Peter Warman speaks at the Esports BAR Miami event.
Peter Warman speaks at the Esports BAR Miami event.
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Newzoo’s Peter Warman: Why big brands are diving into esports sponsorships

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 10 min

Peter Warman, a game industry analyst and CEO of Dutch market researcher Newzoo, started following esports closely in 2013. He started looking into the numbers and comparisons to real world traditional sports, and began making projections about where it was going.

Now esports has begun to explode, and Newzoo estimates it will generate $1.7 billion in revenues by 2021. And big “non-endemic brands,” or those that are not directly related to games or esports, are coming in as sponsors. Riot Games recently announced that Mastercard has signed on as a global sponsor for the League of Legends World Championships. Overall, esports could represent an $80 billion opportunity, based on comparisons to traditional sports.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.