The influence of eSports in youth culture is hailed as an omnipresent phenomenon worldwide. However, in reality, there are two different gaming cultures separated by western and eastern value systems.

The inception point of competitive gaming in the US and Europe is associated with the release of networked first-person shooting games. One game we can pinpoint on when we talk about this is 'Doom', first released in 1993. In 1996, the sequel titled 'Quake' was released by id software.

By 1997, several semi-professional online gaming leagues had started. There were a few 'CPL'or 'Cyberathlete Professional League' tournaments called 'The Foremost Roundup of Advanced Gamers' or 'FRAG' which had live audiences. CPL believed that professional computer gaming was an emerging spectator sport. One of the most prominent game developers, Valve, released 'Counter-Strike' or 'CS' in 1999. CS quickly went on to replace Quake in popularity in competitive gaming. Even today, CS is central to any western eSports event.

Korea is held as the heart of the development of eSports culture in the east. The mid-90s saw the deregulation of advanced telecom applications by Korean policymakers. This nurtured the broadband infrastructure in Korea and it saw massive growth during this time. However, this new infrastructure needed to be filled with content. This is where digital television and online gaming stepped in. In stark contrast to the United States and Europe, games of the genre 'Massively Multi-user Online Role-Playing Games' or 'MMORPG', such as NCsoft’s 'Lineage' (1998,) and 'Real-Time Strategy' (RTS) were more preferred to the Koreans instead of FPS games.

The Korean gaming market has been dominated by the multi-user real-time strategy game 'StarCraft', released in 1998 by Blizzard Entertainment. This game was the successor to the 1994 'WarCraft'. Both the titles were created for competitive gaming.

As mentioned earlier, the broadband infrastructure in Korea was developing rapidly and it was also one of the vastest networks of that time. This encouraged the growth of television stations which would broadcast gaming tournaments. The combination of all these was so favourable that individual StarCraft players gained status similar to professional athletes competing in major sporting events.