One of Warrnambool's highly-credentialed online gamers expects the sport to grow exponentially amid the coronavirus pandemic.
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Billy Thomson, whose game of choice is Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO), played in division one of the international Mountain Dew League in 2019.
CS:GO is a five-on-five first-person shooter game.
His team PC419, made up of players from around Australia, finished fourth after a three-month season.
They also rose as high as seventh on the Australian CS:GO overall rankings.
PC419 trained 6.30-11pm - Sunday to Thursday - during their season last year.
The training involved watching demos - or video game clippings - of an opposition to analyse its gameplay.
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"To be one of the best in Australia, you have to put thousands of hours into it," he said.
The 23-year-old said the numbers were up for the online gaming service, Steam.
The service - which operates like a library for online games - just cracked 20 million concurrent users.
"That's a record high for it," Thomson said.
Steam keeps growing and on Monday had more than 22.5 million concurrent users according to Steam statistics.
CS:GO is the most popular game on Steam and on Monday recorded a peak of more than 1 million concurrent players.
CS:GO, which has been steadily rising in popularity since November, has experienced a 13 per cent increase in concurrent players in the past 30 days according to Steam charts.
The top-five games on Steam on Monday were CS:GO, Dota 2, PlayerUnkown's Battlegrounds, Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege and Grand Theft Auto V.
Thomson believes athletes from other postponed sports, like footy and netball, will get behind online gaming during the pandemic.
"It's the way of the future," he said.
"Like the Supercars, they're jumping on iRacing.
"It's basically stimulated Supercar racing.
"If you can't play something (in the real world), there's a generally a simulated version of it somewhere," he said.
He said, electronic sports or Esports, like iRacing had big sponsors behind them.
He added regular companies - brick laying and grass mowing - were advertising with online gaming as well.
Thomson believes there would be a couple of thousand casual gamers in and around Warrnambool.
He said there was a difference between casual gaming and big-money competitive gaming.
The former footballer said he got involved in serious gaming to feed his competitive spirit.
"You want that competitive rise," he said.
While online gaming can continue amid the coronavirus pandemic, Thomson said the sport had also been impacted by the situation.
He said it could attract stadiums full of people to watch people play in person.
But many events have been moved online or have been postponed.
The 23-year-old said people could stream or watch games through Twitch. It's a video live-streaming service.
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