Abstract
Esports, which stands for electronic sports, is competitions through electronics in the form of video games, where players across nations compete against each other often through an online system. Since COVID-19, going online has become popular and esports audiences have grown rapidly in size leading to an increased interest in esports for businesses and private investors. However, as the business is different from traditional ones, many investors who are putting money into esports organizations have no generated revenue. Esports organizations with professional teams constantly emerge but just as quickly as they emerge, they disappear again. It is believed that it is due to the lack of knowledge in the industry and how to create an esports business model that is sustainable in the long-term. Therefore, this paper sets out to examine how performance measures and evaluation systems in esports organizations can be designed so that there is a focus on value-creating tasks. Performance measures and incentive system are tools that help align the strategy of the organization with its employees and by having a strategy that has focus on value creation, esports organizations have higher chance of staying sustainable. Specially, this paper focuses on esports organizations with professional teams, as they are core for esports industry. By examining successful esports organizations’ business models, it was found that diversifying and focusing on branding is key to success instead of solely focusing on creating a professional team that can have a chance in winning tournaments. Only focusing on training an esports team to win tournaments does not generate revenue, but sponsorship and advertisement is what esports revenue mostly consist of. Therefore, the proposed KPIs and performance measure and evaluation system are ones that have focus on attracting fans and followers who can then turn into potential customers who provide donations, subscription, and merchandise sales. With high viewership and followers esports organizations can then gain sponsorships from other companies to generate their main revenue stream. Apart from being the best players in different franchises, being a unique and attractive personality also attracts the audience, which is something that esports organizations should start focusing on, as it might lower the number of failures in creating businesses surrounding esports teams. Lastly this paper has suggested reward schemes that would be motivating for players and coaches to exert a desired level of effort, while being effective in keeping players and coaches in the organization and make them feel integrated when the organization wish to retain them.
Educations | MSc in Accounting, Strategy and Control, (Graduate Programme) Final Thesis |
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Language | English |
Publication date | 2023 |
Number of pages | 75 |
Supervisors | Jytte Grambo Larsen |