The Effectiveness of Event Marketing: Evidence from Game Publishers and eSports Tournaments

Abstract

Nowadays promotion through events become popular among companies. However, empirical evidence on whether such investments improves company financial performance is mixed. In our paper, we analyze the sales of video games publishers and for the period of 1997-2015. We consider eSports tournaments, organized by these video game producers, as promotion events. Our data include the games name, platform of the games release (i.e. PC, PS4, etc.), genre of the game, publisher, sales in North America, Europe, Japan and other regions. Our results show that the effect of tournaments is statistically significant and positive. Moreover, this result is robust to difference between regions. We find that the relationship between the number of events and revenue presents an inverted U-shaped. The optimal number of eSports tournaments varies from three to seventeen, so one might conclude that there are some important regional differences in terms of an optimal number of events. We can conclude that the use of event marketing has a clear positive impact on the sales of eSports producers. It can be expected that for industries closely linked with some events there will exist a similar effect.