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eSports may be only just entering the consciousness of a lot of people, but it is already a huge market that’s only going to get bigger, and Intel thinks it can be at the centre of it.
Speaking to PCR’s sister site eSports Pro, Intel eSports marketing manager George Woo said that the company believes its next wave of hardware will be pivotal to the eSports experience – both as a viewer and a player: "We can control that narrative with this platform. And we’re in the leadership spot right now."
This is all down to Intel Extreme Masters (IEM), the company’s global pro gaming tour that was launched in 2006, and had its 11th annual show last week in Katowice, Poland. "That’s why we wanted to create that high visibility in this space and continue to show that leadership through our IEM brand and the broader ecosystem," said Woo.
But Woo says that it’s not all about making the most amount of money for Inel. Growth of the segment is really what the company is after, and a big part of that comes from bringing the world outside of eSports in. "You can’t just dump money and think it’s going to be successful.
I look at it from a macro-view, I mean having Gillette here. Does it help Intel? No. What it does is helps the overall segment. And it’ll help accelerate it to where we want to be."
Much of this dominance however boils down to hardware, and the growth in virtual reality (VR) is where the company thinks it really can capitalise: "We want to be the leader, and for VR we want to have people compete, and to form teams. They’ll be untethered – not using the traditional mouse and keyboard – because that’s been going on for centuries. We want to change that model, and that’s why we are continuing to push on this, because we know it’s an open canvass and we can change that scope. We want it to be untethered, almost like a laser tag environment. People running around and being physical but in a virtual space."
Click here to read eSports Pro’s full interview with Intel eSports marketing Manager George Woo.
