Jamaica Urged to Tap Into E-Sport

Chief Executive Officer of tTech, Christopher Reckord, has cited e-sport as a lucrative global industry that offers opportunity for investment locally.

He noted that the $30-billion industry have seen persons, over the past six years, being paid millions in prize money for playing games.

“There is something called the Jamaica E-sport initiative and they are looking to bring the world Olympics of e-sport here. So you do not need any field, just an arena with some massive screens and about 100,000 people sitting down in their homes all over the world but connected back here doing all the stuff digitally,” Mr. Reckord explained.

“So if you want something to look into, some research to consider…we just need to figure out how we are going to connect our know-hows and get Jamaica on the global sphere of something new and something different,” he said.

Mr. Reckord was participating in a plenary session at the just-concluded Eighth Biennial Jamaica Diaspora Conference at the Jamaica Conference Centre in downtown Kingston.

The session, dubbed ‘Inclusive Economic Growth and Job Creation,’ focused on the various business and investment opportunities in Jamaica in sectors such as energy, technology, business process outsourcing (BPO) and the stock exchange.

“We are making a number of investments around some of these areas and sectors such as education, utilising a wide range of these new technologies… so it is about considering how we can take the digital prowess of some of our developers with the know-how, training and digitise and create things such as apps and software and sell a billion of it globally,” Mr. Reckord noted.

Meanwhile, he pointed to the need for policies and incentive packages to support investment opportunities in new and emerging technologies.

“There must be policies to support any of these areas that we are telling people to invest in. When persons want to invest, they look at risks related to what they are investing in – is there an organisation, incentive. Are there things to support any of these various technologies?” he noted.