Name: Pro video gaming: How eSports is taking off with big dollars behind it
Uploaded: 2025-11-04T18:29:49.000Z
Duration: 39 min 9 s
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Welcome to beyond the Valley, a CNBC tech podcast with Arjun Karpel and Tom Chitty.

Past continuous

While Paris hosted the Olympic Games a few weeks ago, nearly 3,000 miles away, another sports tournament was taking place.

Not necessarily with the same prestige as the Olympics, but certainly with a bigger prize pool.

The winners sharing more than $60 million.

This weekend brings the conclusion of the first esports world, which has been taking place in Riyadh for the last eight weeks.

Featuring 23 events in 22 different video game titles, including Call of Duty and Fortnite.

The event was part of Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030, a government program to diversify the country's economy away from its reliance on oil, but

Uniting the industry under one competitive umbrella could, in the words of our special guest this week, bring this to a scale similar to the largest traditional sports events around the world, beyond the Valley.

So for our listeners today, Arjun is recovering from a nasty bout of flu.

I think it was a sort of chest infection.

Yeah, so not feeling tip top but you know, always show up for beyond the Valley, Tom, you know that.

Yeah, no, well, I was going to say I'm happier than usual that you're.

You're with us because our listeners know that you are the gamer between.

I think the last game video game I played was rugby 08.

But for now, let's introduce our special guest.

He couldn't be better placed to tackle the subject for this week's episode.

Firstly, he grew up an avid gamer before co founding one of the first esports teams.

He then went on to co found Electronic Sports League Gaming, a German esports organizer and production company that produces video game competitions worldwide.

It's the oldest esports company that is still operational.

most importantly for the subject for this week's podcast, here's the Esports World Cup CEO Ralf Reichardt.

Now, Ralph, I do like to do a little bit of research on our guests before we meet them.

And I took a look at your LinkedIn page and there's a couple of great proverbs on them.

One, around belief, it says luck is the residue of your laughing.

Now because you're like, no, no one reads that.

Now, I actually looked into where this proverb from and I don't think it can.

There hasn't been a definitive author for the proverb.

But is that, is that your belief in life?

I mean, if you think about anything, there's another quote that we say which is not on the LinkedIn page, is without luck, you don't even have to start because you know you can tackle this from so many things, but

You will miss 100% of the shots you don't take.

So when we started with esports in 2000, it wasn't a completely crazy alien idea.

Because video games were commercially, not culturally, socially not accepted.

Back in the days, even when you quit with Rugby 08, it was still up in the air.

So we started out to try to build a sport on basis of a non accepted medium.

And we went against almost the whole parent generation which, let's be frank, right, hated video games.

And we said, we're going to go out and fill stadiums with it.

That's why these things, these philosophical things are so important.

And now that I'm 30 years into this, I can be sitting down as the old guy and saying this is how it goes.

But if you're young and if you're going into it, going all in, taking all the risks, you don't know.

So it's probably to help out some people.

I think the question that our listeners will most want to know is what game are you playing the most at the moment?

And what's your favorite video game of all time?

It's one versus one, which is very different because you're not in a team.

You don't have that social experience which I'm missing, but it's still a great game.

The other game I'm playing is Dota 2 and I'm playing this since 2004, so forever.

The best video game of all time is obviously Quake.

That's how for me, the esports industry started in 1996.

It was really the first game built to be played on the Internet.

That meant it took away the limitation of any other sport, which basically is you need to meet physically at one point in time, at one place.

And it was the first real 3D shooter as well.

So it's a lot of groundwork for a lot of things we see today and what you've just said, Call of Duty, Fortnite, they're all some sort of based on Quake.

Before we play Stat of the Week, do a little bit of housekeeping.

If you haven't already, you can subscribe to the beyond the Valley weekly newsletter.

Head to cnbc.com beyond the Valley, click on the subscribe button, and

you'll get a newsletter every Friday with all the best international tech stories from cnbc.

And if you want to contact Arjun and I or have a question about a past episode, then email us at beyondthevalleymbc.com before we get back into it, Ralph, we're going to play Stat of the Week, which I know you know, we've got to hear Arjun's stat.

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