Indian sports website Sportskeeda has now become the country’s biggest Esports news portal. The website, as a new press release claims, saw a significant drop in revenue after the COVID-19 lockdown came into effect. This prompted the company to shift gears and focus on Esports content, but a lot of that said content has come under questioning recently.
As you can see from the Twitter thread below, veteran games journalist Rishi Alwani (The Mako Reactor) called into question the ethics of Sportskeeda’s new content strategy. Click on the tweet below to view the entire thread:
There’s no doubt that the highlighted stories do contain and spread misinformation. On certain occasions, the website has event promoted piracy, which certainly needs to be called into question. While I do think that this is a case of said articles not being published without any supervision, it would do well on Sportskeeda’s, and Nazara’s part to take down such content.
From Nazara’s press release:
Sportskeeda was quick to ride on the wave of Esports growth in the country. According to the ‘KPMG Report’, with an estimated net worth of $818 million in 2019, the Indian Esports industry was set to grow its revenue all the way up to INR 118.8 billion in 2023. According to ‘Newzoo’, globally, there were approximately 380 million Esports viewers in 2018 and is expected to surge to roughly 557 million viewers by 2021. However, India itself has more than 150 million Esports viewers.
When asked directly by Alwani regarding the misinformation, Sportskeeda founder and CEO Porush Jain avoided them.
We do hope that Nazara takes appropriate action for the referenced material that promotes piracy. For a website as big as Sportskeeda, readers deserve better.