When people think of “sports” the first thing that comes to mind is usually something like football, soccer or tennis. But today’s video games can also be in that category. Video games were once viewed as hobbies or a waste of time but not anymore.

CNN had stated that Twitch.tv which is a website that was made for videogamers to share their gameplay gets 47 percent of webtrafic right behind Netflix and Youtube.

The definition of sports is a that team competes against another or others for entertainment. Twitch.tv is not only for regular people, each day there is most likely a Esports competition. Esports stands for Electronic sports, this is what makes a lot of games competitive. Last year, over 500 thousand people tuned in to view the Worlds championship for League of Legends on Twitch.

Jake Schaum, junior, has been watching since November of 2012. “ I think its getting to the scale to compete with football and the rest of the sports.”

In fact, there is also a college and high school league in which hundreds of schools around the nation compete for scholarships. Most colleges are now giving scholarships for people who are really good and are able to compete at a college level.

The high school league is kind of like the college league but the team that wins each player on the team receives a $20,000 dollar scholarship. Over 5,000 students participate in this competition, the league is called High School Starleague (HSL).

Streamers can make six figures by streaming every day, and the web traffic they get is massive. Nightblue3, Streamer, streams every day for about five or six hours and gets about 35 thousand people on average. Syndicate and Youtuber streams have the most followers at 1,193,992 people.

Usually during the stream, people donate $5 or subscribe for $5 but only $2.50 is what the streamer makes.

Professional gaming has just started growing Big companies such as Logitech and Razer like to sponsor the teams to get advertisements because so many people watch the professionals play and of course if the pros have it, everyone has to have it. They also stream when they are not competing, usually resulting in some extra cash on the side.

People might assume the companies that host the professional games don’t make much, but advertising makes a lot of money. They also sell things in-game that most of the profits go to the competition. Over the summer, there was a Dota 2 championship and the prize money was $1 million dollars. The tournaments typically have a pretty big amount of prize money.

“Video games have just started to make an entry in our lives and it will not stop growing,” Schwam said. Sports soon will not only be physical but they will be thought of as activities that require a competitive nature.