LAUNCHING OF E-SPORTS EXPERIENCE AT 1ST AVENUE

SPEECH BY CARETAKER CHIEF MINISTER OF PENANG LIM GUAN ENG

LAUNCHING OF E-SPORTS EXPERIENCE AT 1ST AVENUE

14 APRIL 2018, 1PM

 

Salam Sejahtera and good afternoon,

 

Welcome to Penang's inaugural E-Sports Experience brought to you by Penang Youth Development Corporation, PYDC.

 

Global E-Sports revenues will grow 38% to $906 million in 2018 and further grow to $1.65 billion by 2021, according to a report on eSports by market researcher Newzoo. In 2017, there was 14.0 million gamers in Malaysia spending a total of $587 million. This makes Malaysia #21 worldwide in terms of game revenues.

 

E-sports should be professionally organised to cater to youths. E-Sports has emerged as an international sport with professional teams and players from all over the world. The Penang state government is facilitating the healthy development of E-Sports by allocating up to RM1 million to help and train players and teams under 25 years old and to compete in E-Games.

 

The Penang Youth Development Corporation (PYDC) will be the mechanism for this RM1 million initiative.

 

Today, PYDC and The Pantheon, the first E-sports Arena in Malaysia, are bringing the first E-Sports Experience to Penang.

 

In line with the state STEM education initiative, we hope that E-Sports can be one of the platform to cultivate our youth in science and technology industry. With our efforts to succeed in the Industrial 4.0 revolution, revolving around interaction of machines, artificial intelligent, big data analytics, fintech, cloud computing and Internet of Things. Whilst we acknowledge that in this digital era, “data is king”, the state government believes that “talent is everything”.

 

The State has invested RM75 million in STEM education to establish Penang as the Centre of Excellence (CoE) for Science and Technology. This RM75 million includes @CAT Penang (Accelerator for Creative, Analytics and Technology), Penang Skill Development Centre (PSDC), Penang Science Cluster (PSC), Karpal Singh Penang Learning Centre (KSPLC), Tech Dome Penang (TDP), and the Penang Digital Library (PDL).

 

That is the reason why, we invest in STEM education and E-Sports, to help make Penang a Centre of Excellence for Science and Technology.

 

Thank you.

 

LIM GUAN ENG