Tiago Bianchi
Research expert covering internet & gaming in Latin America and Spain
eSports in Latin America - statistics and facts
In October 1972, Stanford University, California, hosted a competition based on the video game Spacewar. Just a bunch of students took part in what is now referred to as the first known gaming event, challenging each other to win an annual subscription to the music magazine Rolling Stone. Fifty years later, organized video game tournaments turned into a billion-dollar industry, commonly defined as the eSports market. While China, the United States, and Western Europe were the regions generating the highest eSports revenue worldwide in 2021, professional gaming is also gaining momentum in Latin America. Brazil, for instance, had over 1,200 active eSports competition players in 2021. Meanwhile, the 2022 closing season of the Liga Latinoamérica (LLA) - the main tournament of League of Legends among Spanish-speaking countries in the Americas – recorded more than 94 thousand peak viewers.
