Virgin Gaming ups the ante in e-sports with premium subscriptions

Posted byby Dean Takahashi
October 22, 2013
Updated June 18, 2025
2 min

Virgin Gaming, the competitive gaming business owned by billionaire Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, is launching a premium subscription program today that will change the way that gamers pay for its e-sports (electronic sports) competitions.

Virgin Gaming players can win cash prizes for beating their friends or strangers in tournaments where the play their favorite console games. The company has grown over the past three years as e-sports, once confined to the elite players who play as professionals, take off among amateurs on a variety of platforms

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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.