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AI and the next big esports boom for pro players, amateurs, and entrepreneurs
- Esports is a billion-dollar competitive video gaming phenomenon, and a booming market
- Professional players are drawing larger and larger team salaries, while monetizing their fans on personal channels.
- Now, with the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) paired with advances in mobile compute capabilities, the next big technology leap and industry disruption is underway.
VB Staff September 26, 2019Â Â Â
Esports is a billion-dollar competitive video gaming phenomenon, and a booming market. Professional players are drawing larger and larger team salaries, while monetizing their fans on personal channels. Meanwhile, big brand sponsors are turning into team owners and traditional sports team franchises are launching their own esports teams. It’s no surprise that, today, online audience numbers for esports are growing at an incredibly fast rate — tech consulting firm Activate estimated that there were 270 million global fans of esports in 2016 and projected that number to grow to 495 million in 2020. Chinese tech giant Tencent, developer of the first mobile esports franchise, Honor of Kings, generated $66 million in media rights and $64 million in sponsorship deals in just the first half of 2019.
The proliferation into mainstream visibility, along with new revenue
streams, is made possible by innovations in today’s mobile and gaming
technology. For example, the esports industry in APAC owes its growth to
the wide penetration of increasingly sophisticated mobile devices.
Now, with the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) paired
with advances in mobile compute capabilities, the next big technology
leap and industry disruption is underway. AI-powered processors are
bringing game-changing performance improvements and, along with it, new
functionality. The chipsets are about to unlock new and diverse revenue
opportunities across the board. And as the continuing global rollout of
5G brings faster connections and extremely low latency, we’ll see even
greater engagement.
Unlocking the esports potential
Recognizing the impact that power-efficient on-device AI processing
could unlock for the esports industry, Qualcomm Technologies recently
launched “Project Imagination,â€
a collaboration with Vivo, Tencent Honor of Kings, and Tencent AI Lab.
This collaboration explores how to bring more efficient and immersive
experiences to the mobile gaming ecosystem from industry experts in the
field of gaming, mobile, and AI.
Vivo iroko smartphones come armed with the powerful Qualcomm AI Engine that’s core to the Qualcomm Snapdragon Mobile Platform.
Using these Vivo devices, professional players are now putting the
multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game “Honor of Kings†through its
paces. Researchers are getting an in-depth look at the ways top esport
pros could initially help to train and continuously improve AI models.
Professional player advantages
To keep improving the skills that set pro gamers apart — response
times, strategy, and muscle memory — esports teams need to practice at
least eight to nine hours a day together. Pros then break off to
practice individually, which usually entails trying to find players at
their skill level or above. Game lobbies full of human opponents don’t
usually turn up a real challenge, so it’s easy to hit a plateau once
you’re at the top of your game.
That’s where an AI-trained opponent could come in, explains Dave
Durnil, senior director of engineering and head of advanced content and
gaming for Qualcomm Technologies. An AI-trained opponent lets individual
professional players match themselves against skilled competition that
challenges and pushes them to improve. In addition, teams can improve
their league chances and boost their competitive advantage when they
practice against AI models based on upcoming opponents.
“The gaming industry is very cutthroat,†Durnil says. “Being able to
play against an AI agent that’s been trained by a variety of star
players is going to enhance your skill set, improve your play, and take
you to the next level. It could be a huge advantage for pro players.â€
The advantages of consistently improved AI-trained opponents could
swiftly make them the go-to method for practicing, especially as these
matchups unfold. What happens when teams that have practiced for
hundreds of hours against AI-trained models of their rivals finally go
head-to-head in real time? Esports professionals will invest in
practicing against AI models to stay ahead of their competition.
Giving amateurs access to esports stars
On the consumer side, the Venn diagram of an enthusiastic fan and a
hopeful amateur is often a nearly perfect circle. Recreational players
frequently harbor dreams of being the next up-and-comer. However,
earning even just a toehold as a professional requires constant practice
and a focus on leveling up out of the rank and file.
“This could turn into a really interesting subscription model where
amateurs might pay a monthly fee to access a continuously updated
AI-trained model of the best esports players in their league,†Durnil
says.
A subscription model could also offer gamers access to AI players to
plug into their home-grown squads when they’re missing a player, or to
just provide a leg up that an AI opponent could give them when playing
against friends.
The potential is only going to grow as we see esports leagues
beginning to take root at the high school and college level. Just like
with regular college sports, college-level esports will feed into the
pro level, and sponsors will look to the lower levels to draft new
players.
