Jason Savio

If anyone has ever told you that playing video games is a waste of time, you now have a new rebuttal to give them: Becker College.

The school in Worcester is now offering a Bachelor of Science degree in Esports Management, part of a booming industry within the gaming world.

Esports are multiplayer games usually played by professional gamers while an audience watches, either in person or online via Youtube or Twitch. There are teams and leagues for specific games, some sports and some fantasy-based. The NBA, for example, has gamers for teams in its league based on the NBA 2K franchise. The Boston Celtics don’t just have a team on the basketball court, they have one in the gaming world as well, called the Celtics Crossover.

The sports element is crucial because that’s what Alan Ritacco, the Dean of the School of Design and Technology at Becker College, compares the Esports Management program to. 

“It’s not dissimilar to a sports management program except it’s around videogames,” he says.  

The four-year Esports program at Becker College, launched last September, is the first of its kind in the country, according to Ritacco, and its focus is on the business side of a team, including management, marketing and delivery of content.

Students will learn the entire system of the esports infrastructure with classes like Esports Event Management and Esports Game Technology. More traditional business classes are also part of the curriculum, so there’s no getting out of accounting and global economics (sorry). But with such a bright future, enrolling seems like a no-brainer if you love gaming and have a business mind.

The esports industry has a global audience of over 580 million, growing at a rate of 40% a year with expectations to top $1.5 billion in revenue in 2020, according to the program’s website.

“This is like the start of the internet,” Ritacco says, calling the Esports Management program at Becker the “ground floor” for getting involved.

The faculty helping Ritacco run the program are industry experts such as Christina Alejandre, a former general manager of the ELEAGUE, a professional esports league with championships aired on the television station TBS. Ritacco expects 13-16 students to enroll in the fall semester. 

“We don’t want these numbers to blow up. We’re not trying to teach a calculus class with 150 people,” he says. “We want students who will graduate and be able to leverage the connections we have.”

One of those connections is the aforementioned Celtics team.

The addition of the Esports Management program at Becker College is the latest in an expanding list of game-based ventures for the school. There is also an esports varsity team for the actual players (it’s like joining your school’s video game team instead of its football team), and an undergraduate Game Design program that is ranked number three in the world. A new program, called Emerging Media, is also in the works, Ritacco says.

 “We want sustainability,” he says. “We’re laser-focused, we’re not shot gunning anything. We have a strategic plan and a vision and we’re staying on that track.”

For more information visit: becker.edu/academic/academic-programs/design-technology/esports-management/.