A bunch of millennials playing video games on a Saturday night in Las Vegas. Not too long ago, that might have been a casino operator’s nightmare. But in the last few months and with accelerating velocity, competitive video game playing—e-sports, as it is best known—has become a reality, just steps away from roulette wheels and slot machines.
Courtesy – Riot Games
With an e-sports scene thriving in Las Vegas, the Downtown Grand has become the tourism corridor’s chief e-sports incubator. LEET, a Las Vegas-based gaming technology company that runs e-sports and video game events for casinos, has been a presence at the Downtown Underground e-sports lounge at the off-Fremont casino on Friday and Saturday nights since November. For a $15 entry fee, competitors get a chance to win $250. Not bad for two hours playing video games.
What exactly goes on at one of these events? Players—a representative slice of under-30 male Las Vegans, for the most part—filter in and are seeded into brackets. Tonight’s game is League of Legends, by some measures the most popular e-sports game. It’s a MOBA, or Multiplayer Online Battle Arena game, where you and four friends (or random players you are paired with) team up to battle the minions and destroy the towers of the opposing five, who are trying their best to do the same. Tonight’s tournament features two-man teams.
Watching the action over a player’s shoulder is uncomfortably voyeuristic; watching it on a big screen is straight-up entertaining. Players hack, slash, cast spells, die, respawn and level up. A cocktail waitress drops off drinks for players and spectators. After a few rounds of retreating and advancing, the tournament is over; the winners and runners-up shake hands.
Sure, it’s fun and maybe even a way to make new friends, but what about the real measure of worth for a Las Vegas innovation: Does it make money for the casino?
Right now, the answer is a qualified yes. Even if buy-in increased exponentially, $15 a head for two or three hours of tournament time isn’t going to knock the slot machine from its perch atop the casino anytime soon. But for the Downtown Grand, it’s driving more people into the property and boosting spending. Some of the players migrate over to the roulette and blackjack tables after the tournament.
Remember, though, that slot machines themselves started small: not-too-exciting devices that took pennies, nickels and quarters and dispensed $100 jackpots. It took about 40 years and a slew of technical enhancements (and a shift in Vegas visitor demographics) for them to become the cornerstone of the modern casino.
More on point, sports betting and live poker, two forms of gambling most akin to e-sports, aren’t huge moneymakers, together accounting for about 3 percent of Nevada gaming revenue in 2015. But they are essential components of a full-service casino because people who like to do the things that make money for resorts—like gamble at other games and indulge elsewhere—want them. They are more amenity than profit center, and that’s all right.
E-sports can appeal to a wide range of visitors, keeping people with diverse interests happy. LEET founder and CEO Kingsley Edwards says that different games attract much different crowds: “When we have a game like CS:GO for instance, it’s a much more e-sports hardcore gamer crowd. Madden, on the other hand, is mostly football fans who enjoy watching the NFL on Sunday and playing the video game in their free time. Now when it comes to a game such as Mario Kart, there’s a mix of everyone both young and old. Mario is the great unifier of video games.”
The weekend tournaments have drawn a steady crowd and seem to be building up (or tapping into) a growing base of Las Vegas competitive gamers. The Underground e-sports lounge is getting a makeover that will see it become less repurposed casino space and more purpose-built gamer space. Having grown the lounge for a few months, co-founders Edwards and Carson Knuth are positive about the future.
“I think it has gone exceptionally well,” Knuth says. “We are seeing larger and larger crowds as word of mouth and our advertising reaches more people. The thing I hear most from the people that come to play and watch is, ‘Finally, something like this exists.’”
Like the best innovations, the e-sports lounge is filling a gap that many didn’t know existed. If it continues to grow, what happens at the Downtown Grand may soon be happening elsewhere in town—and in casinos across the country.
David G. Schwartz is the director of UNLV’s Center for Gaming Research.
