People do a lot of things online and they all have this in common: They need a good secure connection and enough bandwidth for the data they’ll need to receive and send.
Some of the casino hotels — Caesars Atlantic City and Harrah’s Resort among them — and perhaps other operators want to do something big and special online. They want to become major East Coast players in the rapidly growing esports market.
Caesars hosted the city’s first competitive video gaming event, last year’s Gears of War Pro Circuit contest. Harrah’s in May held a Rainbow Six Siege Pro League event.
With esports expected to generate $1.3 billion a year by 2020, there is a considerable opportunity for making competitive online gaming a bigger part of Atlantic City’s offerings.
A nearly concluded deal by a British firm to create a powerful data center, in leased space in the Atlantic City Convention Center, could provide a digital backbone for the tech-heavy esports events of the future.
Continent 8 wants to invest $5 million to build a 6,000-square-foot data center, with the servers and internet connections needed for the network-intensive online competitions.
