[darkwizard42]

Yes, I don't see anything wrong with that or why that might discount the viewership numbers. It is the equivalent of a giveaway during a presentation.

The cost of in-game rewards is in most cases marginally zero in software.

[somehnacct3757]

The post is about the economics of eSports. One of the big revenue sources is advertisers. The viewership numbers are inflated with low value incentived users so that the gaming companies can misrepresent their true audience size and get more advertising revenue

[lovehashbrowns]

The problem with this take is that some of the advertisers in the esports scene like Intel and HyperX have been around for over a decade. I’d trust their marketing department /somewhat/ to also be taking engagement into account and not just viewer count.

It’s not until super recently that other brands have been going into esports advertising. Those newer brands, sure I can see them being lured by high viewer counts. But as an example, you can see the sponsors list in this page for the World Cyber Games 2005 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Cyber_Games_2005

Samsung, Intel, Razer, etc.