Shaping a Regional Offline eSports Market: Understanding How Jönköping, the ‘City of DreamHack’, Takes URL to IRL

ABSTRACT Globally, eSports is growing in influence in media. However, it represents a unique phenomenon in the modern mediascape as it is expanding beyond the online digital world and becoming interwoven in the offline, physical world. Jönköping, a mid-sized Swedish city that hosts the DreamHack winter and summer events, provides the setting for how this offline context is being facilitated and shaped to maximize the benefits of eSports’ increasing cultural relevance and value. By conceptualizing the local eSports scene as a market, this article synthesizes 17 interviews with local actors to answer the question: What offline actions do actors engage in to facilitate and shape the local eSports market? This article provides actionable insights from a strategic media management perspective that can enable others to engage with and develop local offline eSports markets to provide a platform for media creation.