Esports have come a long way from the old stereotypes of sleep-deprived adolescent gamers huddled in their parents’ basements. Esports leagues now pit top online gaming athletes against each other for big money. There’s even talk of esports showing up at the Olympics.

These competitions are digitally-immersive events where anybody, anywhere, can get a virtual piece of the action—not only as a spectator, but as a virtual competitor against their favorite athletes.

With potentially tens of millions live-streaming and cyber-competing, with fractions of seconds separating gold from silver, the virtual experience has got to be flawless. Sounds like an Olympic-sized challenge for tomorrow’s networks.

Beyond hardcore esports, millions of smartphone owners have become part of a growing group of ‘super-casual’ gamers. Casual or not, these mobile players expect the kind of enhanced graphics and gameplay that previously only existed via consoles, a laptop, or a PC.

While cloud architecture and video compression have advanced mobile gameplay, the in-game experience ultimately relies on users’ network quality and capability. It’s unsurprising, then, that mobile network operators see premium mobile gaming as one of the leading use cases for 5G.

As millions of mobile gamers explore augmented realities, destroy digital candy, lay virtual bricks, and battle each other across oceans, networks are having to adapt to a new normal: everyday playtime is now an unpredictable, data-hungry event.

With college scholarships and life-changing prizemoney now on the line, the spoils of the esports world have given rise to a whole new meta-business: virtual coaching.

But analyzing and correcting a gamer’s golf swing requires more than high-res, uninterrupted video—it demands real-time data and undetectable latency. Milliseconds and analytics make or break coaches’ ability to retrain gameplay—meaning ultra-fast connection services have become mere cost-of-entry.

As virtual coaches simultaneously steer contenders through high-stakes tournaments, the pressure isn’t just on the players to level up. With expectations of lag-free, data-rich streaming at the speed of broadcast experiences in high-demand moments, networks will have to become even more agile, intelligent, and dynamic than the immersive worlds of the games themselves.