Doping in eSports: the billion-dollar pill
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 9 August 2021
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Doping is a growing problem in the multi-billion dollar industry of competitive online gaming – but remains an open secret. As prize money runs in to the millions, are more young people turning to drugs to stay focused to win? With major league eSport athletes admitting to mass doping, we speak with the founder of the world’s first eSport university programme - Dr Glenn Platt at Miami University, Ohio - who tells us the casual attitude to doping for performance enhancement. Varsity eSport players Jared Shapiro and Jennifer Frank tell us that doping using Adderall and Ritalin are engrained within eSports, making it to difficult ban, when so many gamers need them for medical purposes. Doping in eSport regulator Ian Smith from the eSports Integrity Commission says that the major tournament organisers and games publishers should foot the bill for testing – which is severely underfunded. But while the major names – DOTA 2, Overwatch and League of Legends – continue to grow in users during lockdown, Craig Fletcher, an eSports tournament organiser, says the business has less money to spend on regulation, after coronavirus stops people gathering for tournaments.
(Image: Pixelated pills. Credit: non157 / Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Tamerson Ford. Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:08.0 | Esports is a multi-billion dollar industry, and it's growing every day. For 34-year-olds and younger, |
| 0:15.1 | they watch more e-sports and video games on a weekly basis than all other sports combined. All of them. |
| 0:22.9 | But as more people play and watch video gaming, there's a fear that doping is on the rise too. |
| 0:29.3 | I do know that Adderall and Ritalin have been like sort of ingrained in e-sports since basically the very beginning and you know I can't see |
| 0:41.2 | it stopping really without any form of regulation. But how do you test millions of e-g gamers playing |
| 0:47.5 | remotely across the world and is the industry ready to tackle it? In today's Business Daily |
| 0:53.6 | from the BBC, we take a look at |
| 0:56.0 | doping in the world of e-sports. It's a multi-billion. It's a multi-border one more time. Make some noise for Team Korn and team poker! |
| 1:15.8 | It's a multi-billion dollar industry involving games like League of Legends. |
| 1:21.2 | Overwatch. |
| 1:22.3 | Back into the break, |
| 1:23.7 | Joan Heck. |
| 1:24.5 | That was Joe Neck with a 4K. |
| 1:26.3 | And Dota 2. |
| 1:30.4 | A record-breaking 80 million viewers tuned in to watch last year's League of Legends World Championship Final in Shanghai. |
| 1:40.3 | Prize pots can be as big as $40 million. |
| 1:44.3 | It's high stakes. |
| 1:46.7 | People train for hours, and many say doping is an open secret, |
| 1:52.3 | as this interview with a gamer after the Electronic Sports World Cup in 2015 shows. |
| 1:58.3 | I don't even care. We're all on Adderall. |
| 2:00.1 | Like, I don't even give a fuck. Like, it was pretty |
... |
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