Since its opening in 2008, the Mercedes-Benz Arena in Berlin has played host to all manner of events, from basketball games and ice hockey matches to rock concerts. On 31st October 2015, however, it hosted something completely different: the League of Legends World Championship finals.

League of Legends is a multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) video game released in 2009 by company Riot Games. It is the most played video game in the world with some 27 million players daily, yet in addition to its large casual fan base it also consists of a thriving competitive scene. As well as the annual World Championships, Riot Games hosts professional leagues in Europe, North America and Asia, which feature playoff tournaments, promotion and relegation just like football and other mainstream sports.

Except it’s nothing like a sport, right? Well, there is a growing number of people who would disagree. Competitive League of Legends, along with other popular video games such as Counter Strike, Defense of the Ancients (DOTA), and Starcraft, are now referred to colloquially as “e-Sports” (short for “electronic sports”).

The e-Sports industry has taken-off since 2000 and is currently booming. It generates almost £500 million per year in revenue. Many of its aspects now mirror that of established sports. The US government, as of July 2013, recognises professional video game players as athletes for visa purposes. Video games now attract sponsorships from industry giants like Coca-Cola, Red Bull, and Intel. In 2000, the Korean e-Sports Association was founded to manage e-Sports in the country, where the top players are celebrities with screaming teenage fangirls and TV commercials. The viewer count is also staggering; the League of Legends Season Three World Championship in 2013 had over 32 million viewers tune into the finals.

Its popularity has filtered down from Korea to Cambridge. Oxbridge now hosts an annual e-Sports Varsity match. Games are streamed online on Twitch.tv, an online video streaming platform popular amongst gamers, which was bought by Amazon in 2014 for $970 million. The first event was hosted in 2014 at Oxford, and consisted of three different video games being played: League of Legends, Starcraft 2, and DOTA 2. It attracted more than 50,000 unique viewers online, and representatives from Riot, Twitch, and Dell were present at the venue. The next year, the day-long event was hosted in the Cambridge Union Society building, and two new games were added: Counter Strike: Global Offensive and Hearthstone. Participants are not awarded blues by their universities, though this may change in the future.

Of course, its detractors remain. In 2014, when asked his thoughts on e-Sports, ESPN President John Skipper said “It’s not a sport — it’s a competition. Chess is a competition. Checkers is a competition”. Mr Skipper’s sentiment seems to be echoing what many think, even if chess is officially recognised by the International Olympic Committee. Many traits of other sports are absent. In football top athletes will run an average of 10-11 km per game; in boxing, fighters suffer from fractures and concussions. E-Sports players rarely move out of their seats during a game, and potential injuries are restricted to repetitive strains to the hand and wrist. E-Sports’ history, or lack there-of, also raises eyebrows. Though its origins can be traced back to 1972, when a group of students at Stanford University hosted a “Spacewar!” competition, e-Sports didn’t receive mainstream attention until the turn of the millennium. Compared to sports like tennis, played casually by Henry VIII, or even basketball, invented in 1891, e-Sports hasn’t been around long enough yet to face the ultimate test.

The jury is still out. Though it is warmly received by many, it’s a big stretch to say e-Sports has mainstream acceptance. Its status as a second-tier Olympic sport means little to its doubters, who equate it to the status of chess or Ultimate Frisbee. Yet with its multi-million dollar tournament prize pools and its hundreds of millions of followers, and with no sign of slowing down, e-Sports doesn’t seem to care.