From marginal to mainstream – a governmentality perspective of market transitions in ESports

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Research question Extant research has investigated eSports concerning its production, branding, and consumption in market-driven economies from the perspectives of companies and consumers. Drawing on the literature on market dynamics, this research invokes governmentality as a theoretical lens to bear on a longitudinal analysis of the twenty-two years evolvement of eSports in China to explore its transition from marginalised to mainstream in the state-led market.Research methods Drawing on multisource databases, we collect 2775 pages of textual data documenting how eSports evolved between 2002 and 2023 and utilised a qualitative hermeneutic approach for data analysis.Results and findings We theorise the 22 years of marginalised-mainstream transition of eSports in China as a three-phase state-led governmentality practice: market demarcation, stabilisation, and invigoration. In each phase, we identify two aspects of the state’s governmentality efforts to mobilise different disciplinary, legal, and security apparatus with various strategic governmentality functions.Implications Our findings, which are deliberately attentive to the meso – and macro-level in state-led markets, supplement and extend the extant studies examining (1) how eSports evolve, by highlighting the significance of states in codifying multilevel orders of responsibility for stakeholders, especially consumers, in addressing social criticisms that challenge the legitimacy of eSports; (2) why eSports evolve, by pinpointing the crucial need for fine-tuning the development paths eSports follow not only from technological advancements but prevailing yet changing state agendas; and (3) market transitions as sequential processes of being, by understanding the transitions as processes of becoming in the intertwinement of the past, present, and future.