Looking at the domestic sports map, it is not difficult to find that the women's sports field is accelerating into the fast track of development. The glory of our sports leaders, such as the king of the women's volleyball team, the resilient roses of the women's soccer team and the famous tennis player Li Na, epitomizes the brilliant achievements of women's sports in China. In particular, our women's basketball team, after a lapse of 28 years, once again won the second place in the World Cup, triggering a national frenzy.
In recent years, a number of newcomers have emerged in China's women's sports sector, including Gu Ailing, Yang Qian, Quan Hongchan, Xu Mengtao, Zheng Qinwen and Wang Frost, who have won the hearts of fans with their strengths and personalities and become sports icons.
Undeniably, women's sports have entered a stage of rapid development in terms of competition quality, commercial promotion and attention. Looking ahead, the women's sports industry contains unlimited potential and has a vast market space, signaling a brighter future.
Women's gaming is booming
In March 2021, Deloitte released its Women's Sports on the Rise: The Road to Commercialization report, noting that women's sports have been able to attract large television audiences, create value for sponsors, and draw tens of thousands of sports fans to a single event over the past decade.
As the gaming industry has boomed, women's gaming has become a bright spot in the development of the sport. In the past, gaming events were often dominated by male players, but in this one, the women shined.
On the evening of September 30, 2022, the annual finals of the 2022 King's Glory Women's Open Tournament came to an end in Shanghai Zhongcheng Zhigu Creative Park. the NOVA King's Glory Women's Team showed strong strength in the finals and defeated RE- Girls to win the annual championship. Among them, NOVA.Yiman won the FMVP honor with her outstanding performance in the finals.
Thus, the 2022 King's Honor Women's Open Championship came to a successful conclusion. For two consecutive years, the King's Glory Women's Exclusive Tournament has allowed the outside world to feel the pursuit of dreams and the desire for championships by female e-campaigners.
Currently, there is a scarcity of women's gaming-only tournaments in China's gaming tournament system. The organization of the King's Honor Women's Open breaks this situation. This is the first women's mobile e-sports professional tournament jointly organized by Tencent Mutual Entertainment Tianmei e-Sports and the e-Sports Management Committee of the China Culture Management Association.
Such a high-profile tournament indicates to a certain extent that the entire market and the resources for organizing tournaments are gradually tilting towards women's e-sports. In terms of prize money, the total prize pool of the 2022 King's Honor Women's Open is as high as 2.56 million, which is one of the highest prize money for women's e-sports in China. In addition to the large investment in prize money, the organizers have also filmed a series of short films featuring their characters, allowing the audience to understand these dream-chasing female e-sports players from more angles.
With a large amount of official resources invested, the tournament has also seen a huge increase in heat and attention. It is understood that the number of applicants for the 2022 King's Glory Women's Open has risen several times compared with the previous edition. Sports business observed that the competition intensity and excitement of this year's King's Glory Women's Open was quite high, with images of turnovers against the wind, teamwork cooperation, and detail-pulling operations occurring from time to time.
Sports Big Business believes that the organization of the King's Glory Women's Open has effectively promoted the development of women's e-sports to a certain extent. First, it fills the blank of women's e-sports events, especially women's e-sports high-level events. Secondly, it assists King of Glory e-sports to further build a perfect national e-sports ecology and accelerate the landing of the national e-sports strategy.
Finally, to fulfill their dreams, King's Honor encourages more female e-sports enthusiasts to pursue their dreams and release their e-sports energy. Just like the female characters in gaming games, female e-sports players in reality are also feeding the e-sports ecosystem with their abilities, providing new possibilities for the diversified development of e-sports careers.
Women's gaming has huge potential for commercial value
Gaming has become one of the most popular sports among young people in China, with a huge market and great influence. The strong rise of women's e-sports will bring a huge boost to the commercial value. 2022 King's Glory Women's Open shows us the potential of the future development of women's e-sports commercial value.
As we all know, sports competitions and performances are the core of the sports industry, and the commercial value of sports programs depends on the events themselves. If there is no mature tournament, then the commercial value can't be talked about. Before 2021, there is no mature women's gaming event in the vast majority of domestic e-sports programs, and there are not many clubs willing to form women's teams. The unsatisfactory input-output ratio has become a bottleneck restricting the development of women's esports. Without a mature and stable women's gaming event, the commercial value is also missing a channel to release to the outside world.
The good news is that the commercial value of women's e-sports is expected to be further developed with the emergence of the women's exclusive track of King's Glory. Sports Business believes that the King's Glory Women's Open could be a turning point for the commercial value of women's e-sports to increase. First, the King's Glory Women's Open, which has been held for two years, has already shown the outside world the potential and charm of women's e-sports. Secondly, with the advancement of King's Honor's universal e-sports strategy, more women's e-sports events will undoubtedly emerge next, providing more opportunities for women's e-sports players to fulfill their dreams.
There is another important reason, the high cost-effectiveness of women's e-sports as well as a broad development prospect. At present, the overall investment in women's e-sports is not high, but it can harvest a huge amount of attention through a national platform like the King's Glory Women's Open, and it can also obtain official resource support from King's Glory. In addition, Glory of Kings will continue to invest in the women's circuit, gradually improve the tournament system, and provide more space for women e-sports players with professional aspirations to play.
From the perspective of e-sports marketing level, the commercialization of women's e-sports will provide more possibilities to enrich the diversification of e-sports marketing. Compared with other sports, the proportion of women's e-sports users is far ahead. According to the 2021 China Esports Career Development Report released by Penguin Intelligence, the share of women's esports users rose from 19% to 39% from 2017 to 2021, with a rising share of 20% in five years.
The more women users there are, the more the boundaries of e-sports marketing can be expanded to accommodate more sponsorship categories, ultimately enriching the scenarios and options of e-sports marketing. Take beauty as an example, beauty and e-sports have highly overlapping audience groups. Through e-sports marketing, beauty brands can achieve the effect of killing two birds with one stone, not only to enhance brand reputation, but also to promote the sales of products, realizing the unity of product effect.
In 2022, women's sports have already shown their amazing potential, and "they" have already demonstrated their great influence to the industry and brands. With esports becoming an official sport at the 2022 Hangzhou Asian Games, there is reason to believe that the day when women's esports will blossom won't be too far away.
