eSports as a Digital Media Business: A Conceptual Review and Analytical Assessment of the eSports Industry

Digital games and their appropriation for live-streamed events of competitive gaming – the pillars that constitute eSports – experience tremendous growth. This theoretical study advances eSports as a digital media business and a novel context for research on organizations. For this, we systematically reviewed 100 academic articles and specialized international media publications on eSports regarding approaches and understandings of how organizing takes place. In this chapter, we propose a conceptual framework of looking at the eSports industry through identity work, team leadership, and institutional theory. This framework enables us to understand how eSports as a digital media business is organized and how it works at the individual (micro-), organizational (meso-), and industry (macro-) level. This contributes to a reflective appreciation of eSports through giving direction for future studies and by hopefully sparking a curiosity towards using up-to-date concepts from organization studies to frame novel and increasingly digital contexts of organizing in eSports.