'eSports' see Guernsey web domain used around the world

Monday 11 June 2018

Thousands of websites around the world are registered with a ".gg" domain, but only around half of those are registered in, or for people in, Guernsey.

.gg is Guernsey's own web domain, and is used by local authority websites including gov.gg and buses.gg, but aside the link to the island, the domain is also the most popular in the ever growing eSports industry - an industry many have not yet heard of, but that is worth going on $2bn. and one which is growing incredibly quickly.

Similar to the egaming industry in Alderney, which revolves around online gambling, eSports focuses on video games that can be played against other people, competitively, for sometimes huge amounts of prize money. It often appears very similar to conventional sports, but instead of a pitch, there are two rows of computers facing each other. 

The teams sat at these computers compete in tournament circuits for their specific game all year round, each time competing for more money, and often with the goal of getting onto a "world stage" at the end of the season.

Within those games, and also other games and sports like chess, the term "G.G." - an acronym for "good game" - is a stand in phrase for a handshake done across the internet.

So by chance, the .gg domain has become synonymous with the industry, alongside the island.

Pictured above: The International 7, an annual tournament for the game DOTA 2 that took place in 2017 in Seattle. The 16 teams of five that competed at the event were playing for a prize pool of $24,787,916+. The winners took away over $10m.

Nigel Roberts from Alderney established the domain in August 1996, along with .je, after proving to the authority in the area in America that Guernsey, Jersey and the Isle of Man were jurisdictions worthy of their own. Initially it was argued that the islands did not have their own ISO (International Organization for Standardization) code, but Mr Roberts demonstrated that they did have their own codes in the postal ISO system, so was allowed to register the domains.

Mr Roberts is the director of the Island Networks group of companies, which run the domains. They administer both .gg and .je domains to people, and also work with third party registrars to sell them.

He said there were "about three to four thousand" .gg websites registered for local companies and individuals, and "very roughly about the same in the USA and UK combined."

"The difficulty we have is that many locals are registered through non-local registrants so I think that is a slight underestimate of the local take-up as certain registrars in particular use privacy services by default," he said.

"But it's a reasonable approximation."

Above: Team Liquid's Counter Strike Global: Offensive team in 2016.

With the growth of the eSports scene has also come the growth of teams and other organisations around it. Those team websites, and often wiki, merchandise, sponsors' , and individual people's websites as well, all use the .gg domain.

Alongside that, larger business' use the domain to differentiate their gaming assets from their normal websites: just last week Facebook announced it would be launching a new website, FB.GG, which will be a "gaming creator portal", akin to Youtube. 

Above: Evil Geniuses' website. They are an organisation with teams across a number of different games. Picture taken in 2017.

Pictured top: Mr Roberts, and Intel Extreme Masters Katowice, 2018.