What a memorable weekend.
SAJ2019 was held on Jan 26th with over 900 attendees including the head of the Japan ministry of Sports (スポーツ庁). My firm joined the event as one of the gold sponsors and I gave a 45min presentation regarding the status quo of Japan eSports market.
Now my session was the last one of the day, the earliest keynote started of from 9:30, and given the fact that the main theme of the event is “Sports Analytics” our expectation was low. To my surprise, however, the hall with 450 capacity was filled more than half which was probably the largest crowd I have ever encountered so far with eSports theme.
And they were certainly taking many photos of my slides!
My talk was largely comprised of three topics
1. the Macro: Global vs. Domestic esports market
2. the Micro: What is really happening onsite Japan esports scene?
3. So what? What you should be aiming for.
I’d say the main dish of the talk was the second part. It started off with a good overview of the dedicated eSports class that we provided with Keio University during Fall 2018. Then, I invited a colleague in the Sports Business advisory on stage to share his view of what it means to have a governance properly established in the sports industry and how that can possibly impact the eSports industry as well. At the end was a documentary-like interview video — a compilation of interviewing four people in the different side of eSports industry including eSports researcher, professional team owner, school team owner and eSports caster.
Just eSports 