Performance Factors in Elite Esports and its Subgenres: Perspectives of Esports Professionals

## Access ##
This dataset is held in the Edinburgh DataVault, directly accessible only to authorised University of Edinburgh staff. External users may request access to a copy of the data by contacting the Principal Investigator, Contact Person or Data Manager named on this page. Requests for access will not necessarily be granted. University of Edinburgh users who wish to have direct access should consult the information about retrieving data from the DataVault at: https://www.ed.ac.uk/is/research-support/datavault.

This dataset includes 15 interview transcripts from 15 esports professionals including players, coaches, and managers from national-level teams. These data are related to the upcoming publication Liu, T., Bobrownicki, R., & Collins, D. (in preparation for submission), ‘Performance factors in elite esports and its subgenres: Perspectives of esports professionals’. To date, studies in esports have typically recruited participant samples comprising high-level or elite esports players, but not necessarily esports professionals. In this regard, many studies have included skilled esports players based on ranking where the pressures and needs may not reflect those experienced by professionals whose livelihoods are closely intertwined with or dependent on performance. To address this, the present study aimed to compare and contrast the perceptions of esports professionals to existing literature and to explore performance factors of esports professionals both between and within major esports genres (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena and First Person Shooter). We employed semi-structured interviews with 15 professionals (i.e. players, coaches, and managers) from national-level teams underpinned by a pragmatic philosophical approach with data analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. The findings indicated that there were differing pressures and expectations for professional players and with respect to genre. Even where similar performance factors were identified compared to previous research, there were noted differences in the relative importance of these factors for professionals. The findings underscore the importance of developing understanding of performer context and current challenges (e.g., age biases) to appropriately tailor support and inform decision making. Future research could focus on longitudinal studies in tournaments and exploring the impact of training interventions on cognitive and emotional skills for player development.