The demand for the best esports players in the world to train AI
models will also grow, Durnil points out, opening a new revenue source
for pro players and sponsors. Professionals could be contracted to train
an AI model every day to ensure that professional subscribers looking
for advanced skillsets and amateurs wanting to match up against their
favorite players are getting an updated AI model every month.
Affordable real-time coaching
New or hopeful gamers spend a lot of time watching YouTube videos and
tutorials, hoping to strike gold and uncover new keys to success. Also,
both professionals and amateurs pay a lot of money to hire expensive
professional coaches, sometimes by the hour.
“Coaching takes players to a whole new level,†says Durnil. “Once
you’ve improved your skill set, honed your reaction time, and mastered
the game, it all comes down to strategy.â€
Coaches understand strategy – they know the ins and outs of the game
and have a lock on the advanced tactics required to win. They also know
how to analyze a player’s own individual strategy and tell them where
they’re going wrong, and how to fix it. A number of professional esports
teams employ coaches. The NBA’s esports league, in fact, hires real
basketball coaches to coach their esports basketball team.
Today’s generation of processors with on-device AI processing will
take this a step further, enabling real-time AI coaching — on screen as
you play — for players of any skill. It can take complete beginners
through the absolute basics, or analyze their play, environment, and
opponent in real time to offer the kind of immediate feedback that makes
a good player great.
Real-time in-game coaching powered by AI has huge potential, because
it can be adapted to several business and price models across a wide
array of abilities. It could be anything from a kid downloading an AI
coach for Fortnite as an in-app purchase to an advanced AI-coach who can
put the player through personalized drills based on their strengths and
weaknesses to an AI-trained pro coach that can introduce advanced
strategy techniques to the player during game play.
The tech that’s optimizing gaming experiences on the edge device
In Asian countries where the modern esports phenomenon first took
root, the mobile gaming is already huge and growing. China alone is
worth about 25% of the world’s mobile games market.
Tencent and Activision just reported that the new mobile adaptation of
Call of Duty, due out on October 1, has already surpassed 16 million pre-registrations in China. With advances in mobile device performance, manufactures of gaming smartphones powered by Snapdragon are now able to go all-in on making mobile the preferred gaming platform across the globe, and consumers are ready.
Powerful AI capabilities that were previously only available in the
cloud are now running on premium smartphones to offer next-level gaming
experiences that includes smarter, more efficient, more immersive
AI-enabled play. On-device AI will accelerate gaming workloads, from
accelerating ML agents within games to accelerating on-device
inferencing for pro-trained AI models.
For instance, the newest generation of the Qualcomm AI Engine on the
Snapdragon Mobile Platform features advanced CPU, GPU, and DSP cores.
The powerful Qualcomm Hexagon DSP
includes a newly designed AI accelerator, doubled vector processing,
and four scalar threads, designed to provide a blend of dedicated and
programmable AI acceleration.
What does that mean for mobile gamers and esports players? AI
acceleration, like the Qualcomm AI Engine in the Snapdragon 855 Mobile
Platform with a total capacity of more than 7 trillion operations per
second (TOPs), offers gamers the advantage of an ultra-responsive
experience. In addition, Qualcomm Snapdragon Elite Gaming
can provide features, such as smoother jank-free game play with faster
physically based graphics rendering and boosted CPU performance without
draining power. The Snapdragon Elite Gaming also offers a more immersive
visual experience with vibrant HDR10 graphics real-time surround sound.
These gaming advancements are especially good news for esports
players who need smoother, faster, cooler gameplay, Durnil points out.
When you’re playing esports, you’ll typically turn down the highest
visual quality settings because you want to run as fast as possible
while avoiding janks or stutter within a game when you’re trying to
execute a slick move ahead of your opponent. That’s now a thing of the
past. “We’ve built up a lot of new hardware technology and software
solutions as part of the Snapdragon Elite Gaming platform to solve that
problem for esports,†says Durnil.
Mobile gaming has proven to be one of the most important 5G
use cases and esports is set to take full advantage. Faster speeds and
ultra-low latency on the network, paired with key innovations in
AI-powered hardware and software, point to a new era of major industry
growth — and a transformation of gaming behavior on a global scale.
Qualcomm Snapdragon, Qualcomm Snapdragon Elite Gaming, Qualcomm
Hexagon, and Qualcomm AI Engine are products of Qualcomm Technologies,
Inc. and/or its subsidiaries.
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Source: https://venturebeat.com/2019/09/26/ai-and-the-next-big-esports-boom-for-pro-players-amateurs-and-entrepreneurs/
