month. During “peak hours” it is producing more bandwidth traffic than Hulu, Amazon, Facebook or Pandora, and is the 4^th-highest traffic site in the U.S. behind only Netflix, Google, and Apple.

Video games are the content that have it all: viewer engagement, actual user participation—and now even live global competition.

For a sign of things to come, look to China, where a 15,000-seat arena on an island near Macau is being developed exclusively for e-sports.

Keep learning,

Brad Grossman and TEAM ZEITGUIDE