Invictus Gaming won the championship (Photo/Dfic)

Dec. 21 (NBD) -- As a new business model, the burgeoning e-sports sector has been approaching a larger audience, since Chinese e-sports club Invictus Gaming won the 2018 League of Legends World Championship last month.

The championship victory of Invictus Gaming went rival on the Internet, attracting great attention to regulatory management and talent cultivation in the promising industry.

China's e-sports industry is undergoing rapid development, with the market size in 2017 reaching 77 billion yuan (11.2 billion U.S. dollars) and that in 2018 to surpass 88 billion yuan (12.8 billion U.S. dollars), statistics compiled by Chinese research institute Gamma Data showed.

Over the past three years, the number of Chinese e-sports users has maintained a growth rate of more than 20 percent, with the number of users increasing by 100 million, and China's e-sports sector is expected to gain a user base of 430 million in 2018, according to Gamma Data.

With the vigorous development of e-sports, people from all walks of life are increasingly vocal about adopting the management mechanism for sports to regulate e-sports.

Yang Yue, director of the e-sports research center at the China Institute of Sport Science, commented on Tuesday at a forum that the e-sports industry, which exerts huge influences on the young generation, sees lacking management, weak policy research and small input.

On the same occasion, Jin Kaosheng, secretary general of the e-sports association of Zhejiang province, said that since e-sports is identified as a sporting activity, a system in accordance with its sporting function and pattern should be established and this sport should be included in standardized management.

Jin also emphasized that e-sports differs from online games, in that the former, as a sport belonging to public goods, has the attributes and functions to influence people with positive energy. To promote e-sports doesn't mean blindly encouraging all people to play online games, Jin stressed.

Talent training plays an important part in future development of e-sports.

In September 2016, "e-sports and management" was added by China's Ministry of Education as a vocational education major in the discipline of sports. Since then, over 40 vocational colleges have opened the e-sports major.

After visiting nearly 30 such colleges, Qiu Jitang, CEO of Guangzhou SuperGen Education Investment, found that some confuse e-sports with video games, and there is no standardized syllabus and teaching standards in place.

In Qiu's view, e-sports education is to cultivate talents for e-sports related management, operations, content production and other derivative domain, rather than train people to play games. But he underlined that it's not scientific for some colleges to instill knowledge about coaches, narrators, referees and even game programming into one student, Qiu added.

Email: gaohan@nbd.com.cn