Photo/Zhang Yun

Dec. 4 (NBD) -- Demand for e-sports talents soared sharply this year as China's e-sports industry embraces rapid advance in recent two years.

A report on China's e-sports industry released by research institution CNG shows that the market size of Chinese e-sports market hit 77 billion yuan (11.2 billion U.S. dollars) in 2017 and the metric is forecasted to exceed 88 billion yuan (12.8 billion U.S. dollars) this year.

Though game revenue still took up the majority of the total income in the sector, e-sports competitions could be a new major contributor to the market growth, as the scale of audience and influence are increasing rapidly.

The e-sports events market will be worth 1.06 billion yuan (168.3 million U.S. dollars) in 2018, accounting for 1.2 percent of the total market value. The report believes the increasing number and further commercialization of e-sports events could push the size of the market up to 10 billion yuan (1.5 billion U.S. dollars).

In addition, the number of Chinese e-sports users rose by more than 20 percent annually over the past three years and is expected to reach 430 million in 2018.

The booming industry now sees a serious gap between demand and supply of the e-sports talents.

As of the first quarter of 2017, the sector has merely 50,000 practitioners with 260,000 talents needed, data from CNG reported.

Positions include professional game player, play-by-play commentator, game streamer and event operator.

The shortage of talents then gave rise to a number of training institutions and new majors in universities and colleges.

In 2016, the Ministry of Education announced 13 supplementary majors in universities, including e-sports and management. In 2017, 18 colleges and universities set up this major and began to recruit students.

Sichuan University of Media and Communications (SUMC) is one of the pioneers. It formed partnership with video game developer Perfect world Entertainment in July this year to establish School of International Game and E-sports offering six majors in the e-sports and game field.

However, the e-sports higher education in China is still at initial stage.

The new school of SUMC plans enrollment of only 90 students in 2019.

The lack of teaching staff and textbooks remain the urgent problems for the industry.

Compared with colleges, training institutions has more advantages in providing professional training courses. Those firms can not only train professional e-sports talents to meet special needs of the e-sports market, but also help students to obtain jobs in the field.

This will spur the segmentation of the e-sports market, and promote the sustainable development of the whole industry.

Email： zhanglingxiao@nbd.com.cn