From an academic perspective, 2025 was not simply a difficult year for esports, but a clarifying one. In this edition of Reflections 2025, Tobias Scholz, Academic Esports at the University of Agder, examines how the pressures of the so-called “esports winter” exposed the structural limits of a sponsorship-driven, spectacle-first model.
Drawing on research, policy work, and educational practice, he reflects on why 2025 forced esports to confront its role as a people-centred digital infrastructure — embedded in education, work, and everyday culture — rather than a self-contained entertainment industry.
As 2025 drew to a close, we gathered reflections from esports industry leaders on the year that transformed their world. Read Tobias’ key insights below, and stay tuned for more in our ongoing “Reflections” series.
1. From your perspective, was 2025 ultimately a positive or challenging year for esports? Which structural or systemic factors do you believe shaped the industry the most this year?
2025 was a challenging year for esports on the surface and a necessary year beneath it. Economically and emotionally, 2025 still carried the weight of what many label the esports winter: restructurings, disappearing teams, shrinking budgets, and the quiet retreat of speculative capital. But from a long-term, systemic perspective, this year was less about decline and more about clarification. The industry finally had to confront what esports actually is and what it is not.
What shaped the year most was not a single tournament, publisher decision, or investment cycle, but a structural realization: esports is not a self-contained entertainment industry. It is a people-centered infrastructure embedded in education, work, culture, and everyday digital life. The crisis of 2025 exposed the limits of an esports model built primarily on sponsorship visibility, inflated audience promises, and borrowed legitimacy from traditional sports. This made professional esports so vulnerable to the ongoing platform takeover by state-backed entities. At the same time, it revealed where esports continues to work remarkably well: at the grassroots level, in learning environments, in communities, and in hybrid contexts where play becomes practice.
In that sense, 2025 was the year esports stopped asking how big it could become and started asking what it is actually for.
2. Looking at the broader ecosystem, what were the key milestones or developments worth highlighting in 2025 — whether in governance, labour, commercial trends, or competitive structures?
Several developments stand out when viewed through a systemic lens. First, publisher power was no longer an implicit reality but an explicit condition. Governance debates, whether around league formats, sustainability, or Olympic esports, increasingly acknowledged that esports is structurally closer to a platform economy than to classical sport. This reframing matters because it forces more honest conversations about control, dependency, and the limits of federation-style governance models.
Second, the industry’s middle layer continued to erode. Large, capital-backed actors consolidated their positions, while many mid-sized organizations disappeared or radically redefined themselves. What survived were either highly efficient global brands or deeply embedded community actors. This bifurcation reinforces a central insight from research: long-term resilience in esports is not created by scale alone, but by relevance to everyday practice.
Third, we saw growing experimentation beyond spectator-centered models. Company esports, workplace formats and educational experiments gained traction precisely because they link competitive play to concrete value creation: learning, recruitment, team development, inclusion. These models did not dominate headlines, but they quietly strengthened the ecosystem by answering a question traditional esports often avoids: What problem are we actually solving?
Finally, the disconnect between professional esports and its grassroots origins became impossible to ignore. Esports was born bottom-up, but had increasingly been governed top-down. In 2025, that tension reached a breaking point and in doing so, reopened space for grassroots, educational, and community-based formats to reclaim legitimacy.
3. Were there organisations, initiatives, or approaches that you feel genuinely strengthened the esports ecosystem this year? What made their contribution meaningful from a scholarly standpoint?
From a scholarly perspective, the most meaningful contributions in 2025 came from actors who stopped treating esports as a product and started treating it as infrastructure.
Educational initiatives that position esports as a structured learning environment, not a reward, not an add-on, but a core pedagogical space, played a crucial role. Academic esports, understood as the intentional use of competitive game environments for learning, research, and inclusion, demonstrated how invisible competencies become visible: coordination, leadership, emotional regulation, intercultural communication, and systems thinking.
Similarly, company esports initiatives showed that competitive play is not just expressive, but productive when embedded in reflective frameworks. As assessment environments, they reveal collaborative skills that CVs cannot; as community spaces, they foster belonging in increasingly fragmented workplaces. What makes these approaches meaningful is not scale, but translation: the ability to translate play into insight, identity into capability, and participation into opportunity.
Grassroots initiatives deserve particular attention here. They are often framed as “feeder systems” or “talent pipelines,” but that framing misses the point. Grassroots esports is not important because it produces professionals; it is important because it produces continuity and community. It sustains participation, preserves culture, fosters diversity, and anchors esports in lived social contexts. Without this layer, no amount of capital can stabilize the ecosystem.
4. Reflecting on your own work, research, or community engagement in 2025, which achievements or developments are you most proud of?
What stood out most in 2025 was that the different strands of our work around esports finally came together into a coherent pathway rather than existing as parallel projects.
A key milestone in this process was the publication of Level Up Together: A Vision for Esports in Norway’s Digital Society, developed through the Norwegian Esports Summit 2025. The vision paper articulated esports not as a niche industry, but as a shared digital infrastructure connecting education, health, innovation, and grassroots participation. What made this especially meaningful was that it translated years of academic research and community practice into a language that policymakers, institutions, and civil society could engage with.
On the academic side, initiatives like Game On and the Academic Esports World Tournament (AEWT) demonstrated how structured competitive play can function as a serious learning environment. Academic esports became a space where collaboration, reflection, and digital competence are not abstract goals, but visible and assessable practices. For many participants, particularly those who struggle to connect to traditional education, these formats provided orientation and recognition before formal credentialing.
At the same time, company esports matured as a bridge into working life. Using the metaframe, the focus shifted away from individual performance toward how people function in teams: communication, adaptability, leadership, and emotional regulation under pressure. This made it possible to translate gaming practices into workplace-relevant insight, not as gamified recruitment, but as authentic assessment and capability development.
What mattered most in 2025 was not any single initiative, but the fact that these elements now fit together. Grassroots engagement leads into academic esports; academic esports creates visibility, confidence, and shared language; company esports opens pathways into work. Esports becomes a tool for orientation and belonging, helping people understand what they are passionate about, what they are good at, and where they might meaningfully contribute.
5. What are your predictions for the esports industry in 2026? Which trends, risks, or emerging dynamics do you believe scholars and practitioners should pay closest attention to?
In 2026, the most important shift in esports will not be technological. It will be strategic. First, esports will increasingly move from spectacle to embedded practice. The central question will no longer be how many people watch esports, but how many people use it, across education, work, health, research, and civic contexts. This shift favors diversified esports models over purely broadcast-driven approaches and reframes sustainability not as financial survival alone, but as long-term social relevance.
Second, tensions around value distribution will intensify. As esports expands into institutional and organizational settings, questions of data ownership, assessment ethics, labor recognition, and participant agency become unavoidable. These issues are foundational to sustainable development. If they are left unexamined, esports risks replicating the extractive dynamics seen in other platform industries.
Third, grassroots esports will emerge as a strategic sustainability asset, not a nostalgic ideal. Governments, universities, and organizations seeking resilient forms of digital engagement will rediscover that participation beats visibility, and belonging beats branding. Ecosystems that endure will be those that reconnect professional, academic, and grassroots layers instead of isolating them.
Taken together, these developments suggest that esports in 2026 will increasingly be evaluated not only by whether it resembles traditional sport, but by whether it helps societies cope with digital complexity in a sustainable way. This question sits at the core of FLARE (Future Lab for Academic Research in Esports): using esports as a human-centered test environment to explore how digital practices around learning, work, inclusion, and collaboration can be designed to last.
The central question for 2026, is: What kind of digital society are we building through esports and who gets to belong in it?
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