BOSTON — Freezing temperatures made worse by a blustery Boston wind didn’t dissuade thousands of fans from lining up along Ipswich and Van Ness streets beside Fenway Park last Friday. The crowd, mostly of 20- and 30-somethings, weren’t there for anything Red Sox-related. Instead, they queued up for hours to get the best seats when doors opened for the Rainbow Six Invitational, a tournament of 20 of the best Rainbow Six esports teams from around the world.
The sell-out crowd of 4,000, the first of three packed houses last weekend, was there to see the tournament’s final rounds taking place at MGM Music Hall, a Fenway Sports Group-built venue abutting the right-centerfield seats. After the high-profile implosion of FaZe Clan in 2023 and the succession of disappointing video game publisher results throughout 2024, the cheering and cosplaying fans from the U.S., Brazil, Germany and elsewhere suggest there’s still money to be made in esports.
“These games travel,” said Maxime Vial, the esports director at Ubisoft for Rainbow Six, the first-person shooter game based on the 1998 Tom Clancy novel. “Our games are played globally. Unlike sports, you don’t need to by physically on site, so all leagues can run online. What’s cool about these events is they are the only opportunities that fans really get to meet each other.”
Between 12,000 fans paying at least $156 each for general admission, plus merchandise sales, concessions and sponsorships including money paid by Boston to host the event—the first time it’s been held in the U.S.—the three-day finale easily grossed at least $2 million. For Ubisoft, the revenue is secondary, given the $3 million in prize money for the teams and other costs associated with the invitational, typically the peak of the game’s esports year.
Said Vial, speaking inside the venue: “While esports comes with some unique perks and opportunities to create revenues … it’s really a platform for the game. It shows to all the fans around the world how great the game can be.”
Like other game publishers, Ubisoft could use the boost. In its most recent quarter, the French company reported total sales of just under €302 million ($317 million), a gut-wrenching drop of 50% from a year ago. It’s not the only esports publisher slumping: Electronic Arts’ latest quarterly results announced early February were down 7%; the best-performing esports publisher, Take-Two Interactive, barely edged out a slight rise in its latest quarter’s sales, glossing over what Jefferies analyst James Heaney noted were weaknesses in daily active users across its portfolio and lack of presence in mobile games.
But don’t put the blame—or most of it anyway—on esports.
“The industry remains hit-driven” Heaney said in a research note earlier this month. “Management teams’ ability to set and manage expectations is our takeaway from this choppy video games earnings season.”
Legacy esports titles have been the saving grace of the major publishers: Take-Two’s results were held aloft solely by strong performance of NBA 2K, while EA’s bright spot was the outperformance of Apex Legends, one of its esports titles (though its FC25 rebrand of the old FIFA title was a disappointment). Likewise, for Ubisoft, its problem was a lack of sales from new titles. Rainbow Six outperformed the industry last quarter by delivering revenue level with the prior year with improving metrics beneath the hood, like session days per user. It’s now Ubisoft’s most-profitable game and a key to what is seen as a much better 2025 for the business, according to another Jefferies analyst. Overall, back-catalog games—such as Rainbow Six and Assassin’s Creed, Ubisoft’s other big esports title—generated €268 million ($281 million) to end 2024.
Though esports has been disappointing for investors in recent years, the business appears to be perking back up, said Leo Matlock, the chief business officer of Blast, a Danish company that specializes in esports, running leagues and various commercial development services, including organizing the Rainbow Six tournament.
“When a whole bunch of investors came into the space [last decade], every game publisher was making huge games—Fortnite, Epic Legends, Rocket League [and] Rainbow Six…. And when you look at that zeitgeist, people wanted to make teams, wanted to have leagues and investors were rushing to be first,” he said in an in-person interview at the venue.
Matlock, formerly a business development executive for the Virgin Racing Formula-E team and England’s Football Association, says esports benefits from having established titles that have a firm fanbase, even if investors have found monetization to be a challenge.
“Millions of people play Rainbox Six every day,” he said. “Esports is on a little dip, but it will rationalize and regroup. We’re very bullish because the dip has helped clear out a few players in the market.”
The challenge that remains is unlike franchises in most North American sports leagues, where it seems values consistently rise even for the worst teams, esports franchises are more dependent on performance on the virtual field. “No esports team in the world has anything like Fenway Park to be able to get predictable revenue,” Matlock said. “You can have an amazing esports team, but if your team isn’t performing very well and you’re not making a big commercial impact, it’s hard for you to get that commercial return.”
There is one esports business that is booming at the moment: putting on esports tournaments. Blast, owned by eight European venture capital funds, generated €72.5 million in sales in its latest disclosed year and turned a slight profit. Its sales are up more than 1,000% since 2020, according to Blast’s annual reports filed with Denmark regulators.
