Are you a gamer? Look out for these tournaments

Hi Readers,

In this blog, I will be discussing my EDA walkthrough on a dataset of ESports Tournaments containing data about 200+ unique tournaments over the years and explain the conclusions from each of the visualizations I make from the data.

Dataset source: Check here

Link to code: Kaggle Notebook Link

Note: I won't be explaining any code in this blog, just the answers, and conclusions. For code check kaggle link.

Let's start with the EDA of the data.

Peeking at the data:

Some immediate questions after looking at the data:

1. Which tournament pays the most?
2. Which countries organize these games most frequently?
3. Which cities organize the games most?
4. How has the prize pool changed over the years?
5. How many tournaments allow solo participation?
6. How many days do these tournaments last?
7. Is the prize pool somehow related to the country organizing the tournament?
8. Can the prize pool be related to how long the tournament lasts?

Let's look at the answers to each of these questions next.

Which tournament pays the most?

Let's first take all the data points in the dataset and check the division.

The highest-paid tournament seems to be "The International" which gets organized every year. Other than that some other significant tournaments are Fortnite World Cup Finals, LoL World Championship, Honor of Kings World Champion Cup, and more.

Now that we saw that let's take a look at what are the highest paying tournaments year-wise, and check which ones actually come into the top paid list often.

Some of the tournaments that are seen repeatedly over the years are The International, LoL World Championship, Overwatch League, PUBG Global Championship, and more.

So that summarizes the answer to the first question. Let's move on to the next one.

Which countries organize these games most frequently?

A direct comparison among the countries can be observed in the above plot. We can say that the United States and China are the biggest promoters and organizers of these tournaments. Let's look at how this comparison changes with time.

Over the years 2016-2019, steady growth can be observed in China playing as the host for these tournaments.

Also, we can see how the online bar spiked in the year 2020 which signifies most tournaments were organized online due to the spread of Covid. We can see that China maintained a good position despite the Covid, while the number of tournaments organized by the United States tanked down a lot.

That summarizes the answer to my second question. Let's move on to the third one.

Which cities organize these tournaments?

Some of the cities organizing the tournaments most frequently are Los Angeles, Atlanta, Shanghai, Anaheim, Columbus which is not very surprising considering these are hot spot cities in the most participating countries.

Not much to observe here. Let's move on.

How has the prize pool changed over the years?

Haha, the graph is pretty much self-explanatory.

We can see steady growth in the Prizes between the years 2015 to 2019 i.e, till the Covid hit in 2020. This also signifies that the pandemic hit the ESports industry very highly. 

Let's check if only the prize amounts dropped or the number of tournaments also dropped due to the pandemic.

So it is eminent that both the count of tournaments and the prize amounts dropped due to the covid. Previously we have seen a huge rise in online tournaments due to the pandemic. It seems the number of online tournaments couldn't compensate for all. Also, this might signify that in those years most companies who organize these tournaments were not able to do so because of losing out on sponsors and investors.

Let's move on to the fourth question.

How many tournaments allow solo participation?

Here 1 represents the solo participating tournaments while 0 represents the ones that allow 2v2 or 5v5 games.

We can see a clear distinction in favor of solo tournaments. Let's look at the year-on-year data to judge on more grounds.

Now it is more clear that the solo tournaments are definitely more frequent but multi-player tournaments have been getting more and more popularity over the years. Soon the multi-player tournaments might surpass in count if more such games come out and gain traction.

How many days do these tournaments last?

I never imagined a tournament can last for more than 500 days. This might be a mistake in the data. So let's check the internet for this tournament.

After a quick search, I found out that the data is indeed correct. It was an online tournament and here are some more details:

Tournament Name: Intel Grand Slam Season 1

Date: 04/07/17 to 12/09/18

Prize: $1,000,000

Winner: Astralis

That was a bit hard to digest but data never lies. So let's move on.

Is the prize somehow related to the country organizing the tournament?

From the above plot, it can be inferred that the mean amount of prizes does not go up if the sum of the prizes of all tournaments goes up. In this case, the sum of prizes also indirectly signifies the number of tournaments that are being organized.

So we can summarize that the host country actually does not have much effect on the prize money. Also, we have to keep in mind that the number of tournaments being organized by the countries is changing every year and with years passing by the prize pool is definite to change.

I am not very sure how I can manage to see that relationship with that much information. So I will leave it be at that. Let's move on to the next and final question.

Can the prizes be related to how long the tournament lasts?

I believe that if tournaments last longer they are supposed to be harder and probably demand more time and energy from the players so their prize money should be equally larger. Let's see what the data says.

My estimation seems to be totally off. There is almost no relation between how long a tournament lasts and how much the winners get paid.

Competitive gamers, if I were you, I would only participate in the ones with less duration and more prizes, what do you do? :)

The only observation is that the number of tournaments with less than 50 days duration is highest among all of the data and that is where most prizes are there as well.

Wow, that was fun. I got the answers to almost all of my questions at the beginning. There does not seem to be much left to understand from the data. 

Obviously, that's from my side. You, yes you might have many more questions. If so then go to the dataset link and work on the data and share your notebook below in the comments. I would love to read them.

That's it for this blog. See you again in some other blog, discussing some other topic.