Esports and Gen Z: How to win with the next generation of bettors

There are plenty of stereotypes about Gen Z. They were born with a device in their hands, their attention spans are supposedly shot, and they switch off at anything longer than a 15-second clip. But the commercial picture is harder to argue with.

Business Research Insights estimates that Gen Z accounts for 44% of global esports betting activity, with millennials right behind at 43%. That's 87% of the market, and their peak spending years are still ahead: the Bank of America Institute expects Gen Z to reach USD $74 trillion in net income by 2040. 

They're also valuable from the first deposit. Our partner data shows esports bettors stake approximately 7x more per first bet than traditional sports bettors. These are first-time depositors who already know the game and the teams, which changes the acquisition math: the same marketing spend brings in a first deposit several times the size.

The catch is that winning this audience takes more than a marketing budget; it takes a sportsbook built around how they already consume entertainment.

Why esports fits this generation

The easy implementation is esports as one more tab alongside football and tennis—same layout, same market menu, just thinner coverage. That structure misses how this audience behaves.

Gen Z grew up bouncing between streams, chat, clips, odds, and social feeds, often on at least two screens at once. A two-hour broadcast with a single camera angle was never part of their routine.

Esports sits exactly where their attention already lives: the intersection of gaming, entertainment, and social media. Fans follow players and teams the way older generations followed clubs and star athletes, except the following is interactive. They're in the chat, arguing about who should have taken that last teamfight. 

Our 2025 Esports Betting Review picked up the same pattern on the betting side: a growing share of bettors follow individual players and teams, and player markets are gaining ground on match markets.

The structure of the content helps too. Matches play fast, tournament calendars run across every time zone, and each title follows its own tiered schedule, so there's usually a meaningful event live somewhere. 

Give this audience somewhere to put that knowledge, and the value per head follows. 

From spectators to participants

Older betting products treat the bettor as a spectator: you place a pre-match bet, wait for the result, and check the score later. For Gen Z, that feels like passive TV viewing.

This generation wants to chat, predict, and celebrate in real time, and in-play and prop markets tap into that directly, built on the questions fans argue about anyway: who gets first blood, which team takes the next Dragon, whether the map goes to overtime. BetBuilder takes it further, letting bettors combine markets within a single match, with odds recalculated in real time.

Depth is the point here; a bettor who understands the game at that level wants more than a match winner market, and every extra way to express that knowledge is another entry point into the bet slip.

Latency: where experience and revenue collide

This generation is known for wanting instant everything. The same can be said for esports betting behavior. Our 2025 data puts in-play tickets at between 72% and 86% of all esports betting activity, depending on the title. When that much of the engagement happens live, milliseconds decide whether the product feels thrilling or broken.

Picture the final round of a major. The underdog pulls off a shocking comeback, a bettor watches it unfold on the stream, clicks to get a position on, and the market freezes. The bet is lost, and so is a piece of trust. Latency cuts the other way too: if the stream runs behind the live game, sharp bettors find edges in stale prices, and a product flaw becomes an integrity risk. 

Low-latency data keeps the odds in sync with what bettors see on screen. They can react to a crucial teamfight or a pistol-round upset in the moment. A good esports Odds Feed is built for action like this. Behind Oddin.gg’s odds sit AI-driven models, traders who are experts in the titles they price and have the skills to think ahead (many of ours are former pros), and an infrastructure built to read in-game data frame by frame.

From a revenue perspective, this goes beyond sleek UX. Every second of avoidable delay costs bets that should have been accepted, and quietly pushes high-value bettors toward whichever book feels faster.

Where the viewing experience and the betting experience merge

Traditional acquisition starts with someone seeing an ad, signing up, and betting. With Gen Z it’s not quite as straightforward. This group drifts between content and live markets and lands on your product when they find the experience they’re looking for. For them, the viewing experience and the betting experience are the same thing.

That's where the engagement layer earns its keep. Esports Widgets put real-time match data, momentum visuals, and player and team information right next to the markets. BetPeek goes further, letting bettors control how they follow the match, switching views and interacting with the action on their own terms. Watching, reacting, and betting blend into one loop, with no friction between them.

A single moneyline per match, slow odds, and a static scoreboard lose the immediate bet, and they lose the perception battle too, because this audience is loud and social. A clip of frozen odds at a crucial moment travels a lot further than any brand campaign. 

What a Gen Z bettor does to sportsbook economics

Acquisition is only the entry point. The way this generation bets changes the economics of the wider sportsbook in three ways.

• Volume between the peaks. This audience doesn't have an off-season. They follow titles year-round across regions and time zones, and tier-1 tournaments plus regional leagues fill much of the calendar. Fast-bet products like our eSims cover the quieter stretches, so betting volume tracks their actual viewing rhythm instead of concentrating around a handful of marquee events.
• More bets per user. These bettors don't place one position and wait. They combine pre-match bets, in-play bets, and player props within a single match, because that mirrors how they watch: reacting to the game as it unfolds. Stack that on a first bet roughly 7x the traditional sports average and the economics per acquired bettor look very different from the old model.
• Cross-sell that compounds. This is where the USD $74 trillion projection comes due. A bettor acquired in their early twenties through esports, and kept through a consistent experience, has decades of rising disposable income ahead of them. They go deeper within esports first, into alternative handicaps, map markets, and same-game combinations through BetBuilder, and when the sportsbook feels native rather than bolted together, they carry that trust into the rest of the book.

So the "how" behind winning this generation is less mysterious than it looks: depth in the market coverage, speed in the data, and an engagement layer that keeps bettors inside the action. The audience already knows the games. The opportunity is building a product that gives that knowledge somewhere to go—before their spending power peaks, not after.

If you want to see what that could look like on your sportsbook, we're happy to walk you through it.

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