Business
SPYR Looking to Carve Out Niche in Fast-Growing eSports Space
SPYR Looking to Carve Out Niche in Fast-Growing eSports Space.
About this update from Spyr, Inc.
[{"type":"text","content":"\nSPYR Looking to Carve Out Niche in Fast-Growing eSports Space\n\nSPYR Looking to Carve Out Niche in Fast-Growing eSports Space\n\nBONITA, CA--(Marketwired - May 18, 2017) - The headline \"Global MMO Games Market to grow with a CAGR of 10.2% by 2025\" was blazoned across a digital report about the current online gaming industry. As readers of financial news know, a 10.2% compound annual growth rate is indeed impressive, but the acronym MMO is what tells the real story: Massively Multiplayer Online games or MMOs are growing at a rate that far surpasses the industry's projected 10.2% CAGR. And SPYR, Inc. (OTCQB: SPYR) is paving its way with its flagship MMO game Pocket Starships.To understand the future of gaming it is important to appreciate its history. Not long after Pong made its debut on TV screens across America, students in Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Lab began playing a game called SpaceWar, and competed in the Intergalactic SpaceWar Olympics for a chance to win a year's subscription to Rolling Stone Magazine. The year was 1972.The 1980s saw Atari's Space Invaders Championships and the creation of The US National Video Game Team, but it was in 1997 when the concept of eSports, or electronic sports, became viable, drawing participation from over 2,000 players to the Red Annihilation tournament for the first person shooter game Quake. Shortly after that, the Cyberathlete Professional League was founded, and in 1999 the league began offering prize money.Mobile gaming (think GameBoy and Tetris) took the industry -- quite literally -- to new places, and allowed players to interact on pocket-size devices. The introduction of each new game and each new gaming platform expanded the gaming universe exponentially, and paved the way for MMO interactive games like SPYR's Pocket Starships.Since that time multiplayer games like League of Legends, Counter Strike, Halo, and even Minecraft, have dominated not only gaming devices, but also the attention of investors in the gaming and eSports markets. In 2016, the total prize money awarded across all eSports games was $93.3 million. In early 2017, universities in the US began adding eSports to both the academic as well as the athletic curriculum, with one women's college in Missouri offering scholarships to eSports student athletes. The Olympic Council of Asia recently ann...