User:Praise1234/College esports in the United States

Esports in collegiate society
Esports made its way to the intercollegiate scene in June of 2014. The first university to recognize esports athletes and offer them scholarships which at the time was a 50% drop in tuition and room and board was Robert Morris University based in Pittsburgh. The University of Pikeville followed this announcement with their own in December of 2014. These announcements began an influx of announcements and created the foundation for the rise of esports in the collegiate scene.

Collegiate Starleague
Collegiate Starleague (CSL) began in 2009 as the first official intercollegiate gaming organization in the world, with 25 schools participating in their inaugural competition of the game StarCraft: Brood War, at which the UC Berkeley team took home the victory. Since then CSL has expanded into a variety of games based on their popularity any given year (15 titles in 2019), and it claims to host over 1,800 aggregate universities worldwide with 55,000 cumulative players actively competing in their league.

Tespa
Tespa began as the Texas esports Association in 2010 from a few students wanting to make a difference in the realm of collegiate esports and who sought to make gaming a social activity at the University of Texas at Aust

in. After a series of successful events, Tespa was acquired by and became a subsidiary of Blizzard Entertainment in 2013. . Since then Tespa has grown to employ a team of over 80 students and graduates across the United States and Canada.

Tespa is the self-proclaimed leader in collegiate esports on campus and on the competitive stage, and aims to promote healthy competition and build strong connections between colleges and universities around North America. It is an outlet for colleges and universities to come and compete against other schools in North America. Tespa has transitioned to support primarily titles owned by Blizzard Entertainment - as of 2019, they host the following: Overwatch, Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm, and StarCraft II. In 2017 Tespa touted 220 official chapters, with competing teams from over 500 schools. In May 2019, Tespa hosted the Collegiate esports Championship in Houston, Texas. Tespa now features over 100 collegiate teams, with 1200 participating schools.

PlayVS
PlayVS is known as a “Science-backed” esports competition platform based out of Los Angeles that works for collegiate esports in America and Canada. The company works with about 200 colleges and universities in the U.S and Canada. The Startup is partnered with the  NFHS (The National Federation of State High School Associations) in order to create leagues for High Schools and colleges all over the country. As of 2018 through the help of the NFHS, PlayVS was able to launch to “approximately 5 million students across 5,000 high schools”. The Startup primarily operates through its website, where it organizes and schedules league games. Due to eSports being an “umbrella term” for many video games, PlayVS must rely on many different companies such as Blizzard, Riot Games, Epic in order to market and manage their games unlike other sports where the only necessities are a rule book and referee.

Partnership With NFHS
The partnership with the NFHS is necessary, due to esports infancy, it lacks structure and motive, especially in planning and organizing tournaments and giving its athletes proper opportunity to get scholarships and succeed. Furthermore, esports does not use the rules of the traditional sport to regulate its game. This is because many esports games differ in genre and how they are played. Leading PlayVS to partner with NFHS so that PlayVS can work on scheduling, leaderboards, and more while the NFHS assists them in setting up rules so that the athletes can have a chance in receiving scholarships. Through their partnership, NACE(National Association of Collegiate esports) was formed.

Funding
The Startup announced they had been giving about $15 million in funding by “New Enterprise Associates existing investor Science, as well as CrossCut Ventures, Coatue Management, Cross Culture Ventures, the San Francisco 49ers, Nas, Dollar Shave Club founder Michael Dubin, Twitch co founder Kevin Lin, and others”. In 2018 the startup secured another $30.5 million in funding through new investors, WndrCo, Adidas, Samsung Next, Plexo Capital and Sean “Diddy”Combs”. The Startup has raised $96 million as of January 2020 through various investors.

Epic Games
PlayVS has partnered with Epic Games to bring competitive Fortnite to both high school and colleges in North America. This is the first time competitive Fortnite will be played in high schools and colleges in America. The partnership will have the regular collegiate and high school format with a national championship held at the end of every season. The format of the competition will be in teams of two, with schools being able to register as much teams as they would like. The season begins with the three teams with the highest scores for any week being locked in for playoffs. At the end of the season teams will compete in the playoffs to possibly represent their school in the championship. The first season begins in 2019.

Platform
As of 2020 most esports platform only support PC (Desktop and Laptop) based competitors, the only exceptions is Fortnite which supports PC, console and mobile players. The only genres supported are multiplayer, arena, sports and fighting games.