Annually, the number of job opportunities available in esports and the gaming industry continues to grow. This is evident in information published by Hitmarker’s 2019 Esports Jobs Report. The international leader in esports jobs has posted a variety of quantitative data illustrating the amount of people with esports jobs throughout 2019.
There are many huge takeaways from the report that show the evolution of the esports scene. The total number of full-time employed esports jobs grew by 118%, from 3,821 in 2018 go 8,330 last year. Also, the amount of freelance opportunities in esports has seen a significant rise from 404 in 2018 to 851 in 2019. This increase may be due to the amount of institutions hiring in esports growing by 17%.
Countries
The USA remains the number one country hiring for esports jobs. The number of esports jobs based in the country has seen a growth of 130.96%. In particular, the cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles combined accounted for 22.70% of all esports jobs worldwide. On the other hand, the number of remote-based jobs only grew from 1,572 to 1,682. In addition, the UK, which is the second most popular country for esports jobs of those included in the Hitmarker study, had 677 esports jobs posted last year. Overall, the USA continues to dominate the esports scene by a significant amount.
Companies
In 2018, the most active company employing in the esports sector was Blizzard, with 217 job opportunities. On the contrary, in 2019, Twitch dominated the job hiring scene with 1,334 job opportunities. This seemingly shows a shift in the esports career scene as it suggests more people are now preferring to be streamers and content creators, rather than working for gaming companies. This is emphasized through the fact that the report shows that Twitch was ranked seventh in 2018 with only 96 jobs. Although, a change in how Twitch defined job descriptions in early 2019 had to do with why it suddenly has so many more “esports” jobs.
Already, the projection for the year 2020 is appearing positive, since the total number of full-time esports jobs grew nearly 111% from January 2019 to January 2020. Expect such trends to continue.
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