The growing popularity of esports in Las Vegas is spurring talk in Carson City of creating the first regulatory body in the U.S. to oversee the competitions.
Nevada state Senator Ben Kieckhefer is drafting legislation that would empower an agency for esports similar to the Nevada Athletic Commission, which licenses boxing and combat sports such as UFC and mixed martial arts and has the authority to issue fines and other sanctions.
Nevada currently considers esports wagers as event betting, like wagering on the Olympics, rather than sports betting, and an application and review process is required for each event before someone can place a bet. The Nevada Gaming Control Board has approved betting on several esports competitions over the past year.
Regulation, in terms of registering players and establishing competitive rules and the like, would lend integrity to the industry as a mainstream sport and provide “greater stability and security,” Kieckhefer told the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
Esports as a business that was just coming into its own in Las Vegas before the pandemic hit, drawing thousands of new visitors to city to attend tournaments and prompting more and more casinos, as they recognized the potential, to respond by designing state-of-the-art arenas to host them.
About 55 percent of U.S. residents played video games during the first phase of the pandemic, according to a recent report by Nielsen subsidiary SuperData cited by the Review-Journal. The same report found that the games and interactive media industry grew 12 percent year over year to a $139.9 billion powerhouse in 2020. Streaming reached 1.2 billion people in 2020 and generated $9.3 billion in revenue.
Moreover, it’s a business Las Vegas is eager to grow, especially in the struggle to recover from the Covid crisis𑁋a business populated by mostly younger demographics that tend to be less interested in traditional casino games.
“I think the general consensus now is that the time has come for something like this,” said Kieckhefer, a Republican who represents Carson City and parts of southern Washoe County.
“This is about adding events to Las Vegas and adding flights and bringing people back,” said former state Gaming Control Board Chairman A.J. Burnett, who is a partner in Kieckhefer’s law firm of McDonald Carano. “It’s pretty clear that unless the convention business and the airlines come back, then Las Vegas will continue to struggle,” he told the Review-Journal.
Kieckhefer said he expects his bill will be ready to introduce during the current session of the Legislature, which began February 1.
Insiders like Milo Ocampo, founder of 8-Bit Esports, sees regulation as “the best possible step” toward legitimizing esports as a gambling activity, one with the potential to make Las Vegas the “esports capital of North America.”
Chris Grove, an analyst with California-based research firm Eilers & Krejcik Gaming, agrees, although he sees some devils in the details.
“Jurisdiction is going to be a tricky question,” he told the newspaper, “and getting buy-in from all relevant stakeholders will also be a challenge.”
This would include players, game publishers and developers and essential tech providers, said Ocampo.
“I think that coming together and figuring out lines to color within, it’s really smart because it promotes the integrity of the overall industry,” said Sam McMullen Jr., founder of technology and development company FiveGen and an advisor to Kieckhefer on the bill’s provisions.
“We need to get ahead of it,” he added.
“If not Nevada, who?”
