Which Province is Most Obsessed with esports?

Esports, short for electronic sports, is a form of competition using video games. The word esports was officially added to Dictionary.com in 2015 and by 2020, the industry saw unprecedented growth in the gaming industry as a result of the global pandemic.

Gamers around the world were eager to learn about alternative ways to compete with others, which led them to esports, a fairly new outlet for people to enjoy sports in an online environment. 

Up to 65% of Canadian adults and 78% of teens reported that playing video games during the stay-at-home pandemic improved their mental and emotional health. The NPD Group also reported that video game sales in North America in March 2020 rose by 34% from those in March 2019, and video game hardware went up by 63%. However, this was only the start of the esports revolution and the popularity of the industry continues to grow at a rapid rate. 

Therefore, the research team at Gambling.com decided to work out Canada’s best provinces for esports. They analyzed four different data points to measure this: Google Trends, esports events, esports jobs, and esports company HQ’s (see methodology at the bottom of the article for more details).

Canada’s Best Provinces for esports

Our research discovered Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, to be No. 1, with a final score of 89.6.

Ontario trumped second-place Quebec on three out of the four categories in the study with a better score for Google Trends, Company HQ, and Jobs. However, Quebec did achieve the highest score possible (100) in the Events category and ended with a final score of 70.9.

In third, British Columbia was narrowly beaten to the runners-up position with a final score of 69.5. It achieved the highest score possible (100) in the Google Trends and Company HQ categories but fell short in the other categories, particularly for Events. 

The most esports-obsessed city in Canada was also identified by analyzing Google Trends data. Our findings revealed Coquitlam, in British Columbia, ranked first for 10 of the most popular esports-related keywords on Google with a score of 37.4. 

In second was Waterloo, in Ontario, with a score of 35.7, while Richmond, in British Columbia, came in third with a score of 35.6. 

Methodology 

Four different data points per province were measured in an index for the ‘Canada’s Best Provinces for esports’. They were:

• Google Trends: 10 most popular esports-related keywords (in the past 12 months)
• Events: number of major esports events (within the province in the past 12 months)
• Company HQ: number of esports company HQs (within the province)
• Jobs: number of active esports jobs (within the province at the time of research)

Sources:

• Google Trends
• EGamers World 
• Cruchbase 
• Indeed 

All four index points were then added for each province to give a final score out of 100 by using the PERCENTRANK formula. All 10 Canadian provinces (including the three Canadian territories) were then ranked from highest to lowest. All data was collected on May 16.