The road that competitive gaming has taken through the world of global sports competitions has been a rocky one. Following the announcement that esports would be featured in the 2022 Asian Games, the 2018 edition held in Indonesia awarded non-official medals to competitors in six different video games, including League of Legends, Hearthstone, and Starcraft II. While Tony Estanguet, the co-president of the Paris Olympic bid committee, briefly flirted with the idea of bringing video games into the fold at the 2024 Summer Olympics, International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach was less than supportive.

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“We want to promote non-discrimination, non-violence, and peace among people,” Bach told the South China Morning Post in 2017. “This doesn’t match with video games, which are about violence, explosions, and killing. And there we have to draw a clear line.”

Less than a year later, however, the International Olympic Committee would partner with Intel for IEM Pyeongchang 2018, a Starcraft II-focused event that was held in South Korea one week before the 2018 Winter Olympics. Shortly afterwards, Timo Lumme, managing director of television and marketing services for the International Olympic Committee, said that the organization would “explore esports’ relationship with the Olympic Movement further” and referred to the potential of including esports in the Olympic games as an “exciting future.” The 2018 Olympic Summit even encouraged “accelerated cooperation” with sports video games.

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Having esports in the Olympics is considered by many in the esports industry to be the next step in terms of making competitive gaming a legitimate sport, despite the millions of dollars and sold-out arenas that it has already managed to accrue. Racing towards this vision of mainstream acceptance has the benefit of getting more eyes on competitive games, but it has its downsides. Fighting games especially have made poor transitions to larger markets due to putting their futures in the hands of organizations that don’t seem to understand the community’s grassroots history, and even endemic developers don’t always get it right. That said, the esports bubble often centers on quick and monumental growth, even in the face of a potential burst, and attention will most definitely be on Japan next year with an eye to where the Olympic relationship goes from there